bad news in the form of an early piano delivery

Stranger things have happened.

The new piano my parents just bought, which I described in a recent post is being delivered TODAY instead of tomorrow.  I'm not yet strong enough to hop into my car and cruise the neighborhood until the piano is successfully moved from the truck in which it arrives to the upstairs loft that will be its permanent home. (It's probably more correct to say that the loft will be the piano's semi-permanent home. I doubt if my parents move again that they plan to leave an eighteen-thousand dollar piano for the next owners of our present home, although from the way they've been throwing money around lately, it wouldn't totally shock me if they did just that.) For that matter, I'm not really even sufficiently recovered for someone else to drive me around the area until the moving process has been accomplished. My brother could carry me down to his car, but my dad said I should not be riding in a car unless it's important for me to travel from one place to another, such as to a doctor's appointment, because even the impact of the seat belt against my incision in an abrupt stop could cause major damage. None of our neighbors are home -- everybody works around here -- or I would ask if I could borrow one of their sofas for an hour or so, but my fear is that a crashing piano would create noise that could be heard all over the neighborhood and beyond.

I need drugs to get me through this crisis of sorts. I have many doctors in my bona fide family and in my virtual family, but they're all working today except for my Uncle Jerry who's s semi-retired. He made a few extremely lucky investments early in his career. He now has so much money that the premiums for the malpractice insurance to protect his holdings would cost him more than he could reasonably charge his patients, so he's basically been forced into early retirement even though he's never been found to have committed malpractice in his entire career. It's one of the things wrong with the health care system today. A doctor who would love to work and is in a field of heavy demand -- he's an OB-GYN --  cannot afford to work because so many scheister lawyers are chasing ambulances around just looking for doctors to sue.  Uncle Jerry occasionally works because the hospital is so desperate that it pays his insurance premiums in times of heavy demand. He doesn't even ask to be paid. He just doesn't want to come out of the deal financially behind for having worked.

Anyway, I called my Uncle Jerry and told him I need some sort of drug to render me unconscious from the time the piano movers arrive until the piano is installed into its semi-permanent location in the loft. He said he can't justify doing that. "What you're asking for is basically milk of amnesia because you're afraid the piano movers will drop the piano down the stairs," he restated.

"Not that drug specifically," I explained, "but something to knock me out cold."

"Sorry, honey, but I can't do that for you, " he said. "If you're telling me you're in pain and need something for it, I can help you with that.  If you're having more anxiety than you can cope with, I might even be able to help you with that, but I can't knock you out cold."

"Do whatever you can, please, " I begged him.

"When's the piano supposed to arrive?" he asked.

'In about forty-five minutes," I answered.

'I'll get there as soon as I can," he told me. He lives about fifteen minutes away. The truth of the matter is that if it were an oversized refrigerator being moved up the stairs, he wouldn't come, but he's a talented pianist. He wants to try out the new piano. The technician will have to tune it before it's playable, but that should only take a few minutes. It will need to be tuned again in a couple of weeks, once it has settled in, but my dad can do that.

So my Uncle Jerry should be here in about five minutes to inject me with something that will keep me from having a complete anxiety attack. I hate injections, which is indicative of my level of anxiety concerning the upstairs move of this piano. Not only could the piano be demolished in one fell swoop; someone could be killed in the process. I'm probably going to have nightmares about it for weeks. I wish my parents could have had the  #%&;* thing delivered while I was in the hospital, before I even knew anything about it.