>> How The Wheels All Came Off At Once...

It's nearly antique now, and seemingly overnight it has developed a series of glitches and things in need of repair.
It ran like a Swiss watch for generations, purring along and doing all the right things at the right times, despite a few bumps in the road. Like any well-maintained object, it broke a few times and it was often hard to start in the morning, but it would give clear signs of stress if I pushed it too hard, warning me of trouble ahead.
The headlights have faded and there are a few nasty spots on the body, but overall it still looks good and is dependable and ready to go on a moments notice, even when attention is deferred and the machine was grossly overused, like pouring too much Beck's into it at once and expecting a clear head the next morning....

That's why it seemed so strange when things started to go wrong with my aging machine, when the wheels all of a sudden came loose and went rolling down the road.

I have NEVER seen a doctor regularly (excepting, of course, my Dad, who was a surgeon. I saw him nearly everyday for YEARS ), I have NEVER been on a regimen of drugs--save for the odd aspirin--and up until last month, "MRI" could have been some obscure government agency as far as I knew--or cared.
Then, like someone had secretly opened the Door to Hell, maladies that I had no prior experience with shed their ghostly sheets and became corporeal, manifesting their nastiness all over me as they jammed the Doorway for their turn at me.

Since July, my health, once a source of hubristic pride, has gone to the Dark Side. The machine has been to the Body Shops a fair number of times.

First it was a little pinpoint of a cancer, poised on the north slope of the left ear. Then it segued into a colonoscopy which involved anesthesia and a strange instrument that went Where NO Man Has Gone Before--it did find several benign polyps which led to days of unneeded anxiety before they were all diagnosed as not being a problem. The third trip to the repair shop was due to a "frozen shoulder", a ghost of an old sports injury, a nearly-forgotten minute of pain and suffering acquired in the late 80s that suddenly appeared and produced great pain and suffering once more. The dreaded Rotator Cuff meltdown...

Now it's back to the shop for yet another cutting operation, this time a laproscopy, a tiny camera inserted into the shoulder to gain a look-see at the current problem AND to determine if even MORE surgery is required.

It has been 3 months of X-rays and anesthesia, MRIs and narcotic drugs--and a succession of physicians and physical therapists whose names and numbers I have had to write down on a cardboard list, alongside the times and contraindications required by my cocktail of 4 (count 'em) drugs. The paperwork is staggering, but so far my insurance has paid for everything but around $200 of co-pays, mostly for the drugs. The MRI alone was $2500!

Wow. ALL of this in the last 3 months--after having around 750 months of literally nothing at all go wrong!!!