Thrilling Days of Convalescence (Part 4 in a series)

Although I made my triumphant return to Rancho Yesteryear on Friday evening around 8:00pm (after spending nearly the entire day at the hospital waiting to see if my doctor was going to let me go home—don’t get me started on that, by the way) this is the first opportunity I’ve had to sit down and rejoin the blog already in progress. (Many thanks to Pam for filling in during my absence, by the way.) The piece I wrote about my late friend Mr. Johnson was written before I went in for surgery.

I’m sure we all remember that too-cool-for-school scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) where the High Priest guy reaches into the sacrificial victim’s chest cavity and pulls out his still beating heart. Unfortunately, we don’t see the excised footage where said victim whines about his chest hurting and has to take a couple of Percocets to numb the pain before he goes to bed each night. That, in case you were curious, would be me—and believe me, I’m using the pain medication sparingly because I’m deathly afraid of becoming addicted to it (I’m liable to become so dependent I’ll lose all inhibitions and allow my thoughts to spill freely like so much talk-show flatulence…with talent on loan from God, if you know what I mean).

Of course, if this were to happen it would be difficult to hear me because my voice has become rather hoarse as a result of the operation—it’s been almost a week and I still haven’t gotten it back. Everyone has been telling me that this is nothing to be concerned about; that this does happen oftentimes as a result of the anesthesia. (I’m not entirely convinced, and in fact I’m not ready to discount that the doc may have done some damage to my vocal cords while landing that thing he took out of my chest—my mother keeps telling me that if this is the case, there’s not much I can do since I signed a waiver…but that doesn’t mean I can’t blame the anesthesia guys.)

Speaking of Mom, she has been quite eager for me to arrange various cinematic entertainments for the past several days. Sunday afternoon found us watching To Have and Have Not (1944) on Georgia Public Television (a particular favorite of hers) and afterward, GPTV ran an interesting documentary entitled Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood (2009), which documented the struggles of several individuals in the German film industry to find work in Hollywood after escaping the Nazis. For every success (Billy Wilder) there was a failure (Joe May), and my only regret is that I only got to see the last hour of this (we watched the news at 6pm and then ate dinner). (The highlight of this wonderful presentation is a “roll call” of those German émigrés who, despite their status in their home countries, could only find one week’s worth of work on the motion picture classic Casablanca [1942].) During the doc, they showed scenes from To Be or Not to Be (1942)—and so I put that on yesterday morning for Mom’s benefit (I think the dark nature of the comedy was a bit off-putting); we also logged in Crossfire (1947; Mom didn’t care for Robert Young), Crazy House (1943; for the Sherlock Holmes gag) and Brother Orchid (1940), which she thought was the best of the bunch.

Once again, I want to thank everyone for the heartfelt sentiments and well-wishes you sent my way—sorry this post isn’t a bit longer but I have to admit I’m sort of surprised at how much the surgery took out of me (I was feeling completely tip-top before I went in). I’m going to sign off for now and look for something to entertain us for the rest of the morning and afternoon.