I Won’t Raise Cain About My New Cane

My life changed dramatically several days ago. I bought a cane at the drugstore for $19.99.

I had put off buying one for a time. Now, however, I’ve been diagnosed with pseudogout (inflammation) in my knee. Walking became too darn painful. That caused me to gimp around and I figured buying a cane might help alleviate the discomfort.

I think I brought on my knee pain from climbing a steep mountain with my wife several weeks ago. Such exercise, I figured, was doing what’s called body wellness, or as the song goes from the Sound of Music, Climb Ev’ry Mountain. But I guess my body didn’t take it all that well climbing this particular mountain.

Actually, it was going downhill from the mountain top that may have done the damage. The next day my legs were sore but I figured that the discomfort would shortly go away. However, after a couple of days, my knee really started to ache.

I went to the doctor who said my knee was inflamed. Take some Advil and stay off your feet as much as possible, he suggested.

I followed his advice. Except it didn’t help my condition when I drove five hours on a vacation trip and got stuck in a massive traffic jam for over an hour on the interstate highway. During all that time, I had to keep my knee bent either on the accelerator or brake because otherwise, obviously, I might have really gotten bent. Then, it wouldn’t be only my knee that was out of joint.

My wife encouraged me to get a cane even if it made me look physically disadvantaged, to use that euphemism instead of how in olden days we used to say a more insensitive term starting with cr. Which I took to mean I was getting older, as if I didn’t know that already. It also meant she too might feel she was getting up in years because she was married to someone who no longer had that youthful athletic vitality, which reflected back to her own lessened vitality.

Now that I’ve started using the cane, I’ve become hyper aware of all the other people on canes, walkers, or in wheelchairs. I’m thankful that in comparison to those people with very serious physical ailments my problem is not life threatening, as far as I know.

Although it’s certainly not good to need a cane, I can see the positives in having one. Maybe now in an overcrowded subway car, my fellow passengers will relinquish their seat to me because aren’t people supposed to be considerate to the physically challenged?

Having a cane also is a great conversation starter among acquaintances or strangers, particularly those with their own body ailments who rely on support apparatus.

In fact, just today as I was walking with my new cane, my neighbor Kate, who I had always just nodded to in recognition, started up a conversation. She asked what had happened to my leg and how her own knee was still throbbing from a recent operation to make it feel better.

Kate said I was courageous to get a cane. She said her brother-in-law, who also suffers from knee problems, is acting pigheaded (no offense to pigs or their heads) for refusing out of vanity or ego to get one.

Leave it to my skeptical friend Mack to return me to the cold reality about using a cane. Maybe criminals will see me as an easy mark to knock me over and steal my wallet, he said. Or people in a hurry won’t have the patience to walk behind someone limping along, brushing me aside to get where they’re going.

Obviously, I’m hoping through my doctor’s treatment that my pseudogout subsides and I can ditch the cane. Until then, I’ll take comfort that the cane gives me support–physically and emotionally. Which means that rather than raise cain about it because I can’t go on my usual power walks, or play golf or tennis, not to mention mountain climbing, I’ll take up swimming and other activities that don’t involve putting pressure on my knee. I guess you could call that landing on your feet.

 

Eric Green is a notorious humor writer with his published free-lance articles appearing in Points in Case, Humor Times, the Washington Post, Oddball Magazine, and elsewhere. One of his latest short stories, “A Marriage Made in Heaven,” was published by the Hudson Valley (New York) Writers Guild.