My Christmas Vacation

I don’t know what the rest of you dudes are getting for Christmas, but I got a hernia.

This was not one of the items on the list I text-messaged to Santa last June so he’d have time to get it right before the advent of the chaotic holiday season, now generally acknowledged to begin the day after Labor Day (renamed by the Bush administration National Right to Work in America Day).

Santa usually totally blows my Christmas list. I ask for a Power Commander titanium slip-on muffler for my VFR, a muffler which will deliver to this fine motorcycle a guaranteed 3.2 percent increase in torque and horsepower and which will allow me to finally blast my zero-to-sixty times below the insufferable three-second barrier known as “The Great Wall of Inertia.”

Santa brings me a wool scarf and says “Hey, an elf checked ‘muffler.’”

Or I ask for a Street Sweeper semi-automatic combat assault shotgun plus a few dozen bowling pins and some watermelons, and Santa delivers unto me a holiday CD, Enya Sings The Sacred Celtic Hymns of the Winter Solstice. It sounds to me like bats on Qualudes.

This year I thought I’d try to lowball Santa and only asked for a new snorkel and three weeks in Belize. Instead, right after classes got out, I was catching up on my laying on the couch when I started to feel some discomfort and pain in what is commonly referred to as the groin and general pubical area. My tolerance for pain is less even than my tolerance for Enya.

Over the next few days, the discomfort grew worse, accompanied by swelling. Of course, my first thought was I have cancer. Cancer runs in my family like some families get frequent lice. If I have a toothache, I assume I have tooth cancer. Pretty much the slightest ache or pain and I go to an emotional DEF-CON 3 and start planning for hospice care.

My second thought was a hernia, maybe a malignant hernia. I wasn’t sure what a hernia actually was, but I had the notion that if you slightly underfill a water balloon and then squeeze it, a hernia would look a lot like that. This seemed like a good description of my groin, so I self-diagnosed probably a hernia

I called Old Doc Novak and made an emergency appointment because my groin was about to explode, and after a record-low three hours in the waiting room I was rushed to the inner-office where another of the interchangeable cute nurses who I had as students only a few years ago went to work measuring my blood pressure and checking my weight. (Am I here because I’m fat!!??)

Novak came in after a few rounds of golf and gave me his usual cheery greeting. “Take off your pants.”

And so, after just a few minutes of groping my balls and sticking his fingers in my butt, Novak diagnosed a bilateral hernia and told me to make an appointment with a good surgeon. I don’t happen to know any good surgeons offhand, so he gave me a few names. As I was leaving, he offered a cheerful parting observation, “This will lay you up for a few weeks.”

“And a happy religiously and ethnically appropriate winter holiday to you and yours as well!” I wished him and his.

I thought, well at least I’m on winter break and I can just pop into one of these surgeons’ offices and get this thing tied off or lasered or whatever they do these days. I’ll use my break time to be laid up and let Mary wait on me. But when I start calling around for a surgeon with a little slack in his calendar, I find the earliest appointment I can get is mid-January.

“What is this, Canada?” I ask my short-list of Professional Office Administrative Assistants Tasked With Scheduling. “Not! This is America! I have insurance!”

But to no avail. I have to spend my winter break nursing a swollen and painful groin, then when I go back to work in January, I have to get practically major surgery and limp back into the classroom within days to lecture on faulty parallelism and other venal sins.

Or maybe I could show a movie, but I’m just an adjunct now. I don’t have sick leave, and if you miss even one day of class they fire you and give all your remaining courses to one of the many Middle-East immigrants on expired work visas who have an Associate’s in General Studies and who will lecture for food.

Life is so unfair, but at least I’ll be getting a handicapped parking sticker. They’re good for a year and you can cut off fat people driving old Buicks and get the parking place right by the Fred Meyer front door. And maybe my insurance will pay for one of those electric wheel chairs to use during my long convalescence.

I want one with a Power Commander.