Saturday is a day for the 3 G's.... Growl, Grumble and Grouch.

Today is Saturday, two days after my appointment with Audrey and Dr. Skrivello at the Little Shop of Horrors.  This morning I have had less than two hours of sleep and my sense of humor may have deteriorated a bit.   I know you are wondering how it could get any more dysfunctional than it was on Thursday, but let’s find out.  The pain started in earnest around 11 am on Friday.  I reached across the table at school to clean up a spill and a searing hot pain ripped down my arm making me feel like I had just dipped my arm in honey and rolled it in a bed of those freak of nature giant screaming ants from Africa or Uruguay or some other country that isn’t the US. 

Footnote: Bullet Ant

So maybe swarms of tiny ants don’t scare you. How about this giant screaming mofo? That’s right, screaming. Bullet Ants hail from the low land rainforests of Nicaragua and Paraguay. Each ant is about an inch long and lives in a tree colony. When a predator approaches the colony some of these bad boys drop down onto it, letting out a shriek before they do.
While not the deadliest insect, the Bullet Ant’s sting is said to be the most painful in the world, according to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. The insect’s sting causes waves of burning, throbbing, mind-blowing, pain that doesn’t stop for 24 hours. It hurts so much it feels like you’ve been shot with a bullet (Get it? Bullet Ant?)

Some South American societies use the Bullet Ant to test the manhood of young boys, making them endure 20 stings without crying out before they can be considered men. Some Non-South American people think that sounds cool and decide to do it just for kicks.   http://www.highestfive.com/combat/10-most-terrifying-and-dangerous-insects/

 

Yeah, those ants.  I wonder if my rotator cuff tear rates on Scmidt’s Sting Pain index?

 

Today I am almost convinced that I am indeed a pansy, contrary to my earlier proclamation that I am not, I believe their may have been a transformation.  I debated at about 3 am, a hasty visit to our local Emergency Room where I would crawl in on my hands and knees, begging for just one hit of Demerol or Oxycodone or any other controlled substance that would alleviate my pain for just a few hours and allow me to sleep in a drugged, drooling stupor, like my dear husband was doing at the moment.  But when I played that pleasant scenario out in my mind, I imagined it wouldn’t really go the happy way I hoped.  I would crawl into our local ER where their super crabby, don’t give a rats #@!# if you come in here with a severed limb and are bleeding all over the floor, sign in and sit and wait to be called, front desk people would look at my foaming at the mouth, wild hair and pajama clad self and immediately peg me as a druggie needing a fix (which is halfway true, not the druggie part, but I was certainly going to beg for some hard core, body and mind numbing drugs).  I could see this going one of two ways.  Way 1: they call security and have me tossed out on my rump.  Or Way 2: they make me wait in the waiting room for seven hours, at which time they call me to triage and take my blood pressure and temperature, ask me why I’m there, determine I’m low priority and I go back to the waiting room for another three hours at which point I am allowed to go to a room in the back, where I can hear several other patients wailing in agony for drugs.  I sit in this back room for another nice long time (I’ve lost the ability to judge time by this point) and at some point a sarcastic doctor comes in and tells me to go home and take some Motrin and follow up with my regular doctor. 

I decided Way 1 is the better of those two options, but staying home and wallowing in pain in the partial comfort of my own bed, making my husband miserable in the process, *bonus*, is probably an even better plan.  What???  Mark made me really mad yesterday and all night he slept like a really annoying baby, which made me even madder.  As a matter of a fact I wanted to tenderly wake Mark up with a well-placed right hook to the groin, but my #@#$#@!! right arm was currently in so much pain I didn’t feel like I could do the hook proper justice.   It probably wouldn’t even wake him and he would just roll around a bit and then start snoring.  When you are in such extreme pain and cannot sleep and someone is sleeping so soundly and peacefully it’s only human nature to want to make them suffer.  Well, it’s in Lorie’s human nature anyway.

So at six am, the vile taste in my mouth and the extreme need to visit the girl’s room, drove me from the bed.  And I used my throbbing right arm to brush the taste of three week old dirty gym socks out of my mouth because I haven’t mastered brushing my teeth with my left hand yet.  My arm went numb while brushing my molars at which point I’m pretty sure I brushed the lower half of my esophagus on accident.  After recovering my ability to swallow again, I staggered back to bed to try and find a semi comfortable position to sleep, only to discover that my darling James had rolled out of his bed and pranced his happy tail into my room and crawled up into my bed and fallen asleep next to Mr. Sleep-through-an-apocalypse.  Sigh.  Now there are two really aggravating, sleeping peacefully, lumps of annoying mass in my bed.  I guess it’s time to get up anyway, cause I’m sure as hell not getting back into bed with that.  Six am on a Saturday is a travesty.  And I’m feeling very uncharitable toward anything that breathes, today.  Hell, I’m feeling violent toward things that don’t breathe too.  The toaster is currently pissing me off pretty good for taking too long to toast my bread.  I may unplug it and chuck it out the window momentarily and see if that relieves some of my sleep deprivation aggression.  I would chuck Mark out of the window, but again, that right arm isn’t cooperating.  (Like I could chuck Mark anywhere with two perfectly healthy rotator cuffs.  Maybe if both cuffs were on loan to me from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).   

 

To add insult to injury, Mark rolled out of bed, cheerfully and well rested, took one look at me with my bloodshot eyes, Mad Hatter Hair and brows furrowed so far down on my face they tickled my nose and proclaimed that he had some stuff that he had to do at work.  He threw on clothes and flew out the door fast enough that it would have made a Nascar pit crew proud.  He was in such a rush that he left poor James here to suffer my wrath alone.  I guess he believes that Lorie’s human nature is actually rendered null by James’s usually very sweet demeanor.  Good thing I love that rotten boy so much.  I guess I’ll just have to cultivate and refine my grouchiness until Mark’s return.  That makes me smile a bit.