Tribulations in Quarantine

At the not so tender age of 73, I find myself becoming a sort of journalist. Not that my writings will ever be posted in a newspaper, or elsewhere, but because I feel the need to document many of the things that I encounter in life. To wit, the 2020 coronavirus quarantine in the USA. While my experiences may not be as dramatic nor as timeless as Anne Frank’s tribulations hiding from the Nazis in that attic, they are still tribulations and deserve documentation.

This particular tale begins in about the 8^th week of quarantine in early May, 2020. My grandson, Nick, had just bought a house in Springfield, Ohio and it fell to me to purchase and deliver an aluminum extension ladder to his new address. Since Nick had my Toyota pickup truck, I had to use my Toyota FJ Cruiser SUV to accomplish the mission. 

Anticipating some difficulty getting the ladder into the FJ, I decided to empty out the rear of the vehicle in preparation. The principal object that required removal was my 2-ball bowling bag.

So, on that Tuesday morning, I went out the front door with my car keys to accomplish the task. I was wearing shorts and my Crocs (yes, with socks), and it was spitting light rain.

I opened the rear door of the SUV and dragged the roughly 40-pound ball bag out and commenced to lugging it, in my left hand, to the front door of the house.

Entering my house means, not only getting into the house through the storm door, but keeping the cat and/or dog from exiting the house. This requires a quick observation as to which, if either, is behind the storm door. I made this requisite observation and assured myself that neither animal was waiting for me to open the storm door, so he could make a mad dash for freedom between my legs.

At this point a couple of things happened. Somehow, I lost my balance in my Crocs, and slipped out of both shoes on the rain-damp porch. At this precise moment, the 40-pound bowling bag in my left hand began pulling my off-balance body toward the edge of the front porch. I don’t recall the next event – I must have dropped the bowling bag – but I recall the event after that. I fell off my front porch – about 8 inches tall – and landed with a great THUD! on the cement sidewalk in front of my house. I landed on my right side, right shoulder, right hip, elbow and acres of my right-side torso. I was aware that the back of my head lightly tapped the concrete.

I laid there moaning for a few seconds – taking inventory of my poor old body – and decided I had not  injured my head or neck, and got up, completed my errand with the bowling bag by carrying it into the house.

Shaken, I explained to my wife what had happened, and she inspected me for injury. No blood, no abrasions.  No bones jutting out. No big lumps on my head.  No loss of consciousness. No obvious bruises but I expected those to show up soon.

Overall, we pronounced me lucky to have survived my fall with no obvious injuries. I downed a couple of Ibuprofen in anticipation of pain, and continued on with my day.

I did some physical labor the rest of that day, buying and hauling the extension ladder to my grandson’s house. The next day I began construction of a display stand for my daughter’s artwork, working in my basement shop.

My injury was barely noticeable during those two days of activity. However, on the afternoon of the third day, Thursday, I was napping on the couch in my living room. When I tried to get up. I became twisted in my blanket and somehow initiated a muscle spasm in my right side. It was intense. I can describe the pain – it was if a major league baseball home run hitter had teed off on the right side of my back and was trying to hit it out of the park!

I could move, and the pain would retreat. But if I rotated my torso even slightly in the wrong direction, it came back. Every time the spasm struck me, I would yell. I couldn’t stop myself.

I won’t say I actually screamed, my noise was manlier than that. But I think I screamed within my ability to scream. And I did so every time the spasm hit.

I immediately rooted though the medicine chest and found some Percocets left over from my wife’s recent shoulder replacement. These didn’t do much to minimize the pain, but they did make me sleepy.

I then wrote a note to my family doctor, described the situation, and solicited some muscle relaxers. He obliged with a script and gave me a treatment plan: heat, 20-minutes of ice at night, Percosets (3 per day), muscle relaxer (2 per day). Keep moving and stretch the spasming muscles.

So that was my regimen until Saturday. The pain was slowly subsiding and I was able to creep around the house with a cane. Getting into or out of a chair was a major challenge. The same for getting into and out of bed, or trying to turn over in bed. Each movement was accompanied by my manly screams of pain. I didn't drive, and I didn't walk my dog - who was very understanding under the circumstances. 

My wife noted that I must be getting better since my scream-per-hour rate had substantially decreased.

On Saturday, I became aware that I had not had a bowel movement for several days. So I commenced to dose myself with Dulcolax and Metamucil. And stopped eating. I went to the bathroom, feeling the need to go, a half-dozen times on Saturday. Unsuccessfully until the end, when I finally had a “break through.”

The process was so difficult and prolonged because I couldn't push. Pushing would exacerbate the spasm pain in my back.

Sometime during the torment of Saturday I beseeched my wife to go to the drug store and get me some suppositories. I felt such an errand was well within the bounds of her marriage vows. She didn’t agree and called me names.

The constipation was caused by the Percosets. So I promptly took the pain pill off my list. It hadn’t eased the pain much anyway. I decided whatever good the opioid did, the constipation far outweighed any benefit. From here on, I’ll stick with just the muscle relaxer.

I rode in a car Sunday for the first time since the spasms began. I rode with my wife to the Taco Bell drive-thru in Fairborn, to add some variety to our quarantine menu. Coming home, I was hungry and fished out a soft Taco Supreme from the paper bag and commenced to eat it in the car.

My wife decelerated and changed lanes at a traffic light, and at that point I sneezed, forcing my body to endure a spasm. I screamed and inadvertently squeezed my soft taco, the mushy insides of which extruded themselves out the end of the roll-up onto my blue shirt.

The best policy would have been to go to an ER and have an x-ray to see if I had cracked a rib. In hindsight, I think I probably did crack a rib, or perhaps tear an intercostal muscle. I would have had to spend a whole day in an ER, probably, exposing myself and my wife to COVID-19, just to get a diagnosis that would not have made any difference anyway. They could only see a muscle tear on an MRI, so x-rays alone would not have been enough.

I know that there is no real treatment for a cracked rib, nor a minor muscle tear.  They would have sent me home, hours later, with the same heat, ice, pain pill, muscle relaxant self-treatment anyway. They would have billed my insurance $1600 or more for all that.

When you’re young, you have confidence that the doctors can “fix it.” When you’re old, you’ve learned about the things they can’t fix.

Shawn Bucy