What Does Decrepit Bring To My Mind

 (Looks at calender, HOW many weeks of this "word of the week" exercise remains in 2014??? Oh, 38 more weeks to go.... ok then. It's just some words are more fun to talk about than others! But I do admire my fellow Whores for all the many and varied ways they each spin every word differently.) This week, for the word "decrepit", I went all stream of consciousness and will share with you the first few images that came to mind...

I have to say my first thought when I saw the word was an old sagging barn, turned gray by the harsh elements. There used to be lots of those up Upstate New York, where I grew up. In the South they'd usually have "See Rock City" painted on the roof, but not in NY. I've actually been to Rock City, which is in Tennessee and features rock formations, beautiful gardens and breathtaking views. You can see seven states from one panoramic viewpoint...

The next thing that came to mind was the character of  Sir Peter

Weyland in the movie "Prometheus." I think he would definitely qualify as "decrepit" by anyone's standard. Rich and obssessed, but decrepit. No amount of money can make you youthful after a certain point, apparently. The actor, Guy Pearce, is not however decrepit and looks pretty darn good when he's not playing a thousand year old guy (or however ancient Weyland was supposed to be).

The third thing that came to my mind was the science fiction novel "Old Man's War," by John Scalzi.  Here are the first three sentences from the book blurb on Amazon:

John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.

I really enjoyed that novel, I must tell you...John Perry isn't "decrepit" for long after he joins the army...don't want to give spoilers...

Decrepit makes me think of rocking chairs for some reason. Actually I received my bentwood rocking chair, which I no longer have, when my first daughter was born, because I had it firmly in my head I needed a rocking chair to sit with my baby. Apparently it had escaped my notice how much time one spends walking a fussy child, or driving them around so they’ll sleep or…but we did have lots of good times rocking peacefully, as it turns out. And with my second daughter, and my grandson as well. The rocker got decrepit and worn out, not me!

I think that’s the way it should be….

And since the word decrepit does conjure up visions of old age, I’ll finish with a quote that I love:

“When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.”  Victor Hugo

Flash Fiction - Decrepit

     I left the odd little house down at the end of the street to last. Weedy empty lots surrounded the dingy green clapboard house. It’s only neighbors were broken glass, scraps of paper and sodden sleeping bags, mostly with no one in them, snarled in the briars trying to overrun the house. Thick, thorny blackberry vines had grabbed hold of one sagging corner of the house. I’d never been able to tell whether the house sagged because the berry vines were pulling it down or if vines had snagged the house because it had begun crumbling of its own accord.

     I didn’t bring the delivery truck up the narrow street. No room to turn around and the gravel shoulders were notoriously soft. Besides. The old man living in the house, Mr. Tilfson, never had anything bigger or heavier than a breadbox delivered. I carried his package up the street. I strode past the empty lot stinking of rot and urine. Homeless encampment, I assumed. Why didn’t the old man call the cops?

     He knew my delivery schedule and I heard him coming out to the porch to meet me. Scraaaaaape. Clunk. Scraaaaaaape. Clunk. Listing like a barge taking on water, Mr. Tilfson listed. To remedy that situation, he dragged a great big axe around with him where ever he went. He used it to prop his decrepit, bony frame upright. The metal axe head rested on the ground. His gnarled hand rested on the butt end of the handle.

     “Here you go,” I said, stopping one step down. I offered up his package.

     Sparse, wiry, white hair poked like straw from beneath a baseball cap so old and filthy it was colorless. Dark bird eyes followed my every move and when I set the cardboard box into his free hand, he grinned a gap-toothed smile. He set the box on the porch rail.

     “Afore you run off,” he wheezed. “Do an old man a favor? Got a deep freeze in the car port. Been a long time since these old bones’d let me reach down into the bottom of it for a morsel of venison.”

     “Sure thing.” I rounded the front of the house.

     He followed, dragging that damned axe across the porch as he came. Bloated black plastic trash bags, the skeletons of ancient lawnmowers and thick spider webs cluttered the car port, but against the back wall, a white deep freeze stood, the path to it clear of debris. The old man hefted his axe down one step, then, one hand on the railing, the other on the axe handle, hobbled down. He tailed me to the freezer, the metal of his makeshift crutch screeching on the concrete beneath my feet.

     He hadn’t lied about not being able to get into the deep freeze. It took me two tries to break the seal and lift the lid. The damned thing wasn’t deep. It was cavernous. Leaning over to snatch a white paper wrapped packet off the bottom took me off my feet. I picked up the packet.

     And looked into the pair of wide open, iced over eyes the wrapped meet had been concealing. My breath went out in a rush.

     “Nice thing about being a butcher,” the old guy wheezed. “I can refill the larder my own self. Hand over the meat.”

     What else could I do? Staring at those eyes, I handed up the packet. “I don’t understand how you get away with it.”

     “Old age and treachery kid.”

     Scraaaaape.

     Excrutiating pain exploded at the back of my head. I fell into those eyes. So far down.
    
     “Old age and treachery."

Decrepit Back

by Allison Pang

I don't have much to add to this week except to mention my back. My glorious back.

Back the Betrayer, I name it.

Breaker of Discs, and Grinder of Bones.

Bringer of Pain.

STUPID BACK.

Decrepit being the word of the week, I have a long and sordid history with my back and assorted back issues.

Most of it all began in February of 2008 when I bent down to chance Lucy's diaper. (She was about 18 months old.) My L4-L5 disc blew out, leaving me unable to get off the floor. Keep in mind, the DH was at work and I had a toddler and a 4 year old. And it took a while for the 4 year old to find a phone he could reach.

Lucy thought it was great fun, mind. She wobbled around me and straddled my head and bounced up and
down on it and then then opened a package of peanut butter crackers and pulled them apart and laid them all over my legs.

Yeah.

Fun.

I ended up at pain specialist and had an MRI done and was told that even though I was just past 30 years old, I had the back of someone who was 60. Not only did I have the cracked disc, but I also had a number of odd birth defects that made things "interesting." I've got a vertebrae or two that aren't fully formed on my right side and a set of facet joints where one is abnormally small and the other is ridiculously large.

Anyway - that was the start of the saga. In the five years after that, I suffered multiple steroid shots, facet-joint injections, a micro-discectomy (which failed), about $10k in out-of-pocket prolo-therapy expenses (which was about 40 injections at a time, every 6 weeks), a discogram, radioablation of the nerves on the left side of my spine, chiropractics, cupping, trigger point injections, magnesium infusions, acupuncture...and a fair amount of painkillers.

I have seen more specialists than I care to think about and everyone had a theory as to what would make me better. The discogram actually showed a Level 5 Dallas grade tear in my L3-L4 disc as well, but as of now that is holding steady and I'm not looking to borrow any more trouble. Could be that it's going to require additional work later on, but eh.

The worst part of all of this is that the cures can hurt just as much as the cause. And worse than that is the fact that it never really stops. Mentally, that's really, really shitty - because you know, no matter what you do, you will always be in pain.  It becomes a vicious cycle. In my case, the initial disc blowout was bad enough, but eventually the disc began to collapse into the spinal column and put pressure on a nerve. Which meant pain running down my left leg, all the time.

The micro-discectomy took care of the nerve issue, but it left the surrounding bone structure unstable, thereby putting a lot of extra pressure on my muscles all around it. Which led to trigger-point muscle knots that just never let go. Those muscle spasms then started pulling hard on the vertebrae and my SI-joint, which started dislocating all the time. Which led to more pain. Which led to more spasms.

When what was left of the L4-L5 disc collapsed on the left side, the vertebrae began to grind together and that's when I ended up finally giving up and turning to painkillers. (I'd been avoiding them for those 5 years because I knew it could be such a slippery road.) But there comes a point when you have to do *something* even to just get a little bit of relief. So I was on opioids for about a year and suffering from a fair amount of depression.

But like everything else, it's a short-lived relief. The more often you take the painkillers, the less they work, and the more you have to take. And that's no good. Between being stoned out of my mind and unable to do anything physical, a lot of my life suffered.

The end result turned out to be another surgery. And I was reluctant to do it. Surgery of this level can't be undone, and I'd read so many horror stories of people who'd had fusions done that left them worse than before, or with new types of pain. I went to at least three different surgeons to try to figure out the best course of action, but I was constantly double guessing myself.

I had the double fusion in September (L4-L5 and L5-S1), and while I ended up giving up some things (the ability to touch my toes, for example) there is an upside.

 Six months out and I'm as close to pain free as I've been in a very long time. (At least as far as the back is concerned.) Sometimes I have a flare, or bad weather makes things ache, but it's a different sort of pain and just knowing it will subside makes all the difference.

Guess The Decrepitness

Oh the burden of falling the fuck apart! Weakened! Infirmed! Feeble!

I'm finding similarities among the aging of my dog, my car, my home, my yard, and ... well, me. Since today is the Day of Fools, let's play a round of "Owning the Ailment."  Match the following signs of decrepitness to the potential owners:

Signs of Decrepitness:

1. Got nailed in the rear. 
2. Blew out supports.
3. Needed oil for the joints.
4. Collapsed progressively. 
5. Broke seals.

Owners:

1. My dog
2. My car
3. My home
4. My yard
5. Me

List your answers below, dear readers.

Now, get off my lawn! 

~ehem~

Fighting the Decrepit

Decrepit.

In my head, I always hear it with the small town Carolina accent of my dad's family. DEE-crpiht.

As in, "that there's a DEE-crpiht shack. Someone oughta tear it down."

Or, "that schoolhouse has gone past DEE-crpiht. I done told the schoolboard."

Mostly, in my grandmother's voice, "I am just gone and DEE-crpiht."

Like those shacks and schoolhouses, my grandmother gradually crumbled under the oppressive heat and humidity of the South. Not a growing thinner and more brittle kind of decline, as with my Colorado grandmother. No, this was a Southern one, where she grew heavier and lost limbs to the rotten rampages of diabetes, as if she'd been overgrown with the kudzu vines of poor diet and nonexistent exercise.

I share her physiology. Every year seems to make the struggle against encroaching weight and flabbiness that much more difficult. I eat (mostly) well and put the miles in on my treadmill desk, but she's on my mind. The "crepit" in decrepit is from the Latin crepare, to make a noise.

I make the noises she did - the groan in bending over. The snap-crick of my joints. I relive her legacy even as I fight it. All these things I inherited from her - the stubborn Scottish smarts, the love of sugar and a long conversation, the tendency to comfortably thicken and spread.

She'd laugh to see my treadmill desk. She'd shake her head at me and tell me to come sit down, have a glass of sweet tea.

But I won't. I drink my tea unsweet and I walk on. Staving off the onslaught of the vines.