Juniorbird.com

If I were wheezing and gasping for breath as I begged for an appointment with my doctor’s receptionist, would you want me to keep it down during said begging? OK, you’d probably want to hear all the drama of my life since you were stuck waiting for your appointment. Being a gossip hound, I know that was exactly how I felt.
First there was the big guy who couldn’t avoid emitting a string of curses every time he moved. “Oh Jesus!” he’d creak as he sat down, then, vaguely, “Sorry!” Or, later, “Christ!” as he shifted in his seat, and “pardon me!” Standing back up earned a “Aww fuck! Oh excuse me.” At least he tried to be quiet. He didn’t try to be quiet when his cell phone rang, though:
bq. “Yeah, they think I have a hematoma. And cracked ribs. Yeah, it feels about like that. Naw, I don’t remember it all. Sure must’ve been, though! He keeps on calling me, says he wants to be my sponsor… I told him I’m not sure I want to take it all the way to sponsor, you know? More like a friend and a sponsor-y person to talk to. Exactly, I’m not sure I trust him! I totally think he was lying. Yeah, exactly. Naw, I’m not at the same doctor. Nah, he wouldn’t give me the pills. Yep, I’m gonna try this one, he works for Larry. Yeah, that’s right. No, I don’t wanna have the same sponsor as him, he seems kinda… hold on”
I think that was when he noticed I was taking notes on his conversation. A pity, since I’d been waiting for a good fifteen minutes when this guy started talking. Fortunately, there were two kind souls who followed on that show to make my 45-minute wait seem as short as possible.
First was a short, square, older Latin man who stomped in with the bow-legged gait of a physical laborer. “Why you give my son pills?” he asked. There was some hemming and hawing as the man insisted my doctor gave his son samples and a prescription, and the doctor insisted he just gave the prescription. “I don’t want you give him pills, you know he go to doctors and they give him pills and he take pills with a drink and he take too much of both,” said the man. “I only gave him amoxicillin and vicodin for the eye pain, he tried to get percoset but I wouldn’t give it to him,” explained my doctor, a short, swarthy man who — if the photos on his walls say anything — used to be an Air Force doctor and who graduated from USC but who seems to have season tickets to UCLA football.
I hope my doctor is not the guy to go for if you’re prescription-shopping. But that would explain his popularity.
He’s so popular his patients can’t wait to come back. One young lady, trying to lose weight, was coming in every six months. “I stopped feeding my cat seconds, too!” she said to her nurse as I passed her on the way to get weighed.[1] Old Black Lady Who Couldn’t Breathe also couldn’t stay away. She shuffled in, bright in her pink silk[2] shirt and pink polyester pants.
bq. “Hi honey. [wheeze] The other doctor [wheeze] finally [wheeze] diagnosed [wheeze] me with a [wheeze] breathing problem. [wheeze] I got tests [wheeze] and everything! [wheeze] I called you [wheeze] a little [wheeze] earlier [wheeze] and said [wheeze] I’d be in. [wheeze] I know [wheeze] I had [wheeze] an appointment [wheeze] last Tuesday [wheeze] but I was [wheeze] too tired [wheeze] to come in [wheeze] then, so [wheeze] I thought [wheeze] I’d come in [wheeze] now. [wheeze] Oh honey, [wheeze] cain’t the doctor [wheeze] see me [wheeze] today? [wheeze] I know [wheeze] I don’t have [wheeze] no appointment [wheeze] today but [wheeze] I was [wheeze] hoping?
She didn’t stick around for her non-appointment but I have faith in whatever doctor diagnosed her with a breathing problem. Still, she was a spry lady for someone I’d guess was in her late 70s — she kept on knocking things off of the receptionist’s desk, but she’d reach down and pick ‘em right back up!
See, with folks like that at the doctor’s, who needs TV? All you need is a phone with a little keyboard on it so that you can transcribe conversations while people think you’re just texting your friends. Like I’d text; I ain’t got no friends to text to![3]
Anyway, I still have the same unspecified blah that I’ve had for the last two weeks, but at least now we’ve Run Some Tests. Soon I’ll have a name to put to all this and then it’ll be all better! It’s just like being in House!
fn1. I’ve lost weight. More on that later.
fn2. Perhaps a rayon blend?
fn3. I know _you’re_ my friend. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that I’ve been in every night for two weeks because I’ve felt miserable, so I’ve turned all my friends away.

So, this weekend was my 10-year college reunion. I was all pumped to go, despite a very long and exhausting week, so that I could show everyone what a big success I am. But then, in my role as a LA Fire Department Rescue Jumper, while bungee-jumping from a helicopter in order to rescue a kitten from onrushing floodwaters, I threw out my back. So, instead, I’ve spent the weekend in my most orthopedically-correct chair.
OK, that’s kind of mostly a lie. Not the reunion part, because that was definitely scheduled, and not the sitting on a chair part, because that has definitely been what’s happened. No, the lies are all in the middle of the paragraph above. First of all, I was not pumped to go, because I am not[1] a success. Second of all, I actually screwed up my back washing my hair. Which is not as cool as being a rescue jumper.
OK, there was a little lie in that last paragraph too. I didn’t actually screw up my back washing my hair; I didn’t get to the _washing_ part. I had the shampoo in my hands and when I touched my head — no more forcefully than usual, may I say, and I’m not a big fan of hitting myself upside the head just to get the Head & Shoulders to my scalp more effectively — I felt something awful happen in the upper middle part of my back. It felt like the three or four vertebrae right there bent outwards while everything else stayed where it was. Then the muscles on the left side of my spine right there got enormously sore, and not even the massaging shower head could un-knot them.[2]
Poor Junior really wanted him a shower too, but I was just in too much pain to let him have that fun. So I got out of the shower, laid down on my bed, felt sorry for myself for a couple of minutes, and then called up the AIG, who’s at a family event back East, and bitched to her for a while.
While speaking to her it became clear to me that I couldn’t turn my head more than a couple of degrees to the left. That makes it rather unsafe to drive.[3] So I canceled yesterday’s trip out to Claremont for my reunion. And, when I woke up this morning and had no more than 15 degrees of neck-turning to the left, I canceled today’s trip too. Sorry, people who I hung out with regularly for four years ten years ago.
What’s really scary is that back injuries are catching, and you can catch them from reading a blog. I caught mine from my good friend “Christie”:http://karayzieho.livejournal.com/241425.html, who also missed this reunion because of her back. Will you catch a back injury from me? Be careful out there!
fn1. yet
fn2. Or ice packs, or Icy Hot patches, or Advil.
fn3. Especially for the poor suckers driving in my blind spot.

In our “last episode”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003015.html, it was revealed that our hero had a very very sore shoulder. Well, insofar as it’s the holidays, and I’m with my family, and they’re footing the bill, and we’re staying at a hotel with an attached spa, I thought I’d get a massage. Because, as we learned in Thailand, “massages fix things”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/002680.html.
So I booked myself a massage appointment (only had to wait two days for it) and walked about 300 feet to the “Trellis Spa”:http://www.trellisspa.com/ next door. The smell of eucalyptus and soothing South Asian-inspired instrumental music greeted me, and I was soon ensconced in a deep chair with some (too-citrusy) spa water. Now, most everyone knows that doing nothing is acutally beyond relaxed, it’s boring — my normal state is doing two things at once so mellow is just doing one thing, and that not very hard. So, after a second of sipping, I whipped out the ol’ Treo and began to play games on it. That held me for ten minutes until a nice woman took me into a small room and had me take off my clothes.
About 2/3 of my hour massage were spent on my shoulder. My masseuse said that, in the ten years she’d been massaging, this was the worst shoulder she’d ever encountered. I’m sure that was part upsell but the pain in my back told me it wasn’t all marketing. I got hot towels, elbows, pressure points, various infused oils — nothing would break my shoulder up.
Sitting here now, it’s kind of funny — I can reach behind myself and touch my back, and the right side is normal and relaxed, while the left is all hard as a rock from the bottom rib up. And this is after my massage, which I would count as good, but not better than the nice old Thai lady who was trained at the Thai Royal Massage School. I think I need me another one of those. Otherwise it’ll just be me and this back against the coach class seats in Continental. Ain’t that Christmasy?

Those of you who have been following along for quite a while may remember The Incident With The Roll-Out Bed. For many years, when visiting my Grandma[1] for christmas, I slept on this fold-up bed on wheels that got rolled out only when I was in town. When I was six, this contraption, whose purchase only slightly antedated my father’s birth, was quite adequate. However, when I turned 14 or so, one night on this bed left me writhing on the floor in the way that only a sore back can make one writhe.
Switching to a hotel bed has been a moderate improvement, although somebody needs to have a discussion with someone in purchasing about buying feather pillows whose feathers don’t magically flow to the part where your head _isn’t_, leaving said head raised off the bed only by the thickness of the pillowcase. But I digress.
Earlier this year, I managed to tweak my back by sitting on my very-not-supportive couch and doing work for days on end. A small tweak was magnified into exquisite pain by economy-class airline accomodations, and I spent four days trying various yoga poses to loosen up my back.[2]
Being an individual whose habits are tempered by practicality, I switched to working more in my office and on my “Poang”:http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jzatarai/poang.JPG chair[3]. While good for my back, neither of these was sufficient to overcome my old “Diablo”:http://www.blizzard.com/diablo/ injury.
If we take the wayback machine to 1998, we might come upon a me, with a different hairstyle, more rugby shirts, and an addiction to the game of Diablo. Like many young geeks, I quested in the catacombs for hours and hours. I even fought through the pain as I was rent asunder by skeletons and developed a twinge under my left shoulderblade.
Sadly, while the skeletons were ultimately vanquished, nothing could take away the twinge. Too much typing and, suddenly, it would appear. Proper posture seemed to have little to do with its arrival. And on Tuesday it came back. I took some Advil and it got a little better, but even some “muscle relaxers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fioricet cadged from a migraine-inflicte friend were insufficient to send it away.
And now, thanks to a three-hour flight in a slim metal tube hurtling through the atmosphere at a speed insufficient to stop the guy behind me from kicking my seat every time he moved, my shoulder pain has spread to the middle third of the left side of my back. Ouchie, it hurts. But, since we’re in Houston, I should expect no less! I’ll see you next year when, perhaps, I’ll slip a disc.
fn1. Not my “granma”:http://www.granma.cu/
fn2. Finally, with a great cracking, something worked.
fn3. Photo is for illustrative purposes only, and does not depict my Poang.

Are you thinking of a “summer internship in or temporary relocation to Arizona”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/001587.html? Think twice, it

I’m officially cured; praise be, my legs are whole again!
Well, not that whole. I’m supposed to start out by running a quarter mile, then increase that slowly. A quarter mile — that’s barely long enough to bother running! The doc’s mostly worried that I still have some soreness in the bones right above my ankles.
My foot pain has almost totally disappeared, thanks to my orthotics:

Look just like a pair o’lungs, don’t they?
From the bottom you can see how they’re molded to my feet:

That shaping lets them support my foot where it needs it most, at the arch. They’re also a bit bucket-shaped:

They cup my heel and the area above my arch, preventing my heel from pronating along with my arch. Let me tell you, these things are like a continuous foot massage! I go to bed each night wishing I could wear my shoes longer. I’m a fan and a convert.
What I’m not a fan of is how long I had to wait to see the doctor to get them. My podiatrist, Dr. Kwong, was almost an hour late for our appointment; fortunately I was coming there from physical therapy, so we were able to devise another 45 minutes of exercise and I was spared the waiting room. I was not so fortunate for my follow-up appointment for my shin splints with Dr. Glousman. He was running more than two hours behind, and, as much as I do have fun games installed on my cell phone, I was reduced to reading Jet magazine in his waiting room (not that there’s anything wrong with Jet, just, even were I black, the demographic would still be about 30 years older than me).
I guess the lesson I learned from this is to always call ahead before you leave for a doctor’s appointment to make sure your doc is running on schedule (although I wonder if they would’ve admitted how far behind he was).
But how do you get two whole hours behind and not take 15 minutes to consider what you should do about the rest of your appointments that day? I would assume that the scheduling person would say something once you got kinda out of control, say at 45 minutes behind. Then it would be time to start trying to reschedule some appointments so that you could make others. I know I saw other people walking out because Glousman was so late, and I know that I would certainly think twice before seeing him in the future — I think I got good care, I just don’t know what standard of care would be worth two hours of my life, given that it was a followup appointment for a non-serious problem that, heck, I could feel had been cured.
So, in sum:

• I love the physical therapists at Kerlan-Jobe
• I love Dr. Fleckner, their orthotics guy, because he makes my feets feel gooood
• I’m not so much a fan of their regular docs, because you can sure have to wait to see them. But when you do see them, they know what they’re doing and take good care of you

Up until recently, I was getting physical therapy for shin splints and for plantar fasciitis. The treatments went well, the shin splints are almost gone and the pain from the plantar fasciitis is greatly reduced. I’m almost ready to start running 2-4 miles/day again!
I’ve got my physical therapy at Kerlan-Jobe in Westchester, near LAX. They have a competent and knowledgable (if somewhat overworked) staff, and great bedside manner.
The facility is pretty dee-luxe, what with all the fancy equipment:

And even a pool! Some days I wish i could be in that pool. But the only people who get to be there are so badly injured they need the support of water to be able to move.

I don’t get to use much of that, though, mostly they set me down on a treatment table and commit various unspeakable acts upon my person:

Tools of my mistreatment include:

Yes, with these fiendish implements, they make me carry out all sorts of sinister shiftings, stirrings and agitations, all with the stated goal of fixing my infirmities. Sometimes I suspect that some exercises are just designed to amuse the therapists — although, in all honesty, this round of physical therapy is much easier than what I had to go through for my badly sprained ankle last year. Most of these evolutions are designed to increase the flexibility of my lower legs. It’s a sad story, really, because running actually makes you less flexible, so I’m pretty tight from the thigh down. If ya know what I mean.
I use that rope to try to pull my leg towards me and stretch my hamstring. Frankly, with as small a stretch as I get, I can hardly believe that I can walk:

Much more fun is rolling the metal tube with my foot. It’s like a little foot massage! Breaks up the scarring and swelling in my arch.

Of course, my favorite part is the real massage:

Then I get to run on this extra-deluxe treadmill. Apparently, it cost $100,000! And it feels like it too — as good as the springiest, softest track I’ve ever been on.

The treadmill

Look how comfy that track looks!

And all these controls!
But after the run comes the ice!

Some people love ice, some people hate it. I hate it for the first couple of minutes, then I tolerate it ’cause it makes me feel better — but I don’t get the soothing feeling that others get. It could be worse, though, last time I got physical therapy I had “The Bucket”

A trash can filled with ice — ouchie!
Well, supposedly I’m cured, and I’ll have the appointment to prove that to the doc tomorrow. Updates as events warrant.

When I was but a wee bairn, I loved to read books because of the colors on the pages. Not the pictures, but the words. Different words had different pastel colors, and the pages were filled with disorganized rainbows.
I remember mentioning this in fourth grade to some friends, and they looked at me like I was crazy. Which I guess I was, since I apparently suffered from synesthesia, a condition in which people have difficulty distinguishing between various sensory inputs. Poor little me saw words as colors. But I never got confused — although I was sometimes distracted; words and colors were distinct in my head.
Anyway, convinced that what I saw was wrong, and being a geeky boy who wanted to fit in, I started to ignore the colors. They went away — whether because of and now the pages of books are just one color.
A few years ago I found out a co-worker was familiar with the phenomenon, and had a good friend who still was synesthetic. That’s when I learned I wasn’t some kind of freak, and started to really miss the colors.
I think being synesthetic at a young age affected how I read. While colors are gone, I still see pages as filled with different densities of letters — something that’s similar, but not identical, to the weight of letters in areas of that page. I don’t start at the beginning of a sentence; instead, my eye falls to a comfortable, soft place in a paragraph, maybe next to a corner, and I move backwards from there, then forwards the rest of the way, sometimes skipping if there’s a line in the text that draws my eye. It sounds pretty awful, but I actually read very quickly and with excellent comprehension.
I see things that other people don’t. But I’m not crazy! Not crazy at all!

Yea, verily, for I have been accursed by the Lord, and he hath burthen’d me with feet that are in the shape of a Z, or so sayeth the expensive orthopedists at the Kerlan-Jobe clinic near LAX. And the Lord did say, your feet shall poorly absorb the stresses of their frequent impacts with the ground, and instead your shins will be overstressed, and you shall have shinsplints, and, should you not get them treated promptly, I shall rain down upon you a plague of stress fractures. And even whenst thine feet do bend and flex to support your weight as you jog, they will flex inefficiently and the plantar fascia become pulled and inflamed. And yea so your arches shall hurt every day, but most of all first thing in the morning.

And it only took, what, 600 hours to find this out?

See, the problem with going to a clinic that’s world-famous for working on top athletes is that you wait quite some time to see your doctor. And, at Kerlan-Jobe, you’re likely to find that half the world is there at any one time.

But at least they have a TV in the waiting room, so The People’s Court could keep me company.

The big plus was that, unlike the Recognizable Sports Stars I was there with, I’m not badly broken.

Sadly, I didn’t take any pictures of the doc manipulating my feet in odd and painful ways. “Tell me when it hurts,” he says as he digs his thumbs into the fleshy part of my arch. Well, good morning to you too!
The prescription: physical therapy and orthotics. I kind of look forward to the orthotics ’cause the doctor there is a slightly batty guy from Utah. He told me how he once tried really hard to run, because he thought all runners had such a good attitude and he thought that, maybe if he ran, he’d get a good attitude too. He tried so hard he actually ran three times in this one week. But he didn’t feel good so he gave up.
At least he didn’t accuse me of having an attitude problem! Although apparently my ankle tendons are so inflexible that he thought I was holding my feet rigid as he cast them for the mould for the orthotics. I have no idea what that says about me. It can’t be good.