So tomorrow, my daughter Kellie is going in for what is, I'm told, a relatively minor operation on her hip to repair a torn labrum. I say "relatively minor" of course, while totally realizing that anything more than a dental filling would be considered major surgery to my daughter and 90% of the rest of the teenagers out there. The problem is, quite frankly....my daughter is a HUGE....and let me re-emphasize this....HUGE, drama queen. Headache? Must be a tumor. Cut finger? Is surgery going to be necessary?
Stub your toe? Amputation. And you think I'm joking. No sir-ree Bob.
Which made the fact that, the other day, Kellie hurt her back all the more aggravating.
Apparently a friend of hers was joking around--totally unintentional--and caused Kellie to slip and twist her back slightly. They did a report at her school, notified Kim and Kellie walked into the house that night walking as though she could barely move. I very coyly (that's me!!) didn't mention anything about it so as to not play into her efforts to be nominated for an Academy Award for best dramatic performance by a teenager. But I digress. A couple of days go by, Kellie is in some minor discomfort--nothing extraordinary, just some stiffness---and then she wakes up this morning. The morning BEFORE her surgery on her hip....and announces that she is having trouble moving.
I mean...as in, AT ALL. After a long wait (well, longer than USUAL), she emerges from her bedroom for the ride to her bus walking like a cross between Frankenstein and CP30 from Star Wars. Again, I say nothing and we walk to the car. She gets in, either feeling extreme discomfort or really laying on the performance thickly.....sort of a last minute plea to the Academy...ya know?
"Ya know Kellie," I say with a voice dripping with sympathy, "I don't think you're being quite melodramatic enough."
No response.
So about two hours later I'm at work and I get a call from the wife, asking me if I can go to the kids school and pick up Kellie. Apparently, after her arrival on school grounds, she was driven---by golfcart--to the school nurse, who informed her mother that after asking Kellie to describe her pain level on a scale of 1 to 10...Kellie uttered in hush tones:
"TEN!"
Seriously, this girl is not my daughter by blood and somedays I don't understand how.
How can someone who's not mine by blood be so totally like me? I mean to tell you, everyone who knows me and hears the stories about Kellie all laugh and say:
"Man, she is so totally YOUR daughter."
What do they mean by that anyway?
Anywho....Kim ends up picking up Kellie and takes her to her work, where she gets some rehab on her muscle spasms (legit--believe it or not!) and who then announces that she is able to return to school. (Okay, that's a statement right there that I would have NEVER made in a zillion years) However, not before she got a nice little lecture from the physical therapist about what was going to be expected of her during her rehab from the hip surgery. She needed to hear it from someone, because when Kim and I told her, she wasn't getting the picture.
So tonight, she got a lecture (minor version) of the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf. She said the therapy this morning did make her back feel much better.
But tomorrow, my little girl is going in for some surgery...and I'm sure she's nervous.
Me? Naaa. Not even a little bit nervous for her.
Liar.
Later,
Jeff
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