The Reminders Just Keep Coming

A few months ago, it was a bed's headboard that kicked my butt. Yesterday, it was the remnants of a couple old bushes I had cut down some time back, along with a surrounding area of heavy ground cover. In both cases, I ended up having to pay a visit to the local Patient First neighborhood medical center.

In the first incident, the headboard fell, slamming into the side of my knee, then sliding down my leg and ending by claiming some of the skin from around my ankle. Ultimately, I had a "melon" swell up on the side of my knee that, for a good spell, made it impossible for me to wear jeans. I either couldn't get the pant leg past my knee, or if I could, the pain from the melon and all the accompanying bruising while wearing them was more than I wanted to tolerate.

Yesterday's encounter was with a picket fence on one side of my house. For a matter of several weeks now, I've been having to take the weedeater to the former area of ground cover to keep it from springing back to life...with no problems whatsoever. As luck would have it yesterday, however, I ended up getting my feet tangled in the earlier mentioned remnants of an old bush, lost my balance, and started falling. In reaching for anything available, the backside of my left arm, just above the elbow, impaled the tip of one of the picket-fence boards.

My wife cleaned up the wound, applied some Bacitracin, and applied a large bandaid. As I readied for an early bedtime, though, so I could be ready for an early-morning fishing trip, I became the target for comments about maybe needing to get a tetanus shot this morning and/or seeing if a couple of stitches might be in order. When I dozed off, the fishing trip was still on my agenda, but my thinking had changed when the alarm went off this morning. I opted to give up my fishing trip and go see what the doctor had to say.

As a result, I now have a new tetanus shot, and I'm on a regimen of antibiotic tablets twice a day for a spell. I also find myself once again bemoaning the fact I'm getting older, clumsier, crankier, and you-name-it. Not helping things is the reality that my fishing skills (if I truly ever had any to start with, that is) are diminishing equally as quickly as everything else about me.

Accordingly, I went looking around the Internet to see if I'm the Lone Ranger here, or if perhaps there are lots of other folks who feel similar. As it turns out, I have a whole bunch of company. One video in particular caught my attention, and I want to share the link here, in case some of you other cantankerous ol' codgers might like to see it, too. The video is titled "Why Do We Start To Suck At Bass Fishing As We Get Older?" It's part of Randy Blaukat's Intuitive Angling series. Just click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qREfMd5gzMk.