Thorn Update

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but the phone won’t stop ringing! Home phone, cell phone, even my email is off the hook!

With my post yesterday, it seems that everybody wants to know how my hand is doing. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS. Ideology doesn’t matter – FOX and MSNBC have been leaving messages, driving my wife and daughters nuts. The print media has been pounding on my front door since last night – The Times, The Post, The Herald, The Tribune, even The Bee and The Post-Dispatch. If this avalanche of concern doesn’t recede, I’m gonna have to escape out the back window incognito and spend a couple of days at an anonymous motel.

The hand is better, thank you. There will also be more posts forthcoming, even today. Little One’s birthday was Friday, and we all had a blast. A crazy night last night, too, watching our friends’ kids. And now I’m faced with the continual existentialist crisis: What to read next.

As to the hand, non-professional opinions ranged everywhere from Slept On It Funny to Premature Arthritis and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Dunna about all that. But the pain – really, an uncomfortable ache; not a “pain” like lower back pain or dental pain – seems to have migrated from the thumb area to the area below my ring and pinky fingers. The wrist itself still aches.

When I splay my fingers, really spread them out, in a west-northwest-north-northeast-east pattern, I get a burn like I get when I do yoga for the first time after a couple months’ layoff. But it feels good after a minute or so. Other than that, I haven’t tried any over-the-counter medication, primarily because of my irrational fear of poisoning myself to death.

So … make of that what you will, George Stephanopolis. I will return to writing, Diane Sawyer, in fact, already have. And you, Frank Rich, yes, you’ll get my reviews of The Virginian and The Lord of the Rings, part trois. Be patient; Hopper has a shipload of ship to do today. But a return to the electronic page is not only immanent, it is achieved!