Result's of last week's 5-hour surgery: ALL positive

 I suppose it’d be safe to say after three nights in the hospital and a five hour surgery that my back problems are all behind me.

But that reaction might be either a bit rosy and open to anatomical  confusion. 

Think about it. 

Aren’t even future back problems all behind us and can the back ever be described  the front?

I’ll try and come  back to this.

Let’s cut to the chase. The doctor said the operation was a success. I’m fine, thank you. And that thank you is from the heart (bpm, 75). I can sense in my veins (bp 120/80) that your prayers and well wishes were all sincere. It warms my soul (body temp 98.7) to know you care.

The operation involved “unpinching” a clutch of nerves that developed after the beavers in my back began damming up my spinal cord. There were bone spurs, arthritis, etc.

It was so bad I needed a wheel chair to get into the hospital for the healing.

The surgery should allow the tangle of nerves to rush to their stations. 

I’m no longer feeling the disabling hip pain that’s for three years made every single step a torture.

It effected every aspect of my life. People were asking what’s wrong with me. Will we ever see the old Chris again?

I’m, grateful especially to Val, Josie, Lucy and especially Val. The repetition is deliberate. She’s deserving of additional praise and affection.

Now, I’m ready to work on my personal appearance punctuation. For too long people have looked at me, I believe, and have seen a hobbled man locked in a defensive crouch, a man too timid to cross a busy street on a drizzly day. I looked like a man determined to shorten the drop into the cushioned comfort of any nearby coffin.

I intend to resume being upright, enthused and as publicly erect as the law allows.

When people observe me, they’ll no longer see a man bent like a nagging question mark.

They’ll see an exclamation point.

And then they’ll know the old Chris’s back. 

• Don’t think you’ve seen the last of me!

Wednesday I'm scheduled for a 6 hour operation; obviously the Doc is not a golfer

 

I’m getting my back operated on Wednesday at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh. I have many concerns, foremost being it could be a really elaborate hoax. If everyone is in on the joke, how will I know they even operated? 

I’m 62 years old and have never once laid eyes on the part of the body — my own goddamned body — where they said they’ll be making the incision.

There’s a reason the office hooligans always tape the “KICK ME!” signs right about where they say they’re going to start cutting me up.

I guess my fears say more about my deceitful nature than they do about medical reality. Studies show it’s very rare for a doctor and his or her entire team to pretend they operated when, in fact, they did not. Even when it's all for the sake of a joke.

It’s just one of the ways MDs differ from BSJs (me). The BS, I’m told, stands for Bachelor of Science Journalism but it doesn’t take a wild imagination to think of a clever substitute for BS, does it?

The procedure, they say, will reduce the pain that is without surgical intervention on a trajectory that will leave me wheelchair bound within a year.

Many good friends have rallied to my side. They say they support me, say they have my back. I tell them they wouldn’t want my back. It’s a mess. My front is no prize either.

I’d say pick a side. Sides are cool. I dream of the day when you could walk into any deli or diner in America and hear someone say, “And I’d like a side of Rodell with that."

Order up!

It saddens me that I’ve succumbed to baseless conspiracy /theories, hinting that I’ve become one of those quacks I once disdained. A friend even offered to provide photographic evidence. I told him I wasn’t falling for his little charade.

“Either you’ll show me a picture of real MDs doing real work on a back I’ve never even seen with my own eyes or else it’ll be a picture of something phony, prepared or manipulated

“You know, something … doctored!”

I sent a text to close family members explaining the situation, telling each how much I loved them. I asked them, if worst came to worse, to honor what will be my last wish: Please do not bicker over my Earthly estate.

“We promise we won’t,” said my brother

Both family and friends have endeavored to put the challenge in the best possible light. They cite progress in the procedure, advances in technology and the growing experience of our top professionals.

They tell me I’ll be in good hands.

Wrong.

Good hands will be in me!

The operation is expected to last six hours.

I’ll be sure to let you know if the halftime show was as confusing to old white folk like me as Lamar’s was.

Seeking Go Fund Me donations: Why now? Why me? Why not?

The venerable Washington Post lost $77 million in 2023. I read that and felt an unseemly flush of superiority over the brainy  conglomerate that runs the place.

I lost way, way less than that — and I’m all alone by myself!

Still, the twin losses are indicative of the fiscal perils for those of us who seek to make money telling stories. For years, supporters have urged me to try a Go Fund Me campaign. I have always resisted the advice on the grounds that I didn’t think it would be  a very good look for me to insinuate my needs next to campaigns for families who’d lost their homes to fire or schools that couldn’t afford to heat the classrooms.

Heck, I didn’t have an effective argument for why you should fund me instead of one seeking funds to buy false teeth for the neighborhood hound: “Chompers for Chauncey!”

What’s changed? Other than all the great strides they’ve made in canine dentures.

I guess I want to ensure my new book achieves lift off. Therefore I’m now actively seeking sponsorship donations that will fund a comprehensive marketing game plan implemented by Headspace Media, the crackerjack local firm that’s become very renown very quickly.

Originally, a book about Parkinson’s, it organically became a book about the pre-existing conditions we all must endure. It tackles parenting, adversity, celebration, traffic woes, spirituality, male pattern baldness and the still incomprehensible reality that we all must press on without Tom Petty.

The book is “How to Deal With Things That Suck: The Art of Living Suddenly.”

I’m grateful for any shares, chatter or donations to help me reach or exceed my $7,500 goal

Our homes are way too clean

 

I’ve been witness to the phenomenon in the cities and the country and I’ve come to conclude our greatest untapped source of natural clean energy is cleaner energy. I’m talking about all the energy that is created and spent by people obsessed with cleaning things that are already perfectly clean.

Cleaner energy is all the time, strategizing and horse power anal retentive home owners  expend on cleaning items and spaces that are already clean and will look indistinguishably different after more furious cleaning activity.

I was making small talk with some friends last week and I asked about their weekend plans. She mentioned a visit to a destination restaurant, a movie and then, her voice rising an octave intoned, “And then we’re going to give the whole house a really good cleaning. We’re going to start in the living room. We’ll dust, vacuum and wax. Then it’s down the hall …”

As she said this, she looked like I remember Gen. Patton looking as he told reporters how he was going to take Salerno back from the Nazis.

I gave her an evaluating look. Not a hair was out of place. Nice smile. Impeccable makeup. This pretty woman was not the kind of person who’d ever even enter, much less reside, in an unkempt house. 

Then I glanced over at the husband. I noted the stress-related baldness. Nervous twitch and a pleading look toward the bartender to pour something down his throt that would spare him his fate.

In short, he looked like one of the soldiers Patton ordered to take back a key Salerno bridge armed with only a feather duster and a can of Pledge furniture polish.

I’ve seen that desperate, forlorn look on men like him a thousand times.

In the mirror!

It may be sexist, but the condition does seem to be more aggressive in the female of the species. I addressed this in  a parallel observation years ago:

“Women look into mirrors and see flaws … no one else can detect.

“Men look into those same mirrors and see perfection … no one else can detect.”

We need to harness and convert all the energy these subjects spend on cleaning and turn it into fuel, fuel to heat and light  our homes.

And what happens if these alterations in adherent cleaning priorities fail to catch on? What happens if the lights begin to dim?

Even better.

It’s much harder to spot a fleck of dust in a room that’s poorly illuminated.

And today in DC, an Asian elephant named Kamala is dead

 

It pains me to on this day, this day of all days, to inform it's time to mourne the death of Kamala.

And by “we,” I mean partisans on both sides because Kamala made a big impact.

How could she do otherwise?

The old babe weighed more than 3 tons. 

Cause of death?

I’ll not fault those of you who are betting it was obesity.

But, no, this Kamala was euthanized. Osteoarthritis had put the elephant in “irreversible decline” and 3 tons is a lot of inertia

Kamala, 50, was an Asian elephant at the Smithsonian National Zoo, and it’s an actual zoo in Washington, a city that’s often described as a metaphorical one.

So today we have a woman who’s running for president under posters that feature symbolic donkeys and she shares her uncommon name (meaning: Sanskrit for Lotus flower) with a great beast that represents a party who’ll stop at nothing to elect a man many voters regard as a giant ass.

Take a moment. That’s a lot to digest.

And I’m being literal here because when I hear a 3-ton animal is being put down, I think DC ought to have one giant barbecue. The logistics are bound to be colossal. You could feed the world. 

For perspective, the other Kamala weighs about 110 pounds. So it’s the one Kamala weighs about as much as 61 of the other. 

How many people could a dead elephant feed?

I say this because the story, in what to me is an unforgivable omission, failed to mention the biggest question of this biggie-sized story.

How do you dispose of a dead 6,000-pound animal? Is there on the grounds a fabled elephant graveyard; or do you dismember the behemoth?

Imagine that task. I have to believe it would involve chain saws, forklifts and triple decker HAZMAT suits — and that’s just if the elephant comes with a penis.

That’s why I’m leaning toward the barbecue option.There aren't  many people who’ve actually eaten elephant. In fact, most people don’t even know someone who knows someone who’s eaten elephant.

Well, strike that one from your bucket list because you all know me and that makes me the guy that knows the guy.

The guy is the late John Clouse, one of the most entertaining men I’ve ever known. I first wrote about Clouse, an Evansville, Indiana, attorney, for National Enquirer in 1997. He was the Guinness World Record holder for being the world’s most traveled man. He’d been to something like all but two of the of the world’s countries, islands and territories.

A World War II vet and survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, he vowed if he ever got out of that battle alive he was going to lead an entirely original life.

And he did just that. He experienced almost everything available for a human to do. When nervous classmates threw themselves into a tizzy over the bar exam, Clouse said, “They ain’t going to be shooting bullets at us, are they?”

He’d survived plane crashes, deadly fevers and the terrors of being married and divorced 6 times. So I knew to call John when editors at Esquire called and asked me if I knew anyone who’d dined on testicles.

You know. Rocky Mountain oysters, fried bull balls.

The prescient among you may already see where this is going. I got a hold of John and asked if he’d ever eaten testicles.

“What kind,” he said right away.

Something unusual, I urged.

“Well, I had some elephant balls once. It was at this Berlin restaurant that was serving elephant testicles in what they were calling ‘Elephant Soup Burundi.’

“And, no, they didn’t come in a really, really big bowl.”

So, there you have it.

Maybe the timing of Kamala’s death signifies that if Washington wasn’t big enough for two Kamalas, that hypothetical is put to rest.

It is now. In fact, if my calculations are in the ballpark, there is now room for roughly 59. 8 Kamalas.

Keep that in mind as you watch the nailbiter results.