I MAY BE ENTITLED TO LARGE SUMS OF MONEY!

I'm not a particularly litigious person, and when I fell on the ice at the train station and tore my rotator cuff, I was prepared to take it in stride. Which is ironic, because I couldn't even take my stride in stride, and that's why I fell on the ice and tore my rotator cuff.

At the time I did not know I had injured myself, figuring that my well-rounded ass had absorbed most of the blow, padded from years of being spanked by my parents, teachers and boy scout leaders. I was not even in the boy scouts.

I thought I simply hurt myself. I even played tennis the next day. But the more people I talked to, the more they convinced me that I should be seeking a large settlement. I have a personal injury for god's sake! An injury is so much more personal when it happens to YOU. I have both pain AND suffering. Does anyone skip the pain and just have the suffering? I may be entitled to large sums of money!

Which lawyer should I go to? I see them on TV: the one with the big handlebar mustache? The lawyer who makes a big show of donning an extremely large hat while he is talking? What about the TV barrister who fills the entire screen with his big, fat, read-headed, bearded face, talking about personal injury while invading my personal space? Maybe Cellino and Barnes, with their pretty song? I sang it in the shower, and then I slipped and fell, but it was my own shower, so I settled out of court. The lawfirm Weitz & Luxenberg specializes in mesophelioma. I heard about their website on the radio: weitzlux dot com. But on the radio it sounded like " white sluts dot com," so I did check out that website, but it was all about lawyers and other boring crap.

Some lawfirms specialize in these weird drugs or operations that caused weird problems. "Did you take Risperdal? If your teenage boy took Risperdal and grew female breasts and started lactating, contact us immediately!" If I had female breasts when I was a teenage boy, I don't think I would be so quick to part with them. Who knows when I might see another pair?

"Did you have vaginal mesh?" The very thought of whatever that is made my head spin. But then I thought about it a little more and thought, hey- if it keeps the damn deer out then I'm in favor of it.

"Do you have 'Non-24?'" YES! I think I do! What is it? "'Non-24' is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder." Where those stupid bugs come by every 17 years and make such a racket you can't sleep? I HAVE THAT! "If you are blind and either can't sleep or have chronic sleepiness you may have 'non-24.'" I'm not blind usually, but when I'm asleep my eyes are closed and I can't see a damn thing! I THINK I HAVE NON-24! OH MY GOD!

"Do you burst out crying, or laugh uncontrollably?" You might have pseudobulbar affect! They used to call this: somebody with PMS watching their kid's driving test. But now there is a clinical name for it, and they are trying to convince people that they have it, so they can create a market for prescription drugs. "Don't call them crazy!" the commercial implores. "Around the bend? Perhaps. Screw loosey? Maybe."

Drug companies are hard at work every day creating pills to cure stuff. Sometimes they have the pill first, and they are left to figure out the stuff that it cures. After a little bit of testing in the lab, it turns out that there are a few side effects. The pills cure your pseudobulbar affect, but you may suffer from acne, shingles, dog bites, sunburns, sideburns, earthworms, bed-wetting and "non-24."

"Also, occasionally death." They include death right after the headaches and listlessness. They figure if the headaches and listlessness didn't kill you, death certainly might, so they had better mention it. However, it is only occasional death, so it's not like I'm dying all the time, just once in a while. By the way what a tease it is to say the word "listlessness" right in the middle of a long list.

Aren't they aware that every commerical like this is going to spawn a zillion hypochondriacs who think they have this condition? Everyone knows at least one hypochondriac at work. I had a co-worker one time that used to wipe down the phone with disinfectant before using it. "Hey you never know where that phone's been," she would say. I said, 'It's always been right there." I think she was afraid that germs might be transmitted THROUGH the phone.

"Is this Rene?" "Yes, whom is this?" "Never mind that, Rene. Do you have any open sores at the moment? And by the way it's: 'Who is this?'" "I do have a paper cut where I tried to file my nails into the wrong folder." "Would you mind holding me next to your sore for a minute?" "Wait a second- is this an air-borne germ?" "So? You were born in Piscataway."

The eighties called: they want their cooties back.

Anyway, I did end up going to a lawyer, about two months after the fact. "Were there any witnesses?" he asked. "YES- I saw the whole thing." I said. "The other side might try to assert that you did something to cause the accident," he said. "You mean something stupid?" I asked. "That might be easy to prove. They could have a parade of witnesses waltz through to testify that I do more stupid things every day than most people do in a week." "Were you tripping when you fell?" he asked. "No," I said, "that wore off in the 70's." The lawyer declined to take the case, but If one of the witnesses fell and injured himself while waltzing through in a parade he could have had a whole new case.



Incidentally, as I was researching the syndrome of "non-24," I came across the following sentence: "The majority of patients with non-24 are totally blind, and the failure of entrainment is explained by an absence of photic input to the circadian clock. However, the disorder can also occur in sighted people for reasons that are not well understood." I could well understand why this was not easily understood this. PLUS, as I was reading this, my foot fell asleep. Coincidence?