Popeye’s Elbow, Flashers, Babies, Jumanji2 and the Flu

Dr. Google says I have Popeye’s Elbow otherwise known as Olecranon Bursitis. Leave it to me to get something weird. What is it? It’s a golf ball sized lump at the tip of my elbow. Apparently there’s a body part there called a ‘bursa’ which is a cushion in between the bone and the skin that gets inflamed and fills up with fluid that sometimes gets infected and needs to be drained. Fortunately most of the time they go away on their own in 3 to 4 weeks with a little rest and ibuprofen and by using alternating ice and heat pads. The weird part is I could also have tennis elbow because before I noticed the Popeye’s ball of warm flesh at my elbow I’ve also been experience mild pain in my forearm. I haven’t played tennis since I was fourteen and batting a ball back and forth in the middle of the street with my best friend when a guy stopped his car by each of us to “ask for directions.” He was totally naked from the waist down.

Being naïve teenagers who giggled over anything remotely funny we nearly split our sides out laughing as we ran into the house to tell my mother. When we finally got the story out Mom called the police. Ohmygod, that poor, young Officer who came out to the house. We were still laughing and his questions just added to our amusement. Of course, we didn’t remember any other details but his penis staring up us. Did you get a license number? What kind of car was he driving? How old do you think he was? What color was his shirt? Was he wearing shoes? Wearing shoes? I doubt we’ve have noticed if he didn’t have any feet to put them on. Yadda, yadda, yadda. What I remember most from that interview is my mother giving us a stern directive to get a hold of ourselves and stop laughing. But how was that even possible when the policeman had to explain what he meant by ‘erect’ or ‘flaccid’. Like I said, we were naïve kids and we didn’t know what the guy was doing. But he definitely didn’t have both hands on the steering wheel. And they say back in the ‘50s everyone lived in Mayberry where things like that didn’t happen.

Speaking of sweet innocence …I got a good dose of babies on Sunday. One of my nine great-great nieces and nephews (all under two and a half) was having a first birthday party. It’s amazing to see their little personalities forming already. One boy was on the selfish side wanting to take toys away from the others, one would try to take them back, but another would have a look on his little face that said, “What the heck just happened?” And when a boy was quietly pilferaging all the Mardi gras necklaces out of the other kids’ party swag bags his great aunt snagged him and said, “Aren’t those pretty! Let’s share the pink and purple ones with the girls and share the red and green ones with the other boys.” When one boy slammed a toy frying pan down on the top of another child’s head and the crying started, the pan swinger said, “Sorry” and hugged his victim as per his mother's directions. I saw some wonderful parenting going on, always watching, always stepping in with teachable moments.

It’s been a good week for socializing. The day after the party I was sitting in the Guy Land Cafeteria with two of my Gathering Girls pals and after a long lunch two of us went to see the movie Jumanji2. Neither one of us had a clue what it was about other than what we could pull up on our phones which was, “Four teenagers are sucked into a magical video game and the only way they can escape is to work together to finish the game.” It was starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan and we laughed from beginning to end. We didn’t expected that. In fact before going in we joked about being too old to understand what was going on since neither of us was into video games.

I wrote the above paragraphs when I got home from the movie theater. Two hours later the flu hit. And the next fourteen hours I spent alternating between projectile vomiting and projectile diarrhea and sometimes doing both at the same time. At one point in the night I woke up to find myself on the bathroom floor and I had no idea how I got there. The worst seems to be over but all I did on Tuesdays is sleep, sip Gatorade and take the flu meds I, thankfully, had stocked up on last fall. I did manage to get a shower and do a load of laundry but some clothing I just threw out. My goal for today is to eat something and hope it stays inside my body but from what I've read I'm progressing on the flu timeline right on schedule. I can expect to be weak and tired until the weekend. This is a terrible strain of flu! ©