awww the miracles of modern science or 

take a trip and never leave the hospital room

the case of the green jello cubes 

  

           what a title!, need to abbreviate but not quite sure how, and yet it needs that much to draw upon your curiosity to see what a guy who apparently looks fit as in a recent pic here,could possibly have in common with a hospital and the rest of the title. 

          it all started with a back injury back at the end of the last century as if to age myself more. it was 1-10 85 , i injured my back unloading a truckload of dynamite . as scary as it sounds the unloading part is the same as if it was groceries . dynamite is fairly safe as long as it isn't around something else to make it go boom like another smaller explosion . blasting caps work well for doing this providing the initial charge to get the explosion started. so it was more like unloading a semi trailer load of boxes all the same size and weight. 60 pounds to the box. not that much weight but after the first 150 -200 of them your back gets a little tight. and mine snapped and put me in the hospital with 2 herniated discs. i had a chymopapain treatment for the one disc which is an operation where they insert a needle across the back of your abdominal cavity and into the center of the affected disc and inject meat tenderizer to eat out the center of the disc and collapse it off the spine thus alleviating my spine pain. sounded easy enough as the foreign doctor explained it to me . tests were run to determine if i was allergic to the papaya enzyme and the operation was performed and i woke up to 2 weeks of constant muscle spasms or tweeks that made my skin jump and crawl as it tired me out physically and mentally . i was told i had a bad reaction to the medicine as apparently a lot of people had as they have discontinued this treatment since then. 

    to say the least Demerol was my friend and every 4 hrs i would want my friend to visit an give me a moments peace from this relentless rounds of spasms from my head to my toes. i lay in the hospital bed and they would administer physical therapy in the form of ice and heat packs to my back. nothing was working and after one day of relentless pain a little nurse came in my room and asked me how i was doing and to rate my pain. i gave it the regular 11 on a scale of 1-10, and she asked me if i wanted pain medicine. of course my reply was the same . bring it on. she said she was going to do a consult with the doctor and see if they couldn't get me something else that would be more effective , i said go for it. and she left and came back about an hour later and had the new script. it was morphine and she mainlined it into me and as she took the rubber band off my arm  and as i felt that rush hit my head i said 'what pain.' she made me comfortable and placed my liquid meal before me. 

    how inviting that dinner looked.  beef broth in styrofoam container and tea, as well as a small bowl of green jello cubes in a plastic pedestal fruit bowl. i stared at this and in my fuzzy mind contemplated what my life was coming to but before i could get very far with my analysis the tray the dinner was on shook, and i swore i saw those one inch jello cubes shake and divide. watching more intensely again the same thing happened . i was amazed at this and intentionally shook the tray and sure enough one dropped off the side of the bowl and onto the tray. this episode was repeated time and again till there was a pile of them on the tray and beginning to fall on the floor. 

     at this point my mathematical brain began to kick in and i started doing computations on how much available space i had for green jello cubes in my room. i had figured that each cube was approximately 1 inch by 1 inch and that it would take 144 to make 1 cu ft. and that i had approximately a 10 by 20 foot room 8 ft tall or 1600 cu.ft. and that is where i decided i better get help in there soon or else  i would be buried in green jello cubes as they would sit still for a second and double into twice as as many as before. i couldn't figure fast enough to determine how long i had as the room was filling up fast. 

     i figured i was at the end room down a long hall and yet i was right across from the nurses station. i pushed the button for the nurses help and no answer. panic was on my side as i wondered how long i could breathe under the weight of jello cubes , and to imagine drowning in your room in a hospital because of jello cubes , what would the preacher say? suddenly a commotion appeared  in my room and just that quickly all the jello cubes were gone and that little nurse stood in front of me asking what was wrong. having felt like a heal as i could see my relentless nagging with the buzzer resulted in her hurrying to my room for no apparent reason, then i became violently ill. it wasn't pretty but there was no way i was going to eat my liquid diet after this and yet to this day i refuse to eat green jello, cubed or not. 

       now as to the operation, it was flawed from  the start.  as in their haste to get me under the knife, apparently forgot to check and see if i had any more bad discs . which i did,  and i was back in the hospital again a year later getting a laminectomy done. now i am even more gun shy when a physician suggests anything to help me with my back. i still and will always have problems but hopefully not man made ones like this operation gave me.