All the Inauguration stories have not been told. Here’s one from the day after the Inauguration.
It was brave for Aunt CC to take me to the train station. I gotta love her for that. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“No, no I insist” she says.
People don’t get enough credit for the minor acts of heroism that happen every day.
Allow me to recap:
Some years ago Aunt CC was rear- ended while teaching her oldest daughter how to drive a stick shift. She was in the car with her two children Angela up front and Brian in the backseat.
A short aside about Angela:
Angela is a true American patriot.
Those who love their country serve it.
And this country’s greatest servants are its greatest assets. She is a constant reminder of the fundamental decency and love of the homeland that true citizens possess.
She is one of those assets.
Angela has done three tours of duty in Iraq. She came back and got a nursing degree and is working as a triage nurse. In what off hours she has she’s taking the MCAT’s to get into medical school.
She inspires me more than she could ever know.
But this isn’t her story.
This is the story of her mother.
So there she is at a full stop and some guy is barreling towards her from the rear. Brian is in the back seat saying this guy is coming fast and doesn’t look like he’s going to stop. She talks at him more to quiet him down than actually listen and continues on with her lesson plan.
The next thing she knows he’s in her trunk.
Literally.
And she’s got a rod in her spine and all kinds of pins and screws. Little do I know she’s been to the doctor’s office and had two cortisone shots; one on the left and one on the right side of her neck between vertebrae 3 and 4.
She opens the door to her apartment to let me in. Her voice is shaky and her eyes are welled up with tears. She begins explaining that she had just gotten off the phone with a friend of hers from some years ago.
I thought someone had died.
I notice that her neck is really stiff. She asks if I want anything. I tell her no, but thank you. I tell her that she doesn’t look well and that I can grab the laptop my father left me and come visit her another time.
“I didn’t know that he was going to shoot me twice. Nobody told me about that,” she says.
She takes a good look at me.
“Freddy could have coughed Christopher up and spit him out,” she goes on.
“I never had a cortisone shot. I didn’t know it was a three shot thing,” she laments.
She tells me that she had surgery 20 weeks ago on August the 27th. She puts a period on this last statement by pulling down her collar to show me a jagged surgery scar. The purpose of the shot was to address the arthritis pain she had been feeling up and down the vertebrae.
“The nurse warned me by the time I got home the anaesthesia would wear off,” Aunt CC says.
“She was riiighhhht”, she says in almost a hoarse whisper.
She asked me when was the last time I talked to my father. I said back in DC before I got on the Metro to Pentagon City. She told me that she had gotten off the phone with him not fifteen minutes before I walked into her apartment. He had told her to turn the radio on because they might be interviewing Rhonda on the Michael Baisden show.
I pulled it off the top shelf and plugged the radio in.
“I’m ready to go back to New York,” she quips.
I told her I liked DC, but it was definitely not NYC. I said that she better stay where she was with a good job that had benefits at least until the Recession was over.
I wish that would hurry up and happen already.
The conversation swiched gears onto the subject of pain.
I said it was a good thing that women had the honor of bearing children. If men had to do it there wouldn’t be any children. Not because men couldn’t deal with the physical agony of childbirth, but there’s no way we would consent to the nine month process of swelling, body disfigurement, hot flashes, cramps, morning sickness, etc.
No freaking way.
She said that I was from a different generation of men. Men from her generation weren’t…(insert expletive)
She added that the doctor’s hoped they wouldn’t have to go back to Phase 2.
She explained that when the fusion took place the doctor could have used cadaver bone or plastic. However, the human body tends to reject foreign materials. She chose instead to have bone taken from her hip made into her new disk.
She grabbed a big medical book with colored pictures of the body. She turned the pages until she found the picture of the spine.
She points to the book.
“The fusion happened here on vertebrae 5, 6, and 7.”
But now she was having pain in vertebrae 3 and 4. The doctor had said that it wasn’t herniated, but there was arthritis in the disk.
The shots weren’t going to take effect for another three or four days.
“When I saw you the other day before the Inauguration I was faking it. I was in a lot of pain.”
She continues.
“If it doesn’t work it’s Phase 2 to fuse vertebrae 3 and 4,” she says this as her fingers point to these vertebrae in the book.
“The needle for the cortisone shots went in between vertebrae 3 and 4. I wish she had told me I’d have to turn left to do my right side.”
She closes the book and we begin talking about the new President.
“I thought he was going to be assassinated. I almost didn’t vote for him because I didn’t want his daughters to go without a father.”
“But the more I listened to him the more I liked him.” she finishes.
I like him too.
-Daimyo
