Recently, my wonderful wife and I have
been experiencing the joy of trying to teach teenagers to read
instructions that accompany new things. Some things are complicated
to operate, and kids tend to ignore the instructions and just begin
messing with the 'thing' until they either break it, or it works.
With Ipads and the like, it's not a problem. These things work
intuitively. With other things, like watches, they are not
intuitive, but more like a Rubic's Cube that tells time. My bride
was somewhat more frustrated than me, and so I felt obliged to remind
her how I learned to read the instructions.
When I was 50 years old, I helped coach
Catfish's soccer team, The Storm. The Storm was made up of about 15,
10 year old boys who had an abundance of energy and enthusiasm and an
utter absence of game sense and skill. As boys will do, they played
hard, and had a hell of a good time as they slowly began to
understand the game of soccer, and build the skills necessary.
As the season progressed, certain kids
started to emerge as distinct skill sets. One kid, we called him
Bigfoot, was an amazing athlete who slowly matured into and
outstanding soccer player. The two smallest kids on the team were
the back defenders, and we called them the 'Hornets' because they
just swarmed to the ball and became the best back defenders in the
league. We were lucky in that we had two goal keepers, and a set of
hispanic kids who were the finest forwards in the league. The Storm
became an awesome team. The other coaches and I often ran with them
as the scrimmaged and acted as opposing players. It was an amazing
experience running with 10 year old boys as they passed the ball
around and behind wheezing, sweating middle-aged men.
One day at practice, we were
scrimmaging, and the kids were really doing well. They burned one
coach after another with quick passes, and juke moves. As the oldest
coach, and the fattest, and the only one who had never played soccer,
the little rats came to me frequently because I was the easiest to
burn. Even at 50, competitive juices still flow. A little rat
bastard with the ball broke toward me. I could see he thought he was
going to put on over on me. I knew what he was gonna do. He was
gonna toe the ball, spin it, jump over it and then whack it with his
other foot and pass it to another little bastard with was trailing
him. “Not this time”, I thought. He came closer. I broke down
like a linebacker meeting Barry Sanders would. Head up, feet spread
apart, knees bent, weight over the balls of my feet, arms spread
wide. He came even closer, keeping the ball close to his feet,
looking me in the eye. “I've got you you little bastard!”, I
thought.
I was wrong. A hint of a head fake had
me lurching to the left as Speedy Gonzolas burnt me to the right. I
spun around and drove off my right leg to try to recover, and I heard
what sounded like a gun shot, and suddenly blinding pain ignited in
my right knee. I hit the ground, clutching my knee. I did my best
to refrain from cussing, and for the most part was successful. The
whole team gathered around and stood silently as I rolled in the
dust. Finally Bigfoot spoke, “I think he's having a heart attack.”
What does this have to do with reading
instructions, you must be thinking. Here's the scoop. I blew my
ACL, tore my meniscus, and broke my tibia...brain bending, mind
numbing, soul searing pain. Pain that you don't forget. Not knowing
the tibia was split for a week was unfortunate because if you don't
know your leg is broken, you might be temped to just suck it up and
carry your 14 year old Labrador Retriever (Buckwheat) who has become
deathly ill out to the car to take him to the Vet where you find out
that you have to put Buckwheat down. Yeah. Carrying a 95 lbs dog
out to the car on a wiggly, broken leg is painful. Putting the dog
down is worse.
So, I had to have my ACL rebuilt. They
did this 'orthoscopically'. The big advantage to this is that they
only have to make three little holes, and one incision to accomplish
the reconstruction. It is an amazing procedure. They take the
center 1/3 of your petalar tendon, and use it to create a new ACL.
The anesthesiologist knocks you out. The OrthoMagician does his
stuff, and voila, a new knee.
The fog of anesthesia lifts slowly. I
woke expecting the worst, but hey....no pain. My knee is in a huge brace,
and wrapped up in bandages. The doc is explaining things to me, but
I'm not listening much. I still have the foggy brain, but Landi is
listening to every word. So we go home, and with crutches and
Landi's assistance, I make it up the stairs to our bedroom, and go to
bed. I wondered how hard it was going to be to get down the stairs
to the spare bedroom tomorrow morning so I could use the passive
motion device which would bend my knee 5 degrees for the prescribed 6
hours.
I awoke to a new hell. The pain
medication from surgery had worn off and it felt like rabid gophers had eaten away my knee. Remember the center 1/3 of the
petelar tendon, well, that sucker hurts. Sunlight from the skylight
falling on my knee burned like fire. Landi, my angle of mercy,
appeared with percocets, and insisted that I come down stairs and
begin the passive motion therapy.
Reluctantly, I locked the hinges on
each side of my knee brace. This was to pervent my knee from moving,
which the doctor had said would be incredibly painful for a time,
while I used my crutches to get down the stairs. I swung my leg off
the bed to begin getting out of bed, and the cutting pain from the
petalar tendon took my breath away. I asked Landi for another
percocet because obviously the last one was not working. She called
me a 'wimp', and said “Just get up and go down the stairs. The
doctor said you have to.” Slowly, and with incredibly searing
pain, I managed to get up and support myself on my good leg, and the
crutches while my repaired leg dangled. Merely touching the floor
with a toe made my stomach queazy. The pain was so strong and
crippling that I was light headed as I approached the stairs. Each
step down the stairs was a study in focused determination not to pass
out because I knew for sure I did not want to fall down the stairs.
Finally, after an eternity, I made it to the guest bed room where the
passive motion device was located.
The bed in the guest room was a tall,
brass bed with the passive motion device set up on it. I had to sit
on the bed, swing my leg up on the bed, then position my leg in the
passive motion device. I attempted to lift my leg, but the pain was
searing. Landi commented that 'You don't look good.', and offered to
help. Just her touching my leg took my breath away. Finally after
10 minutes of trying to find a way to lift my leg up onto the bed, I
had to just grit my teeth, grasp my leg by my big toe and lift it on
to the bed. I almost fainted, but I got it done. I was sweating,
but I only had to get my leg into the passive motion device and then
I would be done. I took a deep breath, and worked my leg into the
device and secured the velcro straps that locked my leg in the
device. I unlocked the joints on the knee brace so the knee would be
able to bend.
Again, you must be wondering, so what's
up with reading the instructions. You're thinking something terrible
is going to happen with the passive motion device. Yeah, it was
painful, but it worked like it was supposed to....once I unlocked the
hinges.
If I had read the instructions on the
knee brace, I would have known the 'lock' position from the
'unlocked' position. What I thought was 'locked' was actually
“unlocked”. My whole painful and torturous journey from upstairs
to the guest bedroom bed had been made with the brace in the unlocked
position.
The other set of instructions that you should read is the ones that come with the percocets. Suffice it to say that 4 days after surgery, I gave birth to a piece of firewood.
That is how I learned to read the
instructions.
