“Pain”

c. 2017 Rod Ice

All rights reserved

(3-17)

Bad knees run in the Ice family.

Or should I say, they fail to do so, properly. After the age of 40, mobility issues seem to be quite common in my brood. One of the most persistent childhood memories I possess is that of my father, a stout fellow gifted with great strength and endurance, complaining that his knees were uncooperative. This affliction did not keep him from being active as an amateur carpenter, household plumber and trained mechanic. (Not to mention scholar and philosopher.) Indeed, I once remember him literally running across the road to rescue my baby brother, who had decided to ride his toy locomotive into traffic while neighbors were busy with conversation. Yet for him, the protest of joint pain was ever-present.

Typical for a young kid, it never occurred to me that genetics would someday dictate that I participate in this arthritic right of passage. I was unaffected and somewhat amused. The notion of pain as a daily companion had not yet arrived.

Working in the retail industry, I developed both supervisory and acrobatic skills. While it was sometimes necessary to modify a labor schedule, read a profit & loss statement or ponder the technical details of an ordering system, I also walked on my knees. On a concrete floor. To speed up the task of straightening and stocking lower shelf items. One old Italian fellow on our team cautioned that I would be sorry for my careless self-abuse. I snickered as he used a gardener’s knee pad during regular work shifts.

After the age of 40, I began to notice that my legs had gone creaky. Just an echo of discomfort a first. My right knee felt “loose.” I kept moving anyway. But eventually it became more difficult to kneel and return to a standing position. I reckoned weight loss and conditioning would take care of this without any medical attention.

After a soccer game where the coach asked all the dads to play against the kids and I was on the field with my stepdaughter, things began to change. His idea was to give his young athletes a better idea of the “game tempo” he desired. But I needed a Velcro brace for a couple of weeks, afterward. Running around like David Beckham exposed my weakness.

Finally, during a workday spent helping customers at CVS, my knee gave out. It literally sounded like the strike of a rubber mallet. The organic noise was loud enough to surprise a woman nearby. I had to hang on counter tops and displays around the store to finish my shift. My diagnosis was a torn meniscus and a degenerated kneecap. The orthopedist I consulted said “I can tell you’ve been on hard floors for a long time.” When I related the tale of walking on my knees, he shook his head with disbelief. But laughed out loud.

My wife observed that I looked like Doctor Gregory House walking with a cane borrowed from my sister. I reckoned there were worse images to project. I could live with that sort of appearance.

Our thought was that surgery would provide an end to this condition. And it did. Temporarily. The doctor offered a prophetic bit of advice during our last visit. “Do not go back into that business or you’ll be seeing me again.” Of course, I ignored him in favor of a manager’s paycheck. In a few months I had returned to the routine. Verbal combat, on-the-fly negotiations with customers and employees, combined with physical tension. The yield of a weekly income was simply one that I could not ignore. Writing for a living did not bring the financial rewards that I needed to support a family.

My left knee was slowly deteriorating from having to carry the other, but it took years to realize my fate. I fell on the ice moving a cardboard bale and kept going. I chased a shoplifter and nearly ended up on the hood of a moving car. I broke a lawn chair and ended up on the rocks during a bonfire in the neighborhood. I tripped stacking off a pallet of water cases at work. Finally, I broke my right ankle in the neighbor’s driveway and defied my doctor’s orders, to make it through the holiday season of 2014 still employed. I wore a fracture boot for eight weeks and kept moving forward.

And then one morning, I could barely walk from this end of the house to the other.

From a closet, I pulled out an “Invacare” cane from a past visit to the Salvation Army store in Meadville, Pennsylvania. It was metal and fully adjustable. Yet not by any means stylish. I felt embarrassed to need this crutch. My guess was that a few days of using this tool would let my body heal. In the past that had been true. Friends on the job cracked jokes about my age. Quietly, I pondered that my father had been using two canes to aid his mobility for several years.

I tried and tried again to shed the cane. Each time the need for support had me returning to my gray, metal pole. Now, having reached mid-50’s, I came to a stunning conclusion.

I was truly my father’s son.

A website on the Internet called “Fashionable Canes & Walking Sticks” carried the Dr. House cane that I remembered best, one adorned with flames like a vintage roadster. Because I was working in Geneva, where summer tourists made the atmosphere like an endless Rock concert, I chose this one as my own.

By doing so, I immediately acquired the new nickname of “Hot Rod.” It seemed to help with customers who were somewhat concerned to see a store manager needing such a prop.

Added to my exhausted knees was a new disability – my left hip ached for help. I avoided much serious medical attention in favor of maintaining a demanding work schedule. Holidays, weekends, nights, days off, vacations… I had learned the discipline well from my sire. “Take care of work and everything else will take care of itself.” In a sense, being on duty was my coping mechanism. Life seemed easier to contemplate when I remained too busy for serious introspection. I hurt on a good day. Hurt with medications, more without. But always less if I was in motion. Having the focus of a purpose in mind lessened my woe.

Pain had become my “co-pilot.”

Almost predictably, the new year brought this reckless ride to an end. With hindsight, it all made sense. I could imagine my father nodding wisely, on the other end of the telephone as he heard my confession of surrender.

“I stepped down this week. Could not do it anymore.”

The ride had ended. Yet an adventure of a different sort was only beginning. Suddenly, I was counting my steps down from the front porch. Counting the number of times I had to get up from my living room chair. Counting trips to the trash can in the driveway. Counting the number of hours I could sleep before my hip won out with agony. (About two.) Carrying a cellphone when walking my Black Lab, in case I ended up in the yard or the street.

My friend Janis found humor in this change. “People are very adaptable,” she said. Her simple logic was bulletproof. I had become the future me, the “self” of today.

Welcome, Dad. Welcome, Doctor House.

Comments or questions about “Words on the Loose” may be sent to: icewritesforyou@gmail.com.

This column is publised weekly in the Geauga Independent.