Kes: I Want To Have My Operation On TV

Folks, this is pretty serious today. I have been limping around for months now. And lately the pain level has increased past my tolerance threshold. Which, as you might well suspect, ain’t very high. Leon had me toughened up back when we were boys. Easy living has softened me a mite.

The pain is not like a tooth ache or kidney stone, mind you. If that was the case, I would already be over the surgery and running barefooted through fields of clover. Dancing down Garrison Avenue. Chasing wild animals around the Apalachicola National Forrest. Playing more golf than Scotty Scheffler. Entering every marathon and triathlon I can find….

The orthopedic doctor who is going to do the surgery asked how I injured my hip.

Well, the first time was when I fell off the balcony of Aunt Beatrice’s big house. One minute we were racing each other around the chairs she had up there, the next second I was flying through the air like I’d been shot out of a cannon. I strained my shoulder reaching back to try to grab the top railing, but the real damage was done when my right hip touched down first on the concrete front sidewalk below.

I only limped for a week or so. But there could have been some internal residual damage.

It was not my idea to tie a 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air hood upside down to the back of Mr. Luther Purvis’ old pickup. We were celebrating the January snow that got us out of school for a couple of days.

The doctor leaned in with a quizzical look on his face so I hastily continued. The hood, turned upside down with a rope tied through the front hole where the ornament would have been bolted on, made a great sled. A 20-foot rope would be plenty enough to pull you down the road and in and out of the ditches on either side.

Neither Leon nor Nicky Joe were old enough to drive. But Nick was Mr. Purvis’ favorite grandson. I don’t remember which one of them was behind the wheel when they suddenly turned off the Como Road into the Purvis driveway. The turn swung me way out wide and way below the gravel road leading up to the house.

For a split second I thought the side of the bridge just below the driveway would stop me. It did stop the makeshift sled. I flew under, or through, the rotting rails and crash-landed right hip first against the rocks below.

Mother took me to see Dr. Holmes, and luckily nothing was broken. That Dr. Holmes could see….

In 1959 I was catching in a Little League district game when this giant from Paris came barreling around third. He sounded like a freight train as I braced for contact and awaited the throw from Wiley Wilson.

I turned my left hip toward Godzilla to impede his progress long enough to catch the ball and almost apply the tag. He knocked me, ball, catcher’s mitt, and left hip through my right hip as the blow turned me inside out and sent me flying one part at a time into the distant backstop! After every grownup in the park had checked me over, I stayed in the game. But I kept the mask on so nobody could see the tears.

That hip was just getting better five years later when Leroy Seagraves put his helmet right on it and knocked me out of bounds in a high school football game in 1964. I limped the rest of the season.

The doctor was looking at my hip with a new respect before I even got down to the oft-told bull riding calamity at the rodeo near Georgiana, Alabama. I was in college. But, apparently, not learning much.

Some cowboy opened the gate and “my” 2000-pound bull jumped sideways into the metal chute immediately crushing my right hip. He then did a flying somersault with a half twist out into the arena, dumping me unceremoniously on…you guessed it, my crushed, broken, beat up, bleeding, and tangled right hip.

I gave the medical staff the short version of my one and only skiing adventure at Steamboat Springs. I was completely out of control the entire way down the mountain. I couldn’t stop and was too scared to fall down. I skied past two emergency safety stations and the ski lift where you get on at the bottom of the hill. I skied past an outdoor restaurant, one of the official ski rental places, a two-lane road, across a sidewalk, and instinctively turned my right hip at 38 miles per hour into the front fender of a Buick Skylark in the first row of the parking lot.

I figured one more blow to that thing wouldn’t make much difference….

The doctor wasn’t 100 per cent sure about allowing TV cameras in the OR to video his work, but he did go back and take a look at the x-rays again. And again.

Respectfully,
Kes
kesley45@aol.com