I told you a couple of weeks ago, that I had to visit a doctor recently and had some observations about the clocks in their office. They all had different times on them, and I was worried that if they couldn't keep the clocks running properly, my chances of survival seemed slim.  (I'll get back to this shortly.)
I have a ditch that runs in front of my little piece of God's land that He lets get very wild from time to time. So, being the nice guy that I claim I am, I go out to my shed, service my weedeater and proceed to clean up the wild mess. This ditch is a bane to me, it's washed out, goes in several directions, it’s filled with rock and volunteer trees, and it's washing out a part of the road that runs by my house next to my driveway (or is it "park" way?). I think I need to get in touch with the county road dept. about this.  Well anyway, I spent about thirty minutes cleaning out the ditch, standing in every concieveable position the human body can possibly get into, and a few I didn't know I could get into. Ouch! That leads me back to paragraph 1; the doctors office!
I had to return to the "doctors’ office", but only because I could barely walk. Which if you don't know, makes it hard to go anywhere and do much of anything, and sleep had become a thing of the past. I've never been one to go to a doctor for much of anything. Mother Nature seems to know best how to repair most of everything that’s ever happened to me, except a few broken bones, and even a couple of those times I just set them myself and went about my business, although I went about it a little more tenderly and a lot more carefully. So, I waited a few days thinking that, the pain in my back, hip ,leg and ankle, would clear up with a little faith and some time.
Boy, was I in for a surprise. There was no position I could llie in  that would not be painful, so I didn't sleep for several nights. I discovered that no sleep, and a lot of pain will tend to make a person irritable, and I was irritated at that ditch. Grudgingly, after my wife told me I better get to the doctor or she will be calling the morgue to say I beat myself to death. [she was going to do it and blame it on me] I couldn't blame her, I was a useless lump.
So to the doctor I went! This time,  he took x-rays, I almost wish he hadn't; shades of Japan went through my mind when he showed me the pictures, not the recent Japan disaster, the one that spurned Godzilla. Besides showing me that I had a pinched sciatic nerve, He showed me that my spinal column has bone spurs that stick out and up like the spine on the famous Godzilla, and to make matters worse, he told and showed me the extent of the arthritis that I already knew I had. That 30-plus years of truck driving wreaked havoc on me internally. Oh well. life goes on and the ditch is still out there defying me again after all this rain.
The doctor set me up on a regimen of medication that shrinks the swelling of the disc that is pinching the nerve and a medication the dulls the pain in the nerve itself. I still haven't had a full night’s sleep, but it's not far off. Thank heaven for some drugs.
Now, I admit that some drugs are necessary, but if you watch television, especially the commericials, you might want to rethink how many drugs you take. I saw two ads,  one after the other last week (while I was being a lump). The first was about a medication that was supposed to work a miracle for you, the next ad was from a law firm that was trying to get a class action against the same drug that was maiming and killing. I even saw an ad for a drug I considered once for the arthritis; the side effects were worse than the trouble I was having from the arthritis. This is not a spiel about just saying NO to drugs. I guess this is a request that you say YES to who you really are and who you really want to be. Know what you're taking and why you're taking it. If you're taking a drug to get away from reality, do it somewhere else. we don't need to be responsible for someone that won't be responsible  for themselves. Go to SanFrancisco; they love people like you.
I'm not fully healed yet, and the ditch knows it, but it also knows I'm coming back. I look out my front window and try to figure out how to cut the ditch back into submission, without hurting myself again. I think I'll try the county road dept first. I'm not being a chicken, but sometimes you just need to use a bigger hammer to get  things done. I'm not eager to spend thirty minutes cleaning a ditch , then spending three weeks recovering. I wonder if I can make an arrangement with Him to keep the ditch in perpetual winter?
By the way, when I went back to the doctors’ office, all the clocks I wrote about had new batteries and were all keeping the same time.  Maybe I'll make it after all!