The Native Iowan

It’s Sunday eve here.

My normal Sunday post is about “Sunday coming down”.

Not today. I didn’t really do much of anything today. I sat in anticipation of tomorrow. Watched a bit of TV. Interacted with the kids and family. But nothing I did was of “the coming down” nature I often write about.

I’m Fixn’ at packing my bag to check into the hospital tomorrow. I’m going in to get my shoulder replaced.

My years of use and abuse have caught up with me. My active and oft times daring/foolish lifestyle has seen me beaten and battered and cut and abraded and injured, way too many times.

The left shoulder has suffered a lot. I kinda think its because my right side is my dominant/ strong side. Or maybe because of the big arsed steel davit that fell on me in about 1991 and landed square across that shoulder? Or that the seat belt in the car I totalled in 2001 ran left to right. Or…

I’ve had Doctors and Insurers ask me how I got injured. I answer “which time?”.

Wuz it when I jumped off a cliff in the 70s and attempted to stop my downward momentum by grabbing a root sticking out of the soil? I felt my shoulder go “snap”. Or when I fell under a telephone-pole sized mangrove post I was carrying with a bunch of students at Choiseul Bay? Muddy ground, big arsed pole, a bunch of kids smarter than me who tossed the pole away as we fell. I had to hang onto it and take the thumping. Or when I had a big steel davit collapse under my weight in the early 90s and land square across me? I was pinned under water for a while but managed to wriggle out from under the over 500kgs of weight. Or the totalling of my new Mustang in 2001? I viciously T’d a van and got even more viciously restrained by my seat belt. Or the near death experience on my Trusty Triumph riding from LA to SanFran in 2015? At 70+mph I hit a lump of timber and my bike flew into the air. I managed to keep it all together but the landing sent a shockwave up my arm and into my shoulder.

All these tales are kinda funny. Each left me sore and bruised. But it’s just in recent years that I’ve succumbed to the damage. I’m running bone-on-bone and it hurts all the time. ALL The TIME! Sleep isn’t assured, complete, nor painless. So I went to see the Saw-Bones.

My life has been a hoot, I don’t regret any of my bad choices or mishaps or accidents. I’ll be the first to admit its been one hell of a party and to have held together for over 60years without crippling myself more, is a miracle of sorts, but… BUT…

I’m pretty beat up, generally, my shoulder is shot. I need to go in for repairs.

This what the repair work looks like…

They reverse the ball and socket. A combination of titanium and metal. My first step into being bionic.

My first step into being an offical ol fart.

And the beat goes on…

More later