22 Minutes by Jeff Spevak

Author:Jeff Spevak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

Ernie’s lesson for the new millennium: your odometer doesn’t hit the eight-decade mark without things going wrong.

Ernie was discovering that in a big way now. Even parties were getting dangerous. Games where a guy sits with a balloon on his lap and, in what must surely be a challenge to personal dignity, his partner bounces on him and attempts to break it. Ernie and Marilyn were pulled into the competition at an Antiguan resort during a 2004 travel-agent junket.

“She jumped on my lap and pushed me right over,” Ernie says.

He knew immediately something in his back had gone awry.

“I wasn’t going to have an X-ray there,” he says, wary of exposing himself to the care of anyone but American doctors. “I laid down for an hour and I couldn’t get back up.”

That would remain the pattern when Ernie returned to Rochester. He was forced to sleep sitting upright on the couch, his feet stretched out on an ottoman. He tried physical therapy and a chiropractor.

“Nothing worked,” Ernie says. “We were considering acupuncture. We had a name of a guy and everything.”

Although, oddly, he could still play golf.

This was a new way of life, and Ernie grudgingly accepted it.

“I had never had a broken bone or anything,” he says. “I never even took an aspirin, even if I had a headache. I was not a pill popper.”

He shrugs. “Now I’m taking them all the time. It keeps me going. I’m not about to stop now.”

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