Caver60

This is certainly what Dr. W pled. He said that he had a very good assistant who left prior to my surgery, and that the staff at this particular branch of UTHSC was just not up to speed yet. I get it. It doesn't make the whole thing less infuriating though. Maybe more infuriating, actually, since he knew that his staff was not functioning at 100% yet.

I got my left shoulder replaced back in March. I am 48, so fairly young for this procedure. I had extreme osteoarthritis from a congenital defect in my shoulder, combined with playing football and an professional life filled with jack hammers and rock drills. The first surgeon I saw told me that my shoulder was "beyond him", and gave me a referral to another surgeon. So I went to see him. Let's call him Dr. W. Skip ahead if you aren't interested in the medical procedure that I underwent- Dr. W does a procedure called a "ream and run". Basically, the procedure involves replacing the humeral head (the top of the arm), as well as reaming the glenoid cavity to give it a new shape for the humeral head to operate within. A conventional shoulder replacement puts hardware in the glenoid cavity too, so that is the way that this surgery is different. I was attracted to the procedure because at my age, I can look forward to at least one more replacement operation before I die. Doing the ream and run would allow for a conventional shoulder replacement at that time, rather than a "reverse shoulder replacement", which has a lesser chance of being fully successful. All of the patient reviews I found on Dr. W were stellar. Here comes the juicy parts- Prior to the surgery, I did some blood work and a urinalysis. The day of the surgery, Dr. W showed me a few stretches I should be doing at home afterwards. I mean RIGHT before the surgery. He also told me to avoid "external rotation". I did the thing and went home. Of course it was a motherfucker. Home Health came in and asked if I had a rehab protocol from Dr. W. I said, no, but that he gave me several stretches to do and told me not to do any external rotation. All fine and good. I was stretching religiously, working with the home health PT, and making good progress. Or so I thought. One day, about five weeks post-op, the joint started moving around strangely. I called Dr. W, and he said to come on in immediately. When I got there, he manipulated my shoulder and told me that I had torn my subscapularis. As a result, I would need a second surgery. I would start back at square one with rehab, too. This was all confusing to me. I walked Dr. W through the rehab and stretches that I'd been doing, and he told me that I should not have been doing some of that stuff. It was obvious to me that I had torn up the surgery through my own ignorance. That pissed me off. Maybe I should have started looking around for another doctor at that point. But I didn't. I scheduled the new surgery for the following week. I told my employer about it, and he was super pissed that our insurance was about to take another hit. He told me that I should make sure that this next procedure was free. I didn't do any of that, because frankly I was in shock that I'd have to go under the knife again at all. This time, prior to the surgery, I got blood work and a urinalysis again. I also got a chest x-ray, an EKG, an info packet on the surgery, a rehab protocol, and some cleanser to use on my body prior to the surgery. I called Dr. W and went over all of this. Why had I not gotten any of this stuff prior to the first operation? If I had gotten this stuff, I wouldn't have been doing the stretches and exercises that I'd been doing. I wouldn't have fucked up the surgery and be having to do it all again. So surgery day arrives. Before the procedure, Dr. W tells me that while they are in there, he wants to look at the humeral component and see if it is matching up with my healing glenoid. If there is a more ideally shaped humeral head, they will replace mine with that. To do this, they wouldn't have to remove the entire prosthetic, just the round "top" of it, if you will. I said fine, go ahead. I came out of the surgery to my wife crying in a chair beside the bed. She tells me that Dr. W swung by after the surgery and told her that they had indeed decided to replace the humeral head during the procedure. But that while trying to remove it, they had fractured my humerus. A fissure fracture, running down the bone. This had loosened the entire prosthesis, and they had to wire my bone back together and drop an entirely new prosthetic in. Not good, Bob. So here I am, about 9 weeks after the second surgery. Shoulder has good days and bad. I am following the rehab protocol exactly, going to PT once per week and doing the rest at home. I'm thinking now that I just have to wait and see. If I start approaching the SOL on this thing and I have a piece of shit for a shoulder, maybe that's the right time to sue. But if things are going well, there will be no need to. All of this has been real hard on my home life and my work life. After the second surgery I was in a real fog for a couple of weeks. My wife told me that she thought the whole thing had broken my spirit. That woke me up some. Any of you Surlies have any thoughts about my "wait and see" approach?

I’m surprised that you’re surprised that Aggy eats paste

Long enough to know that you are rpongetti 😉 and that you and Teddy Lehman both outran your own melanin

Your mom is a sock of a bot

Well fuck me. Who the fuck am I? Sorry I forgot to check first with the dudes with a million posts before I got surly on a site called fucking SURLY HORNS. I read your stuff all the time, man. Through at least two websites now. You think you and the other 50 or so people who post nonstop like you don’t have jobs are the only people who read every fucking word on here? Look, I know that when nothing’s happening shit gets all mentally deficient in here. Just the way it goes. But this shit that hedges on political, and in some cases is two feet fully in political, can fuck right off. Sorry for partying.

Jesus. Jesus H. Christ. I never thought I could be more annoyed than I was with the cheese puns. I stand corrected. At least some of that was mild cheddar funny. Tuskegee syphilis study? Terrible. Take it to another board. Eyes? What fucking recruit brought that up? Valai conjecture. Who gives a shit when it comes to recruiting. Nobody is standing around wondering if a statue of Sul Ross is going to keep Jimbo Baggins from finally filling in a date on that ridiculous plaque. George Wallace? Fuck off. My God, George fucking Wallace has been SUCH a detriment to ‘Bama recruiting I mean really, who in the wide world of fuck thinks any of this has anything remotely to do with the recruiting board? With all due respect, fuck you guys.

Got Pfizer #2 on Saturday. Had a few drinks that night. Strange, had chills but I wasn't cold. Ran between 99 and 100 temperature, but that was done by Sunday morning. I was really sore on Sunday, entire body. Felt great yesterday. Wife got Pfizer #2 on Sunday. Very fatigued on later that evening and yesterday, with a bad headache.

The struggle is real, man. I've dealt with so many ant-maskers over the past year that I've lost count. The toughest stretch was between the start of this whole mess and the day that Trump came out finally and wore a mask himself. After that things evened out a little. We tried all sorts of things. We offered to put anti-maskers and their families on private tours for an exclusive price. That worked sometimes. Other times there was absolutely no way to make them happy. I totally lost my shit one day when a dude who refused to wear a mask was also open-carry, and stubbornly aggressive about it all. Worst part about it was our employees, who freaked out and damn near walked out over the implied threat. Yesterday a guy showed up who presented the old ADA bullshit card for me to check out. I was like, "nah, put that away. Wear a mask or come back when all of this is over. Check our website for when we drop the masking requirement." He wanted to argue and I had none of it. The guy left. To me this is like going to that friend's house whose mother required you to take off your shoes at the door. A minor inconvenience but those were the rules at her house so you just did it. It still depresses me how many of our fellow human beings out there will not do even the slightest something to even possibly keep someone from getting sick. It's nuts.

Same guy who recruited Johnny Walker, the Cash brothers, Tommy Nobis, Priest Holmes, Wane McGarity, Josh Reynolds, DeMarvin Leal, etc The list isn’t long but it’s got its bright spots

I think this years Bama on field coaching staff didn’t include a single coach who was on the field in 2017 when they won it last. Another crazy bit: I think it’s also true that he has never had a signing class at Bama that has failed to win a national championship at some point in their 4 years on campus.

My wife’s office (no pics) is full of Trumpers. 2:15 rolled around today and they were surprised that THE PLAN wasn’t going down. My wife was in a tizzy (no pics) about the kids in school and all. Gotdamn I hate these people. it’s gonna get worse, I agree. It’s bad when the people we hope will put this down are mostly complicit. Holy shit.

They weren’t this stupid because they were deadly serious about what they were doing and the consequences of their actions if they failed. These people, for the most part? Not so much

How can you be a fan when you don’t even watch them? The players are the constant. Coaches come and go. Don’t like the coach? Fine. Me neither. Refuse to watch the kids? Fuck off, you suck, your heart is black as coal. Eat shit and die in eternal fire. You’re not a fan, you’re a wretched heartless pile of shit and you should be jettisoned into space.

Every single one of the Mc’s and Mack’s has more hardware than Herman. We used to think this guy fucks. Course correction. He sucks.

Here it is, in short. I would need to cross check some things to make sure it is all correct, but this is the story in brief: Some time in March, 1944, the 45th was moving into Germany in near constant combat. Grandad was a machine gunner. His best friend was named Dizzy, and Dizzy carried the tripod in the three man crew. Dizzy was killed in combat. At that time, the Allies had an agreement among themselves that if any of the Allied powers liberated POWs from the Germans, they could use them in their own armies until the war ended, rather than go through everything it would take to repatriate them. Shortly after Dizzy was killed, Grandad's unit received a Soviet POW named Stanislav Ordinsky. He was Ukranian, a former university professor who spoke seven languages fluently, but not English (haha). Grandad was a farm boy from Royse City, Texas, and spoke some Spanish. And that was how they communicated until Stanislav learned English. They became good friends through combat and some other escapades, and when the war ended, Stanislav gave Grandad his address in Kiev and headed east for the USSR. Every year on VE Day for the next 45 or 46 years, Grandad would drop a letter in the mail for Stanislav. There was never a response. Then the Wall fell, and sometime that year or next he got a letter back from Stanislav. Turns out that after he got home, Stanislav was sent to a Gulag in Siberia for a number of years, a consequence of having served with the Americans. When he got out of the Gulag, the Soviets had expunged his military service records. This was devastating, because without service records a person could not easily get any sort of quality medical care from the state. Nevertheless, he carried on. Late in the 1980s, Stanislav's son died, leaving a son of his own for Stanislav to care for. Then the grandson came down with leukemia, and because Stanislav could not get good medical care, this was a death sentence. And finally, after all of this time, he received the first letter from my Grandad. The state had let the mail through at last. And so he was writing my grandfather to see if there was any way to recover US Army records which might prove to Ukranian authorities that he had served. Grandad and Grandma hopped a plane to Washington, DC and started poking around. Before long, someone from the State Department heard their story and got involved. They flew my grandparents to Kiev, and brought Stanislav and his grandson back to the United States for medical treatment. The boy recovered, Stanislav's service records were amended, and I learned as a teenager that everyone from the former USSR weren't monsters after all. My Grandad was a great man.

My Grandfather fought with the 45th. He was not in the 157th, I'd have to look up his exact unit. He was, however, there when they liberated Dachau. Some of the things he took from there and traded SS officers for after the capture are on display in the Houston Holocaust Museum. The few combat stories he shared (via memoir to my grandmother - he never spoke of it aloud) are harrowing. He also had one of the best personal stories I have ever heard from that war. If anyone is interested I will write it up here.

It’s because we lack dudes on offense at the skill positions. And in general, really. We have solid players at most every position, but recruiting rankings don’t really lie. We play like a team stacked with 3 and 4 star players, but we don’t have many 5* guys who can really house it at any time. We are loaded with complimentary players who don’t have anyone to compliment. For years now posters on various sites have said things like “Good WR recruits in Texas are a dime a dozen”, and they are so wrong. Texas produces enough talent to bring game changers in every year. Water is wet. OU sucks. This shit is obvious. Brockermeyers are headed OOS. Every year we take fall backs at nearly every position. It’s not rocket science. Herman is a good roster builder for depth, but got damn you have to have some studs and we just don’t. Ossai is as close as we come right now. But you know all of this. You’re a good poster and a knowledgeable fan.

It’s SO rich that Arizona (McCain) and Georgia (Lewis) got to hit some final nails in this sumbitch’s coffin.

I apologize beforehand: I feel sorry for you poor bastards. That’s maybe the worst thing anyone can say to a sports fan in my book. I grew up a cowboys fan. Hell, my grandma was a paralegal for them and I always had signed memorabilia on my walls as a kid. More importantly, I’ve always been a Texas fan. I could barely stomach Arky Jerry, but the wins were scintillating though they came at the hands of pinche Jimmy Johnson of U fame. And then that dude hired the antichrist of my childhood, Barry F’in Switzer. And I was done. The cowboys of my childhood were dead. I feel sorry for you dudes.

I remember when I had my first beer

This is more or less true in my experience. You self-monitor and keep your own records of quantities and usage and then the ATF shows up for inspections every 3 years and audits those records and your magazines for compliance. And that's pretty much it. Ammonium nitrate, however, is an oxidizer and not even considered an explosive by the ATF. All that is required by the ATF is that oxidizers are kept a certain distance away from actual explosives (determined by a table of distances and the quantities and nature of the explosives and oxidizers being stored).

We live in New Braunfels. He plays for a 16U team called the Barracudas. They are partnered up with the Bombers, a really fine softball club.

We have two kids. Our daughter just graduated high school (no pics, assholes) and our son will be a sophomore. One of our son's friends killed himself the other night. Through this whole thing, we have been pretty good about distancing and things. Not too long ago, the boy's club baseball team started up again. We let him do it, and I've been feeling guilty about it ever since. Then this kid killed himself, and sent out a picture of himself with a gun to his head right before he did it. I don't feel guilty about club baseball anymore. We are all social animals and if teachers are willing to teach, I welcome it. Kids need adults to keep an eye on them. Teachers and coaches notice things that we as parents don't. It's hard to tell with teenagers what is normal angst and what is a brewing problem that needs dealt with. There have been plenty of posters on here who have talked about the mental health aspects of this ordeal all along. I want our kids in school this fall. Looks like I won't be seeing my parents for at least a year, and that sucks.

The worst offenders I know are my wealthier friends and their kids. Purely anecdotal, obviously. Many of them had travel plans for spring break and kept them (while things were still open March 9-13).