Quick healing

I always lose to the golf course anyway, but last night it made a physical assault on me: first fall went to Emerald Greens (but I'm going best two out of three). When I turned to walk down the fairway after my second shot on the par 4 dogleg left 3rd hole, I stepped in a pit about 18" deep and crashed to the ground on my right side. It didn't hurt (much) and I walked the last six holes. Over dinner, though, it tightened up and began to ache, enough that I couldn't get to sleep for about an hour. I had visions of having to go into work on a crutch or cane.

I guess I'm a quick healer, though. On waking up, I could walk without pain, go up and down stairs...the whole bit. Thank goodness.

When I had my skull operation to relieve pressure on the facial nerve during my Bell's Palsy attach in 2005, I was out of the hospital in three days, despite the doctor's telling me I'd be in five to seven. (They wanted to give me morphine while I was in ICU, but after I'd seen what it did to my brother while he was dying of colon cancer, I took a couple of ibuprofen instead and held an icepack to my throbbing head.)

One of the things they did to me was install a titanium plate in my skull. I'm still a little chary of shaving it and all, but it's probably tough enough to take that. In fact, about six months after the operation a 200-pound bruiser slammed into me playing volleyball (you can't tell some people that's supposed to be a noncontact sport) and we bonked heads. It sounded like two coconuts being clapped together, and when the noise died away he was out cold.

As he sat up, groggy, I offered the sympathetic observation, "You don't want to do that: I'm titanium-enriched."