here goes nothing

yesterday i went in to see the doc for one last look at my knee. he took a few x-rays, stood over me looking incredibly handsome, and told me the good news: i don't need an osteotomy at all -- just the meniscal transplant. apparently one of the unforeseen benefits of having had to wait a year for the tissue was that he got to examine how my knee acts over time -- he saw the scans last year and he saw them this year and he determined that in the end it won't be necessary to inflict The Most Painful Surgery in the History of Mankind upon me. no sawing of bone! no "excavating" of deeply embedded old screws from previous surgeries! no excrutiating "re-alignment" of my joint as if it were a rubber tire!

oh, i still get to have surgery today--in about 4 hours--don't get me wrong. but at least i get to have the super-cool (yet still quite major) surgery: dead man's knee. i haven't found much out about my donor yet, but it appears he was only 23. very, very sad. i will be sure to enjoy my life a little bit more for him from here on out. i hope his knee liked whiskey.

anyway, today i got up early in order to spend some time with my daughter: this will, after all, be the last time for 2 months that i'll be able to carry her around, the last time i'll be able to walk with her in my arms, the last time ... i'll have to take the morning shift for two glorious pain-medication-filled months! i took her downstairs and, damn it if she didn't try her best to make sure i'd never want to hang out with her again.

first she wanted to hear her raffi CD, which she listens to about 284 times a day. i said no because it was early and we'd wake up her mommy ... and her excellent grandparents who are staying with us and helping us remodel the kitchen. so we played with her choo-choo trains until she decided she was hungry. i asked her what she wanted to eat as if i didn't know her answer would be yogurt ... as if she has wanted to eat anything other than yogurt for the past year. so we went to the fridge and i reached for a yogurt. this elicited a howl. NOOOO! ok, fine. wrong yogurt, i guess. i reached for another yogurt. NOOOO! NO YOGURT! APPLE SAUCE! so like a dupe i reached for the apple sauce, to which she replied NOOOO! NO! APPLE SAUCE! YOGURT! (which, by the way, she pronounces: OG) so the next 10 minutes were spent finding the magic yogurt that she would deign to eat. naturally it was the first yogurt i had proffered.

then we sat at the table. she told me where she wanted me to sit, so i sat there. then she told me she wanted the cat to sit at the table. i had to explain that the table is for people and the cats hang out on the floor. so she countered strategically: she demanded to eat her yogurt on the floor. i had to explain that people eat at the table, not on the floor. we had reached a crossroads. she refused to eat anything other than yogurt ... and now she refused to eat it anywhere but on the floor. i stood firm ... for about a nanosecond. i thought to myself: did i really care if she ate yogurt on the floor on my last day of walking for 2 months? so we sat on the floor.

after yogurt, which she didn't finish, she again wanted to hear raffi. when i said no raffi, she wanted to watch a DVD. damn. fine, raffi it is. i put raffi on the stereo, which was apparently the wrong move. she demanded that raffi be played on our boombox. i explained to her that the stereo was just as good, better even. she freaked out until i had to put raffi on the boombox, which required digging around behind the stereo for the chord (because we lost the boombox chord in the move), failing to find where it was plugged in, falling down and bumping my chin on the corner of the table the stereo sits on.

finally, after minor struggles with the chord, i managed to play her raffi CD on the requested boombox. she smiled. then she said "more raffi? more raffi?" and i had no idea how to counter that: raffi was playing. how could she want more? she walked up to the boombox and cranked the volume to 12. ahh, more raffi indeed. i turned it down so as not to wake up everyone in brooklyn. she countered by screaming even louder than the music had been.

i am telling you, good people, i CANNOT WAIT for the sweet oblivion of surgery today. a nice respite, 'twill be.

posting may be light for a little while. godspeed!