I had my own dress rehearsal for the virus quarantine after the Events I Can No Longer Talk About But Always Do (EICNLTABAD). Of course, I did not know it was a dress rehearsal for this at that time. At the time, it just frustrated me because everyday seemed the same, and I didn’t seem to improve from day to day.
Doctors at University of Cincinnati Hospital allowed me to come home to rehabilitate instead of sending me to the Drake Center or a nursing home. My Long Suffering Wife Ruth rented a hospital bed and put it in our formal living room. She stayed with me about a week but then had to go back to work. At least that was the excuse she used at the time.
I was not allowed outside the house except to go to physical therapy up on the hill at the McCullough-Hyde building. Then, it took Ruth and Patti, whom I used to work with at the paper, to help me get to the car. Those who worked at physical therapy were very good at their jobs by the way.
Because of my EICNLTABAD, I was very dizzy, my balance was that of a drunken man getting off a Tilt-a-Whirl and I had the strength of a jellyfish.
Thus, at least once a day while Ruth was at work, I tried to walk a little around the house’s interior to build up my strength. However, getting out of the bed, because of the debilitating dizziness, took a really long time with many pauses throughout the process. (I was taught by two young ladies at UC Hospital to sit perfectly still and stare at a point on a wall to ease my dizziness. Thus, just getting out of bed could take 15 minutes). A trip to the restroom had to be planned with stops in rest areas along the way. That was before I had access to ebooks and holding books wore me out as well as my dizziness caused me to be nauseous when I tried to read.
What I did do was watch TV.
I’ve written columns about how I love TV. It was my babysitter when I was preschool young and my mom did housework until the soaps came on in the afternoons. And then I watched the soaps with mom. TV has been an integral part of my life since my first memories formed and stayed with me until they began slipping away with my deepening aging process – that seemed to start about 30 years ago, well, maybe a little longer than that.
With the magic of a remote, that became like my talisman, my TV sometimes remained on 24 hours a day and sometimes slightly less, according to how soundly I slept if I slept at all.
My recovery time started sometime in February of 2008, which means the NCAA basketball season was deep into the conference schedules. East Coast and Midwest games were early in the evenings and West Coast games ran into the early morning. I thought I knew collegiate basketball better than at any time of my life. When March Madness came around, I had Ruth run me off a couple of brackets and I filled them out with confidence.
It was the worst showing I have ever had and let me tell you that bar was pretty low going into that year.
What I did get to do more than anything else was make up a list of my least favorite commercials. At that time, my least favorite commercial was J.G. Wentworth: It’s My Money and I Want It Now. The actors would sing – call 877-CASH-NOW — and I think they were on a bus. One was an opera singer, the proverbial fat lady wearing horns. I hated it with a passion. If I had been hooked up to a blood pressure monitor, alarms would have gone off every time that came on, and it came on a bunch.
This time my least favorite commercial is much worse than J.G. Wentworth. I don’t really know what they are selling because my mind has seizures when it comes on. It is a little girl with a screeching voice who is a coxswain in a boat engaged in a boat race.
She screeches until my ears bleed, which does not take long. Ruth long ago hid everything with sharp points, after she found where I had originally hid them. I hid them after she stayed with me this time (during the Stay-at-Home order) 24-7 for more than two days and was giving me looks that made me suspicious and more than a little frightened. Thus, I just have my ear-bleeding blackouts and nothing more dangerous occurs.
But back to the commercial: Her doting parents come in and find her running the restroom basin over – water rushes over the basin edge in a Niagara-like waterfall — as her toy boats ply the water by her spraying water from a toy watering can on them.
Her parents think it’s the funniest, most precious thing they ever seen as the water continues to cascade to the floor. They pick up the child and hug her, saying cute and reassuring things to her. They are proud as punch as the saying goes. It is something about making her dreams come true.
I cannot even imagine what my parents would have done to me if they found me doing something like that. Soaky toys were some of my greatest memories of baths back in the early to mid 60s. But had I spilled more than a little water on our rough bathroom floor in my parents’ home — my parents had to add indoor plumbing to the house after they bought it following the war. OMG. I probably still would have trouble sitting. They would have created nightmares instead of making sure my dreams became real.
Unfortunately, even though the current remote now has a mute button, Ruth rearranges the room a couple of times during an afternoon. It seems no matter the configuration, I cannot link up with the magic box so the remote refuses to work properly. Thus, it takes me several tries to get the TV to do anything near what I want it to. Also, I am usually reading or playing Facebook games or talking – by typing — on Messenger with any number of people so by the time I stop doing what I am doing, find the remote and hit the mute button where it actually works, the horrific commercial is mercifully over.
A P.S. here: As I do with everything I question, I Googled the commercial and found out it is selling American Family Insurance, which leaves me – since I still haven’t figured emojis out to use the female shrugging — with a non-comprehending shrug.