Wednesday--Surgery and Death

Wow-- did that headline get your attention or what?! I had surgery on Wednesday to remove the screws from the bones in my ankle. Obviously, it went well because I'm typing this entry. I'll get to the death part in a second. The surgery was a simple one, a small incision, find the screw heads and back them out with a tool. I guess I concentrated on the word simple too much becuase I wasn't expecting the recovery to be this painful. I'm kind of a wuss by nature when it comes to pain. Maybe it's the holes left in the bones that are giving me fits. Anyway, yeah for good pain meds!! The good news is that I can start putting some weight on my foot as soon as I would like to. I'm feeling a little wussy about that, too, so we'll just take it slow. It's been 3 months so walking will take a bit of work. Here's a picture of the screws before and after they were taken out...and sterilized, of course! The metal plate that you see above the screws will stay forever, or until the resurrection, at least, said Dr. Stewart! Should be fun going through airport security from now on!



Now to Wednesday's death. My kids have been "pet crazy" for the past few weeks. The only pet we've had so far has been fish and as far as I'm concerned, that was a lot of work. Well, the kids have been getting an allowance and talking about saving their own money to buy a pet. (Thinking that I would be so much more happy about it if I didn't have to pay for the pet. Nice thought but, wrong!) Pearce talked nonstop about buying fish with his money. Nothing fancy, just a couple of inexpensive fish to put in a bowl that we already had. So Trevor took him to the pet store on Monday and he came home with 2 tiger barbs which he named Stripes and Fabio. He did a good job of taking care of them but called us while we were at the hospital with "an emergency" wanting to talk to me. Trevor explained that I couldn't talk because I was in surgery and Pearce said "But it's an emergency." Turns out the Stripes the fish died while we were at the hospital. He was pretty sad but it was okay becuase they had a nice funeral before flushing it down the toilet. We lost Fabio later that same day. He's not sure if he's going to try again with more fish. I guess he has learned a lesson about "money down the drain."

More to come: Parker wants to buy a leopard gecko