Iron Fist

I’ve been trying to come up with a suitably embarrassing story, which should be easier considering that my life frequently seems to be non-stop embarrassment, but here we are on Friday and find I’m drawing a blank. So I started looking through my old archived photos for inspiration, hoping that I’d had the foresight to record some of my more embarrassing moments in life, and still wasn’t getting any inspiration until I came across a folder with photos from the last Halloween party I’d thrown.

I remember it well: I’d convinced my roommate that we’d both grow our beards in so we could both be really homely women for the party. I tasked my girlfriend at the time with finding me appropriate garb, but asked her to find something that wasn’t too expensive — after all, how often would I wear a dress?

The local Goodwill didn’t turn up anything slinky that would fit me, but she did come back with a house dress that was about the right size. I decided against a wig, instead opting for a few pink curlers clipped randomly in my hair, and some costume jewelry. Oh, and I had some really messily-applied makeup as well, but that wasn’t until right after I snapped this self-portrait:

The rest is history.

(This is my submission for Phone It In Friday, run by my friends over at The Collective. Got an embarrassing tale? Go dish over in their comments, or link to a post of your own.)

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Think you’ve had a hard time working with an insurance claims agent?

So…who’s going to see Dark Night this weekend?

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Okay, so long story short, I grievously injured my knee at work last week, which is pretty sad considering I work an office job, and I’m going to skip over the how of me wrecking my knee because even though that story takes place on Take Your Child to Work Day and involves me getting injured while competing with a ten-year old girl, it’s actually a far less entertaining story than that brief synopsis might suggest. Anyway, I at least had the good fortune to bend my leg in a completely unnatural direction while on the job, which means my doctor’s visit and the rehabilitation of my MCL get covered by the company.

So today I went in for physical therapy, which I expected to be no more than a nurse applying some hot compresses to my damaged tissues, but OH NO, medical science has advanced quite a bit since the days when my high school P.E. teacher told me to “just suck it up already”, and I discovered that I was going to be hooked up to a machine so advanced that no one actually knew what it did. I deduced this from the medical assistants’ bedside conversation, which went more or less as follows:

Medical Assistant 1: …and then you put the pads on his leg like this…

Medical Assistant 2: Okay.

MA1: And once they’re stuck, then you take the wires and plug them into the electro-unit.

MA2: I see.

MA1: And this is what heals the tissue.

MA2: Huh. How does it do that? With heat?

MA1: Uh…

MA2: …

Me: …

MA1: Actually, I don’t know how this machine works. But you switch it on here.

MA2: Right here?

MA1: Yep! Just turn it on and keep increasing the power until the patient asks you to stop.

MA2: They’ll tell you when?

Me: H’rkk.

MA1: Oh! Do you want us to make it higher or lower?

Me: Down. H’rk. A notch. Please.

I’m pretty sure this device didn’t actually serve any medical function. And when they had me roll over on my side and slopped a handful of warm goo on my leg without any warning and then spent five minutes poking me with an ultrasonic wand, I don’t think that does anything either. Really, the purpose of all this treatment is to humiliate the patient into healing faster. I think it must work, because I’m already feeling well enough to not want to go back for the rest of the sessions.

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