Collinization

Find Joy In My Suffering

here is the full recount of my 3 part tangle with excrutiating pain.

6/2/03 - Life Tells me, "Grab Your Ankles!"

Man, did I get shit on this weekend. Thursday my parents went away for 10 days. Sounds like the start of a great weekend. So thursday night, I'm at my softball game, just waiting for it to be over so we can all go bbq and get wasted in my backyard. About the 4th inning of the second game I hit a bomb to left field, home run. The weekend keeps getting better and better, and it ain't even friday yet! But wait, whats this? A hard hit ground ball to second? No problem, I sez to myself, so I bend down to get it...Hey, it looks like the ball might hit that rock-THUD! Bright stars buzzing around.

2 hours later, the doctor puts that 13th stitch into the bridge of my nose, and explains to me that I broke my nose in 3 different places. How you break 1 bone in 3 places is beyond me, but I guess that's why I can't afford a real website.

So here I am, 22 years old with the house to myself for 10 days, and a huge bag of frozen peas covering my face. Of course the painkillers they gave me(which don't work) don't mix very well with alcohol, so I get to hear all my friends get drunk while I suffer in the darkness of the green giant's bounty.

But what's this in the mail? It looks important. Oh, thats right, its the summons for that traffic infraction I committed over 2 friggin years ago, for next tuesday! Boy, it should be fun to explain to the judge that whatever I did wasn't my fault, even though I can't even remember what the hell the ticket was for, while staring at him through two huge swollen eyes. No sir, I didn't get into a fight, I just suck at softball. Suuuuuure.

Well my answering machine is blinking, maybe there's some good news on there. Let's see. First is the auto dealership, calling to tell me that the blue color on the 2004 subaru impreza RS is not the same blue that they have in the commercials, but rather a gay purplish thing that looks strangely similar to the color of my face after a few hours of swelling. Oh cruel fate, what more could you do to me? The next message MUST be good news, because bad luck comes in 3s, and we just got a hattrick on the car, right? Wrong! Next message is my dear, sweet sister, explaining to me that she made it safely upstate where she will spend the weekend. Innocent enough, it seems. But there's more! She casually forgot to bring the dog's medicine with her, but not because she forgot. Oh no, that would be much too simple. She accidentally took the wrong bottle, and the painkillers that don't mix with alcohol are in her luggage, while I am home to be conforted by antibiotics designed for a sheltie. Fucking Awesome.

6/5/03 - Thank You Sir, May I Have Another?

Tuesday I went to see the ENT(ear, nose, throat) doctor to see if i did any damage to my sinuses, after my golden glove performance last thursday. They told me all he had to do was take a look and make sure my sinus cavity wasn't damaged. What they neglected to mention on the phone of course, is that to look at my sinus cavity requires them to shove a fiber optic cable up there and wiggle it around. So I'm sitting in this chair, and the doctor has this weird tube run up my nose, about as thick as a paper clip, and he's rifling around in there, looking for bone chips, blood clots, and small stray rodents. This is a sensation I have never felt before; its not pain exactly, although it is excrutiatingly painful. Put it this way; when someone told you what an ear whig does if it gets into your ear, and you imagined what that would feel like as it tunneled toward your brain, that idea you had is what this feels like in real life. So im in this chair, wishing I had never seen the movie "Total Recall", and let me just tell you, I was ready to tell this guy where Bin Laden was hiding if he would just pull the thing out of my nose. Seriously, get this guy down to Gitmo and we'll have Al Queda in no time. So he's digging around in there and the nurse knocks on the door and calls the doctor, so he looks at me and goes "excuse me a minute". WHAT!?! So this guy leaves me sitting in my little chair, with a foot and a half of fiber optic cable up my nose; when I reallized that this is what it would look like to use cocaine intravenusly. For some reason I found that amusing, and I started to laugh to myself. BAD IDEA. I dont know what I did, but while I was laughing I guess I shook the cord loose and it came out that little hole in the back of my throat that my nose is connected to, only i thought it was a loogie. So I cleared my throat and low and behold, the other end of the tube was in my mouth. I pulled it out a little bit, and I saw the end coming out of my mouth. That shit freaked me out in a way I couldn't describe, and I said "Holy shit!" really, really loud (it probably sounded more like "hnnly shhhht"). The doctor came running in all scared, and he saw me sitting there like a retarded chimpanzee playing with an electrician's snake. So he grabs the cord, and whips it out of my nose at a tremendous speed. Now THAT shit hurt. The doctor then gave me that weird, crooked head, confused dog look, and the rest of the time I was there, he talked to me like I was a 4 year old child. I wonder why that was. Anyway I got a clean bill of health, so I never have to see that guy again. Which is good, because he was probably half a step from perscribing me a helmet.

So then today I went back to the plastic surgeon, who took my stitches out. Sorry folks, but this actually went according to procedure. I think he talked to the ENT though, because I was not once left unattended in his office, which is too bad, because he had a fun looking box of used syringes...Anyway, my nose is now shaped like a bannana, so next thursday I get to have it reset, which sounds like loads of fun. The doctor was kind enough to describe the process to me in detail: He will jam cotton into my nose until as full of shit as a Clinton(zing!), shoot me full of sweet, sweet novicaine, and then pop my nosebone back into its original position. What kind of neat, high tech gadget will he be using to do this, you ask? His friggin hand! And he's gonna get paid probably more than a thousand dollars to do it! What fuckin scam. Maybe I'll set up a street nose clinic; you break your nose, and for 50 bux ill grab that shit and yank it back into place. Im not really looking forward to it, in case you didn't notice. And that of course, lead me to write this form letter, and distribute it accordingly:

Dear little league baseball coach,

John "The Face" Collins

6/13/03 "Don't worry, this will just take a second..."

So at the ungodly hour of 7:30 this morning I wander into the doctor's office to get my nose set. I've been hearing horror stories about what he is gonna do to me all week; one lady said they are gonna pack my nose with cotton and hit it with a ball-peen hammer, another guy said they are gonna just grab my nose and snap it back into place. Unfortunately, the people I talk to on a daily basis are completely retarded, as you may have noticed by now. So I go in there, I get into my little room and Im lying on this bed-bench type thing that moves; like the ones on the informercial. So the doctor comes in and talks to me a little bit, and then we start to play every doctor's most favoritist game in the whole wide world: "Does this hurt?"

I am not a medical doctor. But in my years of playing "Does this hurt?", I have found that on a pretty consistent basis, the doctor will poke at you a bit and say, "Does this hurt?"(Hence the name) and you reply yes or no. It's fairly simple and easy to understand. But today, "Does this hurt?" was a 1 player game. The doctor would push on a spot on my nose, and say(you guessed it) "Does this hurt?" and I would say, "Yeah, that fucking hurts!". Now, whenever I have played this game in the past, when you answer "yes", it implies that the doctor should stop doing whatever the hell it is that he is doing. But ohhh nooo, not today! Today "Yes" means "Push harder, you sadistic son of a bitch!"

This went on for about 5 minutes. He would poke the bridge of my nose in a spot, and I would say "Oww." He would then take his thumb, and push on the afformentioned spot as hard as he could, as I lay there in agony. I finally had to ask him, "Do you hear me telling you that it hurts?" To which he replied, "Yes, but it's supposed to hurt." Well why the hell are you asking me then!?!

So after a few hearty rounds of poke-n-squirm, good ole doc decides maybe I can have some novicaine now. How charitible of you. So he shoots me full of sweet, face numbing liquid and we wait for it to set in. About 5 minutes after, he comes back, and we are ready to begin. He pulls out this little tool that looks like a tiny pitching wedge, and shoves that shit up my nose. "Don't worry, this will just take a second" he says, and we all know what that means. He shoulda just told me it was going to hurt him alot more than it would hurt me, for all the comfort I got out of such a statement. And it's about this time that I realize, although my cheeks and upper lip are all numb, my nose is still surprisingly sensitive. This does not bode well at all. I wanted to tell him, but I didn't get a chance before he jammed that shit into my eye socket.

This was the single most intense pain I have ever felt in my life. The doctor is using this little wedge thing to push my nosebone back out of the indent, and he is using my upper lip as a point of leverage. So I grab the edge of the bed to squeeze instead of crying like a little girl, and its a good thing I did. Apparently, I am a very fast healer. The doc was having alot of trouble moving my nose bone, and at one point he lifted my entire body off of the bed while pulling up on his little tool. I weigh about 200 lbs, and this man has me suspended in air by a 4 inch metal rod, which is inserted in my right nostril. Good times, good times.

At least now, no one can tell me I don't know what its like to be a vietnamese prostitute. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

Time for part two, the left side of my crooked ass nose. The good news is, this part doesn't involve a metal shard entering one of my orifices. The bad news is, we do this one the old fashioned way. The doctor puts his two thumbs on the left side of my nosebone, and pushes, really really hard. Honestly, I'm glad this part was second, because compared to part one this was like a vacation. So he does what he has to do, and then we put the cast on. Don't get it wet, don't poke at it, don't use it to re-broadcast major league baseball, blah blah blah. So now we're all done; I got this weird white peice of plastic cemented to my face. The doctor says I should wait 5 or 10 minutes before driving; probably because I was stumbling from wall to wall as I walked down the hallway. So I serve my timeout, and set up my appointment to get the cast removed(only 1 week, woohoo). The receptionist asks me where I'm going, and I tell her im going down stairs to smoke a cigarette while I wait for my ride. And then she casually said something that I will never forget for the rest of my life:

"Oh, well be careful. If the spark gets too close to the cast, it will burst into flames."

They fucking boobytrapped my face. I have a cast that crumbles if it gets wet, and explodes into flames on first contact with a spark. I shoulda stayed at 2nd base, where it was safe. I can't wait till the inevitable part 4 of this story, where I light my head on fire, then have to go back to plastic surgeon and explain to him that I should not be allowed within 50 feet of things that burn, melt, or explode, much less have them glued to my grill. I wonder what sadistic devices of torture he will use to treat that injury? The only way to find out is to keep reading my blog! (Now I have you, muhuhuhahaha)