Surgery Or Metalwork?
My little brother had major surgery to repair his ankle a few weeks ago.
His bones never really grew properly in this area, so at age eight he underwent his first corrective operation. This latest was the ninth procedure on this foot.
This go round, his surgeon removed most of the assorted metal implanted in my brother's ankle (pins, staples, screws, broken screw bits, etc.). The surgeon then broke the foot and ankle in three places, inserted pins to hold everything together, stapled together the incisions, and sealed the whole thing in place with a cast.
Hopefully this will be the last surgery the kid will ever need on his ankle.
I've since taken him to get the visible metal removed, and he's asked me to document the process. He has all of the photos and while he hasn't shared many yet I've included a pic of hispre-staple-removal foot below the jump. (Not for the faint of heart). If he sends me more pics, I'll also add them here -- I know I took a great shot of his doctors yanking out the pins with a pair of pliers. Good times.
He's now staple and pin-free and has upgraded to a walking cast. A few more weeks and he'll even be off of crutches entirely. Happy holidays, indeed.
Ron Burgundy Goes To Iraq
A guy I grew up with is an Army MP stationed in Iraq. Here's what he posted as his Facebook status yesterday:
Walked into an Iraqi Police Headquarters this evening where they were all sitting there watching Anchorman. Strange.
Doesn't get much more surreal than that. It's the little things.
What really bakes my noodle now, though, is the trail of breadcrumbs and the use of modern communication which led up to this whole snapshot.
- A dispute over poorly-aligned, antiquated punch-card paper ballots in Florida created controversy over whether George W. Bush was our properly elected President in 2000.
- A bunch of Saudi fundamentalists, trained in remote, mountainous, largely illiterate areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and armed with simple box cutters, stole jumbo jets -- small, fuel-filled flying towns -- and crashed them into mountain-sized buildings in Manhattan.
- The Towers collapsed, killing thousands of people whose days had been spent working on computers, communicating instantly with colleagues around the world and using the very latest technology to run America's financial sector.
- The summary justification for U.S. involvement in Iraq is based on questionable satellite images and photos from surveillance planes presented to the world by Colin Powell, in classic tv anchor style, as proof that Iraq's tyrant was building nukes and/or biological and chemical weapons.
- We went to war in Iraq, quickly freeing the Iraqi people from a tyrant's grip. Saddam, overthrown and on the run, is captured and later executed. That execution is illicitly recorded on a cell phone and posted on YouTube for the world to see.
- Using jury-rigged, hand made, improvised explosives, insurgents from around the world gather in Iraq to fight off the Americans and our Western allies.
- My friend, who I haven't seen since high school, joins the Army and finds his way to Iraq.
- There, he works with Iraqi citizens who themselves are working to create order and stability. He stops by their office, a police headquarters, and finds them watching Will Ferrell in Anchorman, a movie lampooning San Diego, America in the 1970s, the absurdity of America's recent misogynistic past, and local U.S. tv news generally and on-air personalities in particular. The Iraqi police certainly have no context for any of the subtle humor, though Ferrell in that 'stache and those classic seventies' outfits goes a long, long way.
- An Army MP goes back to his barrack, fires up his computer and logs on to Facebook, updating his status.
- As Facebook is what reconnected us, I'm able to glimpse his surreal day from the opposite side of the globe, mixed-in with updates about one friend's Christmas cookies and another friend's love of cheese melted on burgers.
The mind. It boggles.