A cast itches, there’s no two ways about it. It’s absolutely maddening when it’s in an area I can’t reach, but usually if I ignore it, it goes away pretty quickly.

The one thing that’s making me batshit crazy right now is the place where my stitches are itches. And it won’t stop.

I could reach it to scratch it if I found a long enough item to scratch with, but I’m supposed to get the cast off and the stitches out tomorrow, so I can’t risk a) ripping stitches or b) getting anything infected.

So I have about 13 more hours to sit here, trying to ignore the massive itch on my foot, and hoping this at least goes away long enough for me to get some sleep.

I was a real goody two shoes when I was growing up, so I’ve never actually been grounded. Lately, I feel like I’ve been getting a taste of what I missed out on.

It’s been about six weeks since the first cast went on, and I’ve barely left the house. I do still have TV privileges unlike a grounded teenager, but I don’t have much else.

Even when I could sort of walk after the first cast but before the surgery, the longest I’ve been out is for a few hours.

I bought a tank of gas before the first cast. Even picking up and dropping off my mom at LAX, it’s still half full.

I’ve got another week in the cast and then a couple days of trying to decrease the atrophy enough to come back to work.

All I want is to get out of the apartment to do more than wash all my bedding or get the mail.

Why does it feel like it’ll be a fucking eternity before I can do that?

I love my apartment, but being here all the time points out to me with a flashing neon sign its one very glaring flaw: It’s fucking hotter than hell in here.

I live on the second floor of my building. There’s very little shade, the airflow is poor, heat rises from downstairs, and when the marine layer burns off, the sun just flat-out bakes my apartment.

Consequently, even though most of my windows are open and I have 2 fans going and it’s 62 degrees outside right now, it’s still over 75 degrees in here. It was over 80 this afternoon.

When I run my window unit a/c, which I try to do minimally, it creaks and sadly fights to keep the place under 75.

There’s an apartment that might be coming open downstairs, a little more money but it’s already remodeled and it has a small patio.

I’d been considering moving down because of the foot, but right now I’m thinking I might melt before the foot gets better if I don’t move.

I joked after what happened last year on my birthday that for my 26th birthday I was going to spend the entire day hiding inside, not doing anything.

Turns out I wasn’t kidding. Luckily, I’ve made it through the day so far without hurting anything new, so I’m hoping this is a good sign of things to come.

Surgery went well, the most painful part of it being getting up at 5am to be at the surgery center at quarter to six. Mercifully, since they just sedated me instead of using full anesthesia, I was out of the surgery center by 9am.

The doctor found that the accessory navicular bone that he was taking out was badly tangled up in my posterior tibial tendon, a complication that he said he’d never seen in 30+ years of being a foot surgeon.

It kind of sucks, because it means the three weeks in a cast I spent hoping it would heal on its own were even more futile than I initially thought.

However, the screwy situation didn’t show up on either MRI, so I suppose there’s nothing the Doc could have done different, and you always want to avoid surgery if you can.

However, the good news is that such an oddity a) provides an explanation for why it hurt so much for so long and b) makes me more hopeful that this will, in fact, be a permanent fix.

That permanent fix, my friends, is all I really wanted for my birthday.

A few odds and ends before I disappear into Foot Surgery Land tomorrow:

- Disgusting double-entendre of the day.

- CBS resurrected Jericho, which makes me happy because I enjoyed how insanely ridiculous that show was. I was not enough of a fan to send unsolicited tons of peanuts to CBS, but still, it’s nice to know the show will live to create even more egregious plot holes.

- Mom’s here to help me out with the first couple post-surgical days when I’ll be doped to the gills, which will be helpful. However, mom snores REALLY loud. I’d forgotten about that.

- I have to be at the surgery center tomorrow at 5:45am, so I’m getting up at 5. Between mom snoring and Chaplin yowling, I don’t think they’re even going to have to give me a sedative to get me back to sleep.

So the surgery is taking place Thursday, June 7th, or 364 days after I first hurt this bad boy, or one day before my birthday.

The good news is that I will be on some very excellent drugs for my birthday. Nothing I wanted more this year than to be high as a kite! Well, perhaps that this would have gotten better months ago like it should have, but I digress.

Mom, who I’d managed to hold off from coming so far, has taken over dad’s traditional role of Helpful but Overreacting Parent, and is coming out for the surgery.

It will likely take me until she gets here to get this place clean enough to prevent her from having a heart attack at the sight of it on arrival. And she’ll still say “God, this place is filthy!” no matter how long I spend cleaning it.

It’s official: I need surgery. Sometime next week, not sure when yet. Whee!

It’s pretty insane how much my left leg atrophied over three weeks. It really looks like it’s from a different person, particularly when compared to my right leg which has been carting my fat ass around all this time.

I’d post pictures but a) the pictures don’t really capture the difference and b) my leg still looks pretty hideous given that it was imprisoned for weeks.

The small solace is that I can at least hobble in the boot until the surgery. The pegleg will sit to the side, since I’ll need it for another 3 weeks after the surgery. But for now: Hobbling.

The leg hurts like a motherfucker (I’m sure all the muscular atrophy isn’t helping matters there), and I’m still supposed to keep it elevated pretty much all the time, but at least I can take out the trash now.

Yay?

A few small pieces of flotsam and jetsam, Krazy-glued together into one for your convenience.

1. Doc’s taking off the cast tomorrow, so I find out if (*cough cough* when *cough cough cough*) I need surgery. At least I’ll finally be able to scratch this itch on the outside of my leg that’s been driving me nuts for days.

2. I really have got to figure out why my apartment heats up faster than my damn oven. I’m trying some heat control window film (if I can figure out how to get it on there) on the giant front window to see if that helps, but if it’s getting to be 80 inside when it’s not even 70 outside? I’m fucked when it’s 100 outside.

3. That guitar at the end of the episode that aired tonight? I have been lusting over that exact guitar for six years. I almost bought one when it was cheaper, but then I had to replace my car’s entire exhaust system, and away went my guitar fund. When they took that sucker out of the box, I was green with envy. When it was played by a talented guitarist, I was even more jealous, because it sounds fucking amazing. The prop department has put me On Notice that if it goes missing, they’re coming after me. Probably prudent of them.

Having spoken to precisely two people in person in the last week and a half, including my neighbor who came up to tell me that anytime I ran water in my apartment her kitchen was flooding, it was nice to have Miss Cleo come by tonight.

However, I’ve been so starved for human contact, I fear I may have become this guy:

Rhetorical Pleasantry Elicits 45-Minute Response

KANSAS CITY, MO-”When he put his hand on my shoulder, I knew it would be a while,” recalled Harding, who could not escape from the monologue.

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I’m strongly considering declaring “for the sake of my sanity” a legitimate reason to leave the house.