Recently when responding to a friend who was asking about my health I compared myself to an apartment building in Venice – the exterior was crumbling a bit and definitely showing signs of aging and low maintenance but inside the apartments were still comfortably luxurious. I must now admit that allusion was completely delusional.
The reality is much closer to this memorable scene near the end of the Blues Brothers Movie. After a winter of movement restricted to the distance between my bedroom and the living room couch, my entire structure has succumbed to sudden total failure brought about by an accumulation of 75 years of destructive physical effects resulting from a total reckless disregard for the laws of nature as revealed by 2000 or more years of scientific study.
Whether we’re talking about biology, chemistry, physics, the laws discovered by the likes of Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, van Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur, Schleiden, Faraday and so many more never applied to me. At least I never let them stand in the way of a good adventure or an ill-conceived uncontemplated solution to a problem. And now the results of my life’s enduring study of what happens if…in which I filled the role of both curious seeker of knowledge and human guinea pig, are in.
Looking at them objectively, it’s amazing how much abuse a human being with a relatively sturdy frame, a strong constitution, a resilient immune system, an extremely stubborn mindset, and a lot of luck can actually withstand. However, from a subjective point of view, the outcome has proven to be frustratingly debilitating with severely reduced capability in all four limbs. It turns out the our limbs function much better when equipped with tendons, ligaments, cartilage and the like.
My right arm has more or less been reduced to a merely decorative role, more Baroque than Bauhaus; my left arm has seen its range of motion reduced from reaching for the sky to barely reaching for the refrigerator door handle. Plans for a full reverse shoulder replacement have been abandoned on the advice of a leading joint specialist who candidly revealed that even such a complex operation as this would not improve my restricted range of motion as not only is my rotator cuff toast but the tendons and muscles required to raise an arm are no longer there – not even a vestige or hint of where they once were remains.
My legs are both affected by lymphedema that has arisen from the removal of large portions of meat, bone and my lymphatic system in order to rebuild my right arm following my altercation with that rogue aircraft propeller 4 years ago. And my left knee which had all the cartilage removed in the 80s following a severe disco dancing incident and which, it was discovered at the time of that operation, had completely lost its ACL somewhere in the fog of the distant past, has now been joined by the sudden painful failure of whatever was or wasn’t holding my right knee in place.
My forward speed has now been reduced so severely that the only way I could beat a slug in a foot race would be to knock it out of the way with my cane. Still, however, on the positive side, while I may have obviously experienced serious structural failure, I haven’t reached a WTC Building 7 level of collapse quite yet. Fortunately my internal data center, food processing facility, auxiliary generators and ventilation system all appear to be functioning well enough to keep the ‘building’ somewhat usable for the foreseeable future even with its reduced capacity. I can still hope that engineers will find new ways to revive it before it either suffers total collapse or heaven forbid submits to forced clinical disposal by a dispassionate demolition crew known in Canada as M.A.I.D..
