I'll Be Out In A Minute

I'M sure apologies is too strong a word, but my usual tax procrastination has combined with Physical Therapy to throw my blogging timing way off.  

Especially the PT, which I'm hoping was merely a matter of wrong place/wrong time.  My "therapist" Liz--or, more formally, Ms Mengele--works out of a book entitled To Serve Man, which the others don't seem to be using. Last Friday I was given a series of calisthenics of about ten reps each and told if I managed to do them three times a day it would be "awesome".  Yes, vocabulary is another area where Liz and I don't see eye to monocle.

I return on Monday and find myself led into a secret room and strapped into a series of torture devices heretofore unmentioned.  It was a lot like being at some trendy gym with ex-Nazi trainers, except all the hot chicks were 85 years old.  Really, so far as I've seen I'm the youngest client there by roughly two decades.  And then Nurse Mengele has me do two sets of fifteen reps each of all my exercises, or roughly now, three fucking times what she started me on just 72 hours earlier.  That's some awesome progress.  Then she led me to a table and tried to dislocate my hip.  

Now, two things:  one, I'd been doing two sets of ten-fifteen reps on those exercises at home already, because they seemed pretty easy and the resulting pain was manageable.  But she didn't know that, and she barely asked me how things had gone.   I suspect she may have skipped a page somewhere. And two, my suspicions are at least partly confirmed by the fact that she began by working on the wrong leg, which is not a real confidence builder, shall we say, and the fact that she perpetually loses count on my reps, and was only alerted to the fact that I was doing 95 rpm on the recumbent bike when the adorably garrulous  ninety-year-old woman parked in the wheelchair behind me commented on how fast I was going.   Let's just say that I'm on guard in case she tries to lock me in the steam room.

The most disconcerting thing was that when I winced while doing an exercise on some stairs she stopped the proceedings and admonished me to stop doing things when they hurt.  When they hurt!  Lady, everything hurts, unless you've got some morphine in the desk you'd care to share.

No, wait, the most disconcerting thing is that the assignment of therapists seems to be on a strictly coed basis--every patient I've seen so far has one of the opposite sex, and the men seem to say "honey" a lot and "you've got my card if anything changes", and...wait a minute!  Where are the old therapists?  All of them seem to be under twenty-six.  Ohmigod, it's Soylent Green! They're in the mats!  Police!  Police!

Okay, so on second thought that's really not all that troubling.

But Liz and I decidedly did not hit it off, in part because she's got that Fergie thing going on, where apparently instead of showering with soap and water she uses olive oil, and Spanish instead of Italian at that, and in part because I was insufficiently impressed by the five-carat diamond on her left hand.  The goddam thing is almost as tall as she is.  And let's just say the aura is not of someone whose full attention is on the rehabilitation of Which Knee Was It You Had Surgery On, Again?

Plus I'm a short timer, which apparently doesn't make you very popular, but which did not prevent the office person from asking me if I preferred "James" or "Jim", to which I did not reply, "Well, my friends call me Jimbo, but you can call me Mr. Riley."  'Cause there was a thirty-year-old guy in the waiting room, and I had him pegged for a Soylent Green agent.   They're everywhere.