The Fruits

Been known to complain, have I, during these last two weeks, about those nine-hour days killing me, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. And, truth be told, those nine-hour days haven't been a wonderland of joy, because sitting at a desk in "action pose" for that long does make my chest hurt. Actually, it's about 80% chest incision pain and about 20% flaccid back muscle pain, brought on by the fact that I haven't really sat at a proper desk in a while (my sitting posture at home, as I type this, is radically different than how I sit at work. At home, I recline such that I can and occasionally do nod off when the mood strikes me, but at work that's kind of a bad idea).

But the point is that sitting at the desk causes me pain. By the end of the day it's pretty bad, but at least the drive home allows me to lean back just enough that the "direction of stress" in my chest changes and the pain goes away. (This is going to sound odd, but leaning back makes my chest feel like it is pulling apart; sitting up makes it feel like it is being pressed together.) So I was known to whine about the level of pain, and last Friday it was so bad I starting to question the wisdom of this "going back to work" idea in the first place.

But now it pays off, because today was my day off, and payday at the same time! Could it possibly get any better?? So what did I do on my day off?

I mustered out of rehab. That's over, or at least Phase II part of it. Now I have the option of continuing with Phase III rehab, at $16 a week, or pretending to do rehab at home, which has the characteristic aroma of wishful thinking clinging to it. I don't know if $16 is a bargain or not, but I'm tempted to go that route anyway. It's across the street, in a larger facility, and features a much wider selection of machinery, but it's still semi-supervised (meaning, I guess, that if I fall over face-first, someone will at least call 911).

I got my prescriptions filled, replenished my supply of arcane supplements, and reloaded mein pillschlepper, a plastic deal that holds a weeks' worth of pills and which greatly simplifies the process of taking pills at 5:45 AM. It looks pretty ominous - the compartments are full of big gnarly-looking gel-caps and capsules and spacecraft (a wan The Right Stuff joke, if you'll indulge me), but the actual drugs are tiny pink and white tablets and the big gnarly things are mostly fish oil, red something-or-the-other and niacin.

I went to the grocery store, which was fun, and the book store, which was funner. I found that my lawn tractor is continuing to malfunction and is once again full to the gills with errant gasoline, but the large tractor runs like a top since I carried out the Great Obscure Spark Plug Search and adjusted the carburetor properly (all I can imagine is that the last owner misread "one and a half turns" as "six and a half turns").

So was it worth the pain in my chest to have today off? Well, yeah, to have today off and a paycheck to go along with it, sure!