So my knee hurt off and on and I continued to ignore it. I could walk so I was fine right? Well a few days before Christmas my family has Christmas dinner because my parents were going to be out of town on Christmas day. The day before everyone comes over I am running up and down the four flights of stairs inside my house cleaning, cooking, picking up, etc. My knee hurt so badly that night I couldn’t sleep. The next day my family is over and we are having a grand ole time. I sit Indian style on the floor next to my niece and start handing out presents. About 5 minutes sitting like that I stretch my leg out and it pops like an M-80 going off.
My sister-in-law looks at me and says, “Was that your knee or did something blow up in the kitchen?”
Me: “It was my knee I hurt it a week ago and it is popping and hurting.” I explain how I hurt it and then everyone starts telling me I need to go to the doctor. So Hot Carl makes me promise in front of the whole family to go to the doctor next week. Everyone goes home and we clean up and I put a reminder in my phone to call the doc in the morning.
I show up for my doctor appointment and have the doctor pull really hard on my knee, push it left, right, up and down, and then sits on my foot and pulls against my knee to see where it hurts. She is 90% sure I have just sprained it and it will take a while to heal. Gives me a prescription for pain killers and tells me to stay off it as much as I can, and also that she wants to get an MRI of the knee to make sure I didn’t tear the MCL basically a ligament in my knee.
So the referral nurse makes an appointment for me at the Hospital Imaging Center for Christmas Eve Day. The hospital is short staffed that day due to the holiday and I am an hour late getting back to the MRI machine. No biggie I am off for the day and I have a book with me. The nurse walks me back and tells me to take off my pants and undies and hands me scrubs to put on. I disrobe and go to put the scrub pants on and notice they are about two sizes too small, but I squeeze my lard ass into them; and I look like a sausage about to explode.
I walk out to the machine and get on the table. She grabs a blanket out of a microwave type unit and throws it over me because it is COLD in there. She wraps a plastic thing around my knee for the pictures I assume and gives me headphones to put on. She said she can offer me a FM station so I ask for JACKFM. She loads me into the machine and says the headphone should drown out most of the noise and not to move at all during the 20 minute procedure.
I put my headphones and wait for the music. The first song is the “Boys are Back in Town”. I hate the song there are not enough words to describe how much I hate this song. But I stay still and listen and then hear the MRI machine kick on. It is the loudest noise I have ever heard. It went DA BOOM, DA BOOM, DA BOOM, WHIRR, WHIRR, WHIRR and I think I am in a nuclear reactor. I can see why people flip out in these things. Then silence, then nuclear reactor, then silence, then nuclear reactor, you get the idea.
I go back to listening to the headphones and thank God there are now playing commercials. A few minutes later a Crack Head version of Jingle Bells comes on, then more commercials, then the DJ’s rambling about their day, and finally I song I like. Stone Temple Pilots, now that is my speed. I start getting into the song and the nurse says. “OK all done, you can get dressed and leave. You will have the results next week sometime.”Sure finish during the good song. So I go peel the scrub off, get dressed and leave.
I get home and take a pain pill and start wrapping presents. I make southwest egg rolls and bacon wrapped little smokies to take to the in-laws that night for Christmas Eve dinner. We arrive and go inside. I carry the food in and Hot Carl and one of my brother-in-laws goes outside to get the presents. I take the cover of dish with the egg rolls and notice that they didn’t brown, hadn’t noticed until then. I know I put them in the oven and cooked them for 45 mins, and then realized I made them from scratch and you have to fry egg rolls to get them to brown. I assure everyone they are done, just not brown. They really were done and tasted great, they were just white. Oh well.
I go back to the front room and put the packages under the tree and notice one is missing. I ask the boys to go look outside and they can’t find it. I then go look and cannot find it. I decide I left one at home and feel horrible. Well at least it is the 3 year olds and he wouldn’t remember. So I tell his mom I will bring it to him later and all is good.
We eat dinner, including the white anemic looking egg rolls, and then start opening presents. My niece unwraps the present we bought her and finds another wrapped present inside with her brother’s name on it. She holds it up and yells, "I found Brendan’s present it was wrapped inside of my present."
My Brother-in-law looks at me and without missing a beat, “Can I have some of the pain killers you're on?”
Wow I only took one pain killer and apparently forgot how to cook and wrap presents.
Oh and I couldn’t find the scotch tape while I was wrapping the presents so I used box tape to wrap the presents and thought this will be ok.
I have been off the pain killers since yesterday and realize what a nut job I was Christmas Eve. Who knows what else we will find around the house that I did while on the pain killers. Oh well. Merry Christmas to All and I’ll update you on what the Nuclear Reactor (MRI) picture says.
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