Dem Bones..Dem Joints..Dem Dry Docs....

It isn't fair. I didn't know I was being stalked from the bushes by an old and crazy woman. I didn't notice (being forty-five and fabulous!) as she took her knife and fork to me, eating in little slices over the next five years, until I was consumed...like the little gingerbread girl! Help, I've been eaten by an old woman and I can't get up! I know I'm in here somewhere...but no mirror shows it, instead I think I'm passing a portrait of my grandmother. If I lift my glasses up to peer through the reading part, it's sometimes a portrait of my father...something about the Clark Gable moustache I suppose!

Did I miss the part in the Pre-Being Contract where preemies hit fifty...and jumped immediately to seventy as penance for being too eager? I was always eager. I ate life in large delicious bites, singing and dancing my way across the continent more times than I can count. I have the tailbone of a long-distance trucker; once journeyed across Canada in March, sitting sideways on top of the old truck's engine and staring into the hypnotizing, never-ending snow. My tailbone never quite forgave me for that trip.

What business does this old woman have, eating me? What chutzpah to chow-down on me yout' and then begin to crumble around me! I try to fight to rebuild bones with those nasty weekly pills that feel like setting cement in the endless half-hour wait before I can get to my cuppa and come alive. Doc said I needed extra calcium too but then there was too much in my blood and still not enough in the styrofoam bones. Oh, here comes the fun part....

Now they tell me I have become a little oyster, trying to make pearls of calcium deposits! I'm wearing them but they're not half as pretty as my Auntie Mary's little double-string with the antique-iffy catch. I suppose it's the only dressed-up part of me as I head through the revolving daktari doors! A few more x-rays and I should be able to get a part-time job as a standing lamp for room ambiance, pearls on the shade.

Don't you just love when a young doctor comes bouncing into the room, obviously oiled and with correct moving parts, tells you that you're a degenerate...bones, joints and discs...and then tells you that you SHOULDN'T be in this pain, as if you are a naughty wee girl vying for some attention. Excuse me young man, do you not see this old woman who ate me and is crumbling? I don't suppose you know what it feels like to lose two inches in height because of stress-fractures do you? I don't suppose you have knees and hips that can tell my local weather FAR more accurately than KING 5?

The bones are going missing under the porcelain tombstones of my teeth, leaving them to tilt and fall like vandals have come and gone under cover of darkness. Next Monday three molars will hit the scrap-heap...at an inflated cost that makes my poor grey matter deflate alongside our already fashionably skinny piggy-bank. The uber-expensive upper denture has never been able to fit...and of course it was the ol' woman's fault for having deformed bones...pay the bill please...ca-ching!

For the last month I have felt old, sore, stressed and tired like never before. I'm a little weak and shaky from the "suck-food" diet BUT...everyone tells me how fabulous I look with the drastic weight-loss....woo-hooo....*faint*

I won't go quietly, old woman...and I'll hold onto my sense of humour till the last. Oh, I'm gonna be a character alright...a tiny wee bent amputeeth sucker fish in pearls!