La Vida Roja with Crazy Red
Crazy Red
How My Mother Took the Yippi-Yi-Yo out of my Ki-Yay
or
"I've Got the My Mama Wears Depends,
My Sister takes Dextrol
and I'm Doing More Kegels Blues”
If you are just tuning into the continuing saga of my ridiculous life for the very first time let me briefly bring you up to speed on the latest doings then move on. We have a lot of ground to cover. Okay, my mother told me in August that her definitive decision regarding my constant nagging to get her knee replaced was "Shut up, Red, as usual you don't know what you are talking about. I will never have my knee replaced EVER! I will just suffer!". Two weeks into my 3 week vacation she emailed me to let me know that her "knee had finally imploded", she was having knee replacement surgery in October and how soon could I be home. The surgery was done on Tuesday morning of this week. The operation went smoothly, the recovery process has been a whole other enchilada.
Things I have learned this week..
1. My 80 year old mother LOVES "Hannah Montana" and the rest of the Disney Channel line up. Which I discovered on Tuesday when I asked if we might watch the debate. "No, Red, I absolutely REFUSE to watch the debates!” she shouted at me over the eardrum shattering volume of a hospital TV turned to high. She then proceeded to yell at me over a deafening roar of canned laughter the back story of " The Jonas Brothers". This is the same woman who in 1960, when our television was broken beyond repair, refused to allow my father to purchase another because we were growing up to be heathens and TV would be our eventual undoing. Instead, we were made to listen to recordings of “Peter Pan” with Jean Arthur and Sir Cyril Richard, “The Lady's Not for Burning” by Christopher Fry and “Winnie Pooh and the Heffalump” as narrated by James Stewart. Then one day my father came home from work early and found all of us including our maid, Rosita, next door at the neighbor's house watching the Mickey Mouse Club and bought a new television set that very day.
2. I have several friends whose parents have had the same surgery as my mother and assured me that she would be sedated for at least the first day or two and would sleep most of the time. Well, they sedated the wrong half. She had an epidural. According to the surgeon other than knocking her out for a brief time in order to insert the needle, she was awake through most of the operation and talked a blue streak to the anesthesiologist. I was informed later by the recovery room staff that she never shut up the entire time she was there and when they wheeled her into her room she was still talking. This continued all day until she finally fell asleep late that night and only because I insisted that the nurses give her something to knock her out. Please!
3. The “Sleeping Chair” for the family member staying with the loved one overnight is not made for sleeping no matter what the sign says. It is an instrument of torture designed to drum up future business for the Spine and Joint Hospital.
4. Before she drove us to the hospital my mother handed me a thick file folder containing among many things a sheet of paper with a list of 20 people that she wanted me to inform that she “had survived the surgery”. The list was divided into two categories, one for email and the other for phone numbers. My younger sister was dead last on the email list and my older sister was dead last on the phone list and the number listed as hers was an old number from several years ago. This may explain why my sister says my mother never calls.
5. Wednesday night she was in a lot of pain. Because of the epidural and her low blood pressure the pain medication had to be held to a minimum. To distract her I began asking her questions about her childhood. She told me stories from 6 PM until Midnight. This is my favorite ..
My mother loves cats and as a child saved up all of her money to buy Missy, a White Persian. At some point Missy went into heat and all of the Tom Cats began coming around and serenading the fair Missy outside of my grandparents house for several nights running. Finally, one night my grandmother had heard enough. She got up out of bed, stormed outside, looked over the assemblage of cats, selected the one she thought was the best of the lot, picked it up, took it inside the house, and threw him in the spare room where she was keeping Missy cloistered. Two months later Missy had kittens.
My mother was discharged from the surgical hospital this afternoon and is now ensconced in a rehab facility for the next 20 days. I told her that some of my StumbleUpon.com friends had sent her their best wishes for a speedy recovery and she said “Well, Red, please tell them I said thank you, but why you feel compelled to tell the whole world our business, I will never know. Now shut up, Hannah Montana is about to start.”
So, for those of you who have wondered why CrazyRed is so crazy.....
CrazyRed is:
Still Crazy,
Redder than ever,
and really wishing she were adopted.
— Crazy Red
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Today's Theme Song:
Queen performing ``Killer Queen"
