You Never Want to End Up Sitting on the Floor of a McDonald's. Or in a McDonald's

The epic of Chase's Cursed Knee is Now in Full Swing.

Our “hero” (although there’s nothing heroic, or exceptionally protagonistic about him so far) sits on the living room couch for another morning. A Saturday. Mostly it seems like every other day. The kitchen needs to be cleaned. Still has to grocery shop. Small pile of cardboard by the front door has not been taken outside to the dumpster. Except for one new element to today’s morning pages session; sitting next to Chase on the gray sectional couch, is his cane.

“Yesterday was absolute shit,” Chase begins to write in his blue leatherbound journal. “I walked to work feeling amazing and had a normal very mobile walk to the bus stop after a great writing session. I even stopped by this little store called Merchant’s Mercantile to get a mocha.” Chase take a pause, distracted by the ridiculous name for this store. “What the heck is a Mercantile? One second, I have to know what this word means. So help me God if it means Market . . .” Chase turns away from his journal to search his phone.

“Mercantile is a place where goods are sold. Like a MARKET. A merchant is a person or company that sells goods or services. So their business name is basically ‘A Business That Sells Goods at a Place Where Goods Are Sold.’ SOLID work people. Anyway the drink was gross. Huge shocker. They don’t know how to make a coffee there and they put a chocolate-covered espresso bean on the lid as a garnish. Those are also gross.

What a terrible concept for a snack first of all. And an even dumber signature garnish(?) to put on the lid of all your drinks. You bite into one and for a brief moment, you think “Oh Yum, a chocolate,” but that is immediately thwarted by the sensation of 1 million tiny bits of coffee bean that you are crushing into fresh grounds in real-time in your mouth. You know how we make coffee so that we never have the grounds in the drink? It’s on account of how gross it is to get them in your mouth and stuck in your teeth. It’s the worst. Hiding that by covering it with a thin layer of chocolate does not a delicious treat make. It makes it a mean prank. I threw that dumb ass bean into the bushes when I exited the store.

My morning was productive. I felt like asking Nicole to do something fun after work and I was excited for the weekend. In fact, this was the first Friday I came into the office for a while. Then at lunch, my entire day took a nose dive. My knee just seized up and started swelling as I was almost walking into a McDonald’s. I was in a situation and panicking.

You know that feeling you have when you walk into or drive up to a McDonald’s? One usually reserved for directly after you’ve consumed fast “food?” McDonald’s is unique because that guilty shame comes on pre-emptively. As if your body is trying to warn you that there is still time to turn back and purchase a bag of chips at the gas station. Anything besides a 20pc chicken McNuggets. My body was doing this as soon as I left my office and began the walkover. In our parking lot, I passed our CEO and we waved. What a normal and positive day!

Stepping up onto the first curb, I felt a familiar sensation around my right knee. The muscle tissue had a sort of numbness and there was discomfort. And swelling. This happens. I need to get this osteochondroma out of my leg. I’ve had it since I was 13 and in the last 4 years, it has become a serious issue. Sporadically, it caused my leg to spasm and swell around and above my knee. Today, after almost a year of minimal issues, was the day that my body had had enough.

I found myself limping into a McDonald’s. At no point did it occur to me that I could turn around and return to my office without the fast food. My assumption that my condition would remain mild and not get worse was right out. I was waiting for my food and the only way I could relieve my pain was by removing the pressure of letting my leg hang vertically.

On the floor it is.

If you are sitting on the floor of a McDonald’s, you know you’re hurting. And so does everyone else who sees you sitting on the floor of a McDonald’s because healthy, happy, feeling okay people do not plant themselves (hands first to support your hurting leg) in public and sit on the floor of a McDonald’s. Somehow, I limped back with food in hand and made it - UP A FLIGHT OF STAIRS - to my office where I deteriorated quickly. Too embarrassed to allow myself to just be in excruciating pain at work. Eventually, I wound up on my office floor, writhing. CRYING, and calling Nicole to beg for help. I was a pathetic broken mess.

It took a while to get picked up; at least an hour or more and I was not having an okay time. Nicole said she was going to pick the kids up for her job at a school and then come get me. She made arrangements to leave early though and come to get me when I finally admitted that I felt my entire leg was experiencing the agony of Romans crucifying a living body onto a cross to die a horrifically tortuous death.

The urgent care took me right in. Thankfully, they had a wheelchair with a leg rest to allow me to elevate and relieve some pain.

Just kidding, when I asked for such a thing, I was met with stares of wonder and confusion. Who has ever heard of such a device?

Apparently, no patient of Kaiser Permanente in Tacoma, WA has ever suffered a leg injury. I was a barely walking medical anomaly.

The triage nurse placed me in a regular wheelchair and asked me to keep my foot from dragging while she proceeded to run my hurt leg into 2 different doorways.

I desperately needed a doctor to help me with this pain and thankfully I was finally waiting on a bed in a small tented ER room. Across from me just beyond a thin plastic sheet was a different patient. The doctor informed her that she had Shingles. Awesome. I love this for me.

I left there with a scheduled surgery and pain meds to help me, which was most appreciated. Finally, relief. Damn, that pain was so intense. Just an all-encompassing presence shouting at you from inside your mind (and knee) that something is very wrong. Despite my anguish, after I finish writing these morning pages, I’m going to end up cleaning the kitchen, lighting some incense, grocery shopping with Instacart and other non-essential apartment stuff will pile up around me because that’s all my knee can take. And I’m not even supposed to do all that stuff this weekend. It needs to rest but if I don’t do those few things, they won’t happen at all. Not on a timeline that is conducive to my stress-free healing anyway.”

Chase rubs his knee, which is still very swollen and uncomfortable. It won’t bend and he wonders if his fun new exciting book idea is actually just a complete waste of his time.

(hey. It’s not. I’m not sure why I’m using parentheticals for this twice-removed narration. Maybe because it’s not the narrator’s narrator but actually me. Chase. Yesterday was rough. This is still a good idea. Be nice to yourself.)