THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   9/12/2023

Let’s just say “It’s challenging”

Lest the significance of yesterday’s date escape us, local and broader ceremonies commemorated the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania, attacks that shall remain indelibly etched in our minds. Eternal vigilance alone will secure our homeland against foes. Let us hope that it doesn’t take another few thousand lives lost to impress the urgency of unity for survival.

A few days ago, simply writing that title would have been insurmountable. Not physically, mind you, but the required coordination between mind and fingers was almost nonexistent. I’m sure some readers have endured similar types of surgeries; in my case, a total right knee replacement.

Between two “pre-op” meetings, the diagnosis and description of the surgery, it did not register that I would endure days of physical immobilization, and a painful, mentally compromising, drug-induced fog making even reading a challenge. The words legible, concepts understandable but the process beyond my brain’s capacity.

It could’ve been worse; I was paired with a patient, Tim, who’d undergone multiple back surgeries, most recently requiring days of in-patient treatment. The first night we got on famously, yucking it up over movies and broadcast shows, easily mocked and joked about. You could say we were each still above the physical, and mental, morass to come.

On Thursday, a darker reality set in; getting out of bed required a walker (new=$45; used=$7) for me. Tim, however, endured rapidly deteriorating, physically debilitating back pain that had a lifelong truck driver reduced to sobbing through tears over not being able to even roll over in bed without excruciating pain. His wife was able, when she arrived, to rearrange his blankets to allow him to roll over.

I could relate to his situation. A few years back, I had a “stenosis” condition in the L4, L5 lower back, complete with a cyst, arthritis and other things that made rolling over in bed horrendously painful, and walking to the bathroom an endurance test. I was in line for a spinal fusion and, only due to COVID restrictions on bed space, was put off until the pandemic policies were relaxed. Thanks to that, I was on a waiting list; while on that waiting list, my symptoms disappeared, miraculously or otherwise.

So, 3 or 4 days after surgery, the mental and physical cogs are beginning to mesh, allowing me to follow the play action of college football games—and to put words to keyboard for this column. While there are videos of knee replacement surgeries, I could have opted for the type of anesthesia that let me remain conscious. Neither option had any appeal to me—just let me sleep through it, knowing the 30 metal staples, holding the 10-inch-long gash together, will end my “knee modelling” hopes.

Meanwhile, it is relevant locally that Huntington Beach has made the bold, constitutional, and scientifically sound decision to ban all mask and vaccine mandates. I’d love to see a debate on these pages and in Council chambers on the propriety and necessity of allowing mandates in our fair town, with those determined to force others to violate their own conscience and sources of medical information on one side; and those of us who’ve learned truly informative things over the years, standing on facts and principles, on the other side.

I can’t help but crack a wry, knowing smile to think that the same ones that went all hysterical over our officials refusing to celebrate “Pride” (for the “trans,” sex-change, cross-dressers among us—not for the civilizationally normative side), will stand on their little virtual soapboxes, and go to their ideological battlements over mask and vaccine mandates.

Please share the intellectually puny positions you want to enforce upon the rest of us. Please tell us how it is a dire imposition upon you to not allow you to force others to wear the “face diaper,” the sign of submission, and the “jab of physical subservience.” That felt good; mental recovery is progressing.

For those readers missing informed commentary on larger issues, I once again direct your browser to https://donpolson.blogspot.com/ where there has been no interruption to the flow of articles and opinions not otherwise easily found on network, cable or Associated Press “news” fed into your local paper. Even there, an article pointing the finger of accountability at Barack Obama’s policies for high gas and energy prices was “censored.” Can’t have the plebians making connections between current, historically high gas and energy prices—and the Obama/Biden policies directly responsible for the supply shortage.

You might not be aware of the ideological and political lunacy rearing its head in the land: “Insanity in California: AB-957 'gender affirmation' bill passes State Assembly - Newsom on deck”;

“White House Used Misinformation From Foreign Activists to Target Townhall and Censor Americans”;

“Alabama Appeals to US Supreme Court in Battle Over Congressional District Map” shows that judges have no business injecting themselves into political, electoral boundaries.

Plus: Election fraud; Americans were way better off under President Trump; “Proud Boys” prosecution shows how justice ends in America.