Today’s post will give you a little bit of insight into my ex-husband’s mental illness, which he calls “sense of humor”. But first, a little background. Eight weeks ago, my daughter Lauren had surgery on her knee. She has a condition in both of her knees called discoid meniscus. For most of her life, it was just this weird party trick she could do with her knees, popping them at will and generally grossing everybody out. But back in February, she began to develop pain in her right knee and started limping. We went through several weeks of diagnostic testing and found out that she needed surgery to repair the torn meniscus in her knee. Her post-surgery recovery was going well, she was done with rehab and progressing as expected. And then she went swimming with her Dad and slipped on the wet concrete and fell on her bad knee. It immediately swelled up and was painful for her, so we made an appointment to go back and have it checked out by her orthopedic surgeon. The appointment was this morning, and my ex-husband (feeling somewhat guilty about the accident, I think) wanted to come along. Since he offered to drive and I’ll take any excuse to save a little gasoline, I agreed.
I should mention that I work at the pediatric hospital where this clinic is located. I know these doctors and some of the staff personally. I worried that I would be embarrassed by my ex, and he did not disappoint. We were led into the exam room by the nurse, and upon entering the room, my ex loudly exclaimed “Where are the nachos???” The nurse turned and looked at him with an “are you insane?” kind of look, and politely asked “Pardon me?”
“Nachos”, he said. “Where are the nachos?”
At this point, I turned to him and said “Sit down, Keith, you’re not being funny.” The nurse seemed relieved that I had intervened and quickly excused herself. I sighed, because I was certain that she was running out to the nurses’ station to tell everyone about the “crazy Dad” in Exam Room 2.
“Why are you talking about nachos?” I asked. Here’s where I’m stupid. I try to understand what goes on in his head. This is somewhat like trying to understand why your dog sniffs another dog’s ass. It will never make sense to you, so just stop trying to wrap your brain around it. Even knowing this, I still tried to make sense of it and asked him what the hell he was talking about. He said, and I’m not even lying about this, “Nachos is a funny word. Everybody thinks so. I say it to put people at ease with me.”
Of course. What was I thinking?
The rest of our visit was uneventful, except for the time that he deliberately mispronounced the surgeon’s name and called him Dr. Aioli, and the time he grilled the resident physician about his credentials and said “So are you a real doctor?” Aside from that, he was lovely. We don’t know yet if Lauren did any more damage to her knee, but we have a plan in place and a deadline established. If she continues to improve, we won’t do anything. If she doesn’t, we’ll scan her knee again and she will potentially need another surgery. But for now, we are waiting and watching and I’m okay with that plan.
It’s days like this that I am reminded (not that I’ve ever, for one second, forgotten!) why I divorced him in the first place. I hope that when he dies, he donates his brain to science, because it would keep a team of researchers fully engaged for at least a century.
