Earlier this week, I went for the MRI results of the injured hand I wrote about in To The Wall. As both my Husband and the pit of my stomach had been predicting, it is in fact broken. Not massively, of course, or else it would have shown up in the initial X-ray taken at the Indiana emergency room, but subtly fractured enough to require a hard cast up to my elbow. Excuse me, but FUCK.
Putting a hard cast on a patient requires two things: an orthopedic surgeon to prescribe it and a technician to put it on, taking care to create a small, permanent patch of solid frayed edge that will continually cut into the patient’s flesh. My point of pain is the crease between my left thumb and forefinger, which after a single day bore an abrasion the size of a kitten.
The following morning I woke up bleeding and cranky (have a nice day, honey!) and spent the early hours affixing anything adhesive-backed I could get my good hand on in an attempt to soften the friction. What finally worked was the fuzzy half of the Velcro strips we use to put Navajo rugs on our walls. This is a decorating trick we learned out in New Mexico when we bought the rugs at auction: don’t frame them; just put Velcro strips on the wall and press the rug right over them. For larger rugs, use heavy-duty Velcro on a wooden strip and nail the strip to the wall. Until now, I never found a use for the fuzzy half left over. Oh, happy day.
Once I could move my hand without wincing, I drove over to my school, currently on a two-week recess, and spoke to the director about my options. My course of study involves the use of portable but cumbersome equipment for which I need both hands all the time. As a result of my injury, I have not been able to do the many hours of homework we were assigned or practice on my own at all.
Before I even saw the director’s face, which said “Oh, dear!” I knew I had two options: Miss the first two to three weeks of the new session or take a leave of absence. The sessions are ten weeks long so I need to do the math and decide if I can still keep up after missing that much time. Taking a leave of absence would mean I’ll be reassigned to the class behind me, a group of pinheads the entire school has recognized as intolerable.
I don’t know who’s paying for these adult women to attend this expensive, specialized program, but they behave like they’re children at summer camp, disrupting every class with their chatter and tossing cheese doodles across the room on breaks. Their rants to each other have included wails like “I can’t believe she gave me an ‘F’ on that report! I used so many big words!” God help me.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos say Oooh, That’s Gotta Hurt
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fake homeless
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