Velma

Well, Sunday I woke up at 5:00 AM, screaming into my pillow because I'd tried to roll over in my sleep only to discover immeasurable pain.

Just another Sunday, right?

Um, NO.

So I took ibuprofen (the medicine that God and Andrew Dunlop gave us so that we could function as adults in an ever-changing world), and I went back to sleep.

Except that later, when I woke up again, the ibuprofen had only made my neck angrier, and I could not get up. Also I could not roll over. Also I could not reach anything, including the remote for my television, my book, my knitting, and my laptop. Since not having any form of entertainment made being stuck in bed boring as well as excruciating, I grabbed my cell phone (fortunately, I had forgotten to plug it in to charge the night before, so it was within reach), and I called home.

Did I mention I was home?

Yeah.

I heard the phone ring on the other side of the house, and I prayed silently that this was not one of those days when my mother decided picking up the phone was a bad idea (she does this). But it wasn't, and she answered.

"Mum?" I said.

"Yes? Laura?"

"Yes," I replied. "I am trapped here."

If this had been a Stephen King novel, that would have been a very creepy sentence. Also it would have been nighttime, the East coast, and probably Maine.

"What?" Mum asked.

"I cannot get out of my bed."

This is one of those shameful things you say as an adult, all the while remembering those advertisements with the old lady on the ground crying out, "Help! I've fallen, and I can't get up!" The lady we made fun of on the playground in elementary school. I am that person now, but younger and with better clothes.

Mom helped me up, but I regretted it instantly.

An hour later, I was in the ER, waiting.

The ER is boring. Also it takes up to three hours for them to call your name, even if it LOOKS empty inside the waiting room. This is because everyone has better things to do than go to the ER on a Sunday, including medical staff.

To my shock, Dad had responded to Mom's notification that I was heading to the ER by also going to the ER. And so there were three of us and I felt like a four year old with two worried parents, which was slightly awkward until Dad found Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the ER television set, and then it was like home but with uncomfortable chairs.

It is whiplash. Which means I have this sexy collar to wear.

 

It is offensive, but it is an orthopedic device, so what can you expect? It's better than the way I was holding my head before (balanced on my right shoulder), even if I do have to eat like a dinosaur now (meaning I reach my whole head and neck toward my food like a stegosaurus, causing The Brother to hum the Jurassic Park theme at me as I ate my dinner last night. Since I am me, I made dinosaur calls as I ate instead of getting angry and throwing things at him.

 But because I am a knitter, I instantly found a better way to wear the neck collar.



There is a reason why I knit all these little scarves.

I was feeling pretty good about the whole scarf/collar combo until my friend Melanie brought up that I kind of look like Velma. Which meant nothing to me until I Googled Velma, and lo and behold, I am one orange turtleneck away from solving crime with a cowardly dog and a VW van.

Velma from Scooby-Doo. No, I did not 

draw this. It is all Hanna-Barbera, folks.

I don't know whether to be ashamed of this or proud. Without intending to, I have clearly reached cartoon immortality. I know what my Halloween costume will be now, if I ever have need of one. I mean, some people live their whole lives without ever knowing who their cosplay double is, but now I know, all it would take is a costume change and I would be Velma from Scooby-Doo, only not in a gross way. (Don't ever Google pictures of Velma and you'll never know why the gross. No really, don't Google Velma pictures. Don't.)

They also gave me muscle relaxers and prescription ibuprofen and a SHOT. The shot made me feel cozy, which was necessary, because without it I would have torn that neck collar of in a minute flat, like I want to do now. Apparently, the shot made my hyper-sensitive fear of strangulation (the reason why I don't already own a Velma-style turtleneck) fade enough that I could be comfortable in the brace thing. But the shot has worn off now, and it is only fear of agony that is keeping the brace on.

I should be okay soon, or so they tell me. But two weeks ago, they told me I was "clinically insignificant." So we'll see.

Please Make the Hurting Stop

I am a broken, broken person.

I mean it. Parts of me are about to fall off, or wither away. I feel like I have been tumble-dried, or hurled down a flight of stairs, or, gee, I don't know...in a CAR ACCIDENT.

It's been almost two weeks since Bethany and I were bounced about like rag dolls. She still has her hands bound up in gauze as her burns heal, but I have nothing visibly wrong with me anymore.

Nothing VISIBLY wrong.

My back is killing me. It isn't really my neck, but a spot between my shoulder blades. After a while, it grows and encompasses my right shoulder and neck. And that is when I want to curl up in bed with my heating pad. Except that is not always smart.

I had nestled into bed like that earlier this week when I discovered at bedtime that I was unable to move. I had frozen there, like a turtle, my arms and legs the only mobile parts of me. My back had resigned its position as body-mover, and I was trapped there, waving my arms and legs, wishing it weren't so late and that I could call my family for help.

At around that same time, it occurred to me that our ancient heating pad might not actually have an auto-shut off feature. And if that was the case, I would slowly bake to death and die like that king Paul told me about who slowly roasted to death waiting for his servant to come help him, because he was too lazy to move his chair further from the fire. That was it. Laziness. Except in my case, I couldn't so much as unplug my heating pad, because I could not reach the cord.

I was trapped.

Clearly, I lived. But I could have died, and that is why we need a new heating pad.

This morning I tried the heating pad again, because I woke up feeling as if my head was connected to the rest of my body by a single, rusty hinge. I have spent my day attempting to remain as still as possible, not an easy feat with four classes coming through the library for activities. Meanwhile, I have taken ibuprofen, and I have taken Tylenol, and it has been as if the pills stared at me with their blank faces, laughing silently at me as they refuse to help.

Does anyone have a full-body cast they aren't using?

I keep telling myself to tough it out, because I'm from the Midwest, and we tough things out, but MAN does this hurt. And I have a really high pain tolerance. I know this because three different doctors told me so. Otherwise, I would have thought the opposite because I've always found pain pretty painful, generally speaking.

I want to be the kind of pioneer woman who plows things and then says, "Huh. This tooth hurts," gets the pliers, and does her own dentistry before going back outside to plow even more things.

I am not that sort of girl.

Instead, I'm resigning myself to the fact that I'll have to go back to the doctor to have him check me over again, just in case, so that I can maybe get that back brace I've never wanted, like Deenie from that Judy Blume novel of the same name.

In the meantime, whatever you do, don't hand me anything or give me things to do, because I can't hold anything or do anything. I'm lucky I'm standing right now. Wait. I'm sitting. You get the idea.

Instead, remember that I really want to be a fun, happy person, but pain has made me bitter and sarcastic. More bitter and sarcastic than normal. Remember Old Laura, and hope as I do that she will come back, with her fully functioning spinal column intact.

Heat Wrap Love

I decided after the misery of my last post, I owed you something relatively amusing. My funniest story I can't tell you because it's library-related, so I new I'd have to pick something else. So I have decided to tell you about my heat wrap.

(I love my heat wrap.)

Almost two weeks ago, I woke up Monday morning to find my spine had, somehow, turned to dust in the night.

I could not remember a creeper coming into my bedroom and stabbing me repeatedly in the spinal column, but clearly that was what had happened. I slithered out of bed onto the floor. The process took fifteen minutes. The process of readying myself for the day was sheer agony. I could not reach down further than my knees, because bending at the waist was impossible. I was forced to grab the heating pad from the foot of my bed (where it stays to keep my toes toasty) and sit on it until the pain abated enough for standing and walking.

That day at work, I tried to spend as much time as possible leaning against walls. That was the only non-painful activity. By the afternoon, I was dying. I slithered home, napped, woke up, took too many ibuprofen, slept some more, and by the next morning I was sure I was already dead.

"You need to go to the doctor," Mom said.

"What would they DO?" I asked. "Nothing is broken. It is a muscle spasm. They will tell me to use a heating pad and to rest. I am doing both of those things."

"Yeah," Mom replied. "You're right."

In the afternoon, the pain from my lower back had spread to include the spot between my shoulder blades. This meant no reaching forward. My arms needed to remain at my sides, so I could flex my shoulders backward, which relieved pain.

I was a walking corpse.

"Why are you so pale?" One coworker asked.

"You should go to a chiropractor," another advised.

What I really wanted was to be suspended from the ceiling by my ankles, so everything spine-related could slide back into place.

Then Mom walked into the library with a CVS bag.

"This is for you," she said. "It is like a heating pad without the cord."

She handed me a box. On the cover was a man wearing what looked like a bandage around his lower back. The bandage appeared to be giving off some kind of radiation.

"Doesn't Michael Jordan do commercials for these things?" I asked.

"No," Mom said. "He does commercials for the name brand ones."

So I took my knock-off heat wrap to the bathroom and fastened it around my lower back. I nearly needed to call in reinforcements.

Within an hour, the hurting had faded. Two hours took even more agony away, and soon I was creaky, but without pain! I could touch my own toes, and I hadn't done that for DAYS. Not only that, I could bend over the circulation desk and check out books. And I could SHELVE! When I got home, I celebrated my pain-free back by putting on socks.


"I love my heat wrap," I told Twitter. "It is like wearing a hug. It is the best invention of all time."

The person who invented the heat wrap should win a Nobel Prize. Seriously.

These things are fantastic. They never get too hot. They are like magic. Everyone should try them. I think they should come with Happy Meals at McDonald's.

What was my life like without the heat wrap? It must have been a cruel, wicked existence filled with lots of pointless suffering. Sort of like life before I was allowed to listen to mainstream music (thanks a lot for those years, Dad). Or life before I was allowed sugar (shudder).

The only sad part is that you can't just live in the heat wrap. It's an eight-hour time limit kind of thing. It might have to do with the muscles around your spine starting to cook after a while, or maybe it's the freaky chemicals they use to make the air warm up the wrap, but who cares? A little cooked-spine and dangerous toxins are a small price to pay for eternal happiness.

I have written several short songs for my heat wrap. But no, I am not going to sing them for you.

I think they will have heat wraps in heaven. I think the reason everyone is so happy in heaven is because there are heat wraps, and. therefore, no more suffering. No one feels pain, because they are nestled in heat wraps all the time. Pillows should be like heat wraps, too.

I love my heat wrap.