Life on the disabled list

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Pardon me for being crabby, but I'm on my last nerve, and that nerve is on the outside of my ass.

For days, I've been hold up, here, on a Lazy Boy chair with only two pugs book-ending me.

You see, my body is failing me. My left knee has become a mess of angry cartilage, threatening to explode every time I get up to take a piss. As if in retaliation -- in the case of my gallbladder, it's always 'what about me?' -- I am nursing a sickening pain in my right side, making laying down not an option.

Being immobilized means that all the food just settles despite a parade of little helpers: antacids, green tea, and Aleve, so I'm feeling really bloated and belchy, unable to bear the fencing in of various rolls of flesh. Bras and control top underwear, once my go-to friends, have become the enemy.

Here I splay.

Being a shut-in, chained as I am to the Lazy Boy, is no picnic. I am a reactive mess forced to entertain myself with a variety of devices, all of which give me no comfort. Television has already failed me. I can no longer tolerate the imbeciles that litter daytime television, the free-range thinking of has-been actresses and comics, the commercials selling insurance and cures for incontinence.

The news is no better with the 24 hour cycle filled to the brim with sad images of fallen soldiers and serial killers, interspersed with reports of what's trending on Twitter and cat videos.

I'm going nuts, I tell you, nuts.

My only relief is letting the dogs out, which I do a couple of times a day. I can fairly well hobble down the stairs holding onto the railing while Finnigan barks and snaps at Sophie. Gingerly, I limp towards a chair to spend a precious hour throwing Kong for Finnigan whose gratitude fills me with delight.

Sometimes I'm envious of this wonderful, vibrant soul who exists in our world oblivious to its sordid underbelly. And I'm envious, too, of the hundred or so souls who bustle past me on St. Laurent Blvd. completely taking for granted their ambulatory abilities.

What wouldn't I give for a day without pain?

Still, I'm grateful for a crisp autumn day, the burst of color, the falling leaves landing on my lawn where they will stay until someone else rakes them up.

How wonderful, I think, as I see Finnigan sniffing an apple that, presumably, some lazy schoolkid tossed over the fence. He worries it, turning it over and over and walks away. And then I realize there is something wrong with it. I hobble over, pick it up and see that it's not an apple anymore. It's a drug pipe fashioned with metal mesh and remnants of some sour smelling mash that makes my loyal retriever turn up his nose.

Lucky for Finn, that he didn't gobble it down. He would have dropped like a stone, and that, my friends, would have been a terrible day.

I'm not sure what's safer, life on the inside watching murder and mayhem on the news, or life on the outside witnessing firsthand what our world has become.

In the end, I suppose, it could be much worse.

I could be really sick, not just injured. And Finnigan could have chosen the wrong door by gobbling up that apple.

Better to be watching the news than be in it, I guess.

A glass is half full observation that helps me get through my day.

A day in life, on the disabled list.