I got my first shot of steroids today. It was kind of a letdown because it was not paired with a Major League Baseball recruitment letter or a yellow jersey, but I can still report that the experience was a pleasant one for the fractured rib.
Dr. Luke, my excellent Canadian sports medicine doctor, had offered a steroid shot into my sternum as a last resort if the pain got to be too much but the shot itself sounded so painful – needle to bone?? – that I didn’t jump on it. Today’s injection wasn’t quite that brutal. The cheerful assistant physical therapist taped two pads to my body, one with an internal pouch filled with steroids on the fractured rib, the other flat one on my abdomen. Both patches were hooked up to an electrical current. The vibration and heat force the skin to osmose the steroids into the wounded area and the flat pad acts as a ground. How cool is that?
I wish I could think of another application for the technology. If we could liquify common sense, perhaps we could send the patches out to minimum wage workers and they’d all vote Democratic?
Displaced 
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