Yeah, I know, what’s so big about April, right? Well, let me tell you. 2025 was the first time in at least six years that we made it through the entire month of April without illness, broken bones, torn muscles, torn ligaments, or any other ailments that knocked us on our asses for the whole month. It’s a big deal.

2019

On April 5, 2019, I tore the gastrocnemius muscle in my right leg. About 6 weeks earlier, we had started taking the kids to DojoBoom every Friday. It’s an indoor trampoline park. It’s something we all enjoyed, and it provided much-needed exercise for the whole family. I looked forward to it every week. I was particularly interested in the obstacle course. I really liked it because I saw results almost immediately.

The year before, I started doing 20 sit-ups every morning, and over the course of several months, I worked my way up to 250. Two hundred fifty sit-ups became easier to do every day, but I saw no difference in my body, and I became discouraged. With the obstacle course, though, I saw results every week, so each week, I pushed myself a little harder. 

That was what led to my injury. I was so excited to start the obstacle course that week that I went straight to it without warming up on the trampolines or any of the other lower-impact activities. I had left off the week before, trying to conquer the warp wall. The warp wall was a ramp with a steep curve that, as the name suggests, warped up 90º. The idea was to run up it and climb up to the platform at the top of the ramp. So, that’s where I picked up this week, and not on the short wall either. I ran up the big one.

Poo Life Choices

The pain was delayed, but I knew something bad had just happened; I just didn’t know what. The initial jolt in my right calf didn’t hurt. I thought my GoPro fell out of my pocket and bounced off my leg. That’s what it felt like. Seconds later, I was on the ground, holding my leg, in pain that would make, if not the top 10 of my life, then certainly the top 20 most painful experiences I’ve had. 

As I lay on the ground, grabbing my calf and trying to understand what had just happened, a crowd began to gather around me. Bonnie, both kids, their friend Kaden, their other friend Zach, Zach’s dad, other kids, and their parents who were nearby, and of course, DojoBoom staff, who immediately began their injury protocol.

One might think that their injury protocol would be to render aid to the customer who was just injured in their facility, but it’s not. The protocol was meant to mitigate their own liability, not to help me in any way, although they were gracious enough to bring me some ice while I filled out their incident report. 

I injured myself within the first few minutes of walking in the door, and we had paid for an hour. We didn’t want to waste that money or deprive the kids of their weekly romp, so I found a bench to put my leg up and ice my calf while everyone else enjoyed themselves.

Zach’s dad sat with me. He is a veteran Hollywood stuntman, so he has had his share of torn muscles and ligaments. He made it seem like a torn muscle was no big deal, but it didn’t feel that way. Without surgery, how can the muscles grow back together properly? And if it doesn’t grow back together properly, my leg will never be the same as it was. How is that not a big deal? I mean, just look at the way the guy walks.

The 45 minutes that I sat uncomfortably on a hard bench, trying to ignore the pain in my leg, were the longest of my life…up to that point. The 30 minutes in the car on the way home with no way to position my leg that wasn’t agonizing turned out to be even longer. When we got home, I went straight for the couch. Bonnie came in a few minutes later and gave me 1300mg of acetaminophen for the pain. And this is where the fun began.

At no point in my life have I ever been sicker more often than when my oldest son started going to preschool. For about 2 years, I was sick with one thing or another seemingly at all times. I had a shit job that didn’t have things like health insurance, vacation time, or sick days. If I were sick, I just had to go to work, have a miserable day, and spread disease like a conservative.

To cope with the symptoms until I could return to my bed for a few hours before the next day started, I consumed a wholly unadvisable amount of cold medicine. What I found particularly effective was DayQuil, the active ingredient of which is acetaminophen. It allowed me to breathe and minimized my coughing enough that I could pass as someone who wasn’t a harbinger of plague. 

During this time in my life, I honestly couldn’t say how much DayQuil I consumed. Not a healthy amount, I’m sure. There was even a 6-month period where I was also taking Wellbutrin. I had always read on the DayQuil box that it shouldn’t be taken with MAO Inhibitors, but I had no idea what an MAO inhibitor was, so I ignored the warning. Obviously, if I were on an MAO inhibitor, I would know it, right?

Evidently not. I took DayQuil with the Wellbutrin for a couple of weeks, and I noticed that during the day, my face would go numb. (This, of course, was long before The Weeknd.) The first time I noticed this was happening, I was driving to a job, and I turned to my coworker and said, “I can’t feel my face.” Alarmed and confused, he snapped his head in my direction and exclaimed, “What?!” Realizing the irregularity of what I had just said, I casually replied, “Nothing.”

It’s important to remember that all actions have consequences. You can’t spend years and years popping any sort of pill without some sort of unintended side effects. One morning, I wasn’t feeling well, so I took 2 DayQuil capsules in my van on my way to my first job that morning. The job was cleaning all of the carpet in a townhouse and a couple of sofas.

I started with the sofa, and about halfway through cleaning it, I started to become very nauseous. I didn’t know why. I was trying to think of what I could have eaten, but it was just the usual things that I normally eat for breakfast. I took Dayquil 2 hours before, but that had never bothered me before. It was very difficult to work while trying to talk myself out of throwing up. I did the best I could.

As I returned to the house after retrieving something from the van, the customer stopped me to ask a question. We were standing in her entryway with a small powder room to my left. I knew I was going to throw up any second, so I was trying to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, but it wasn’t quickly enough. In mid-sentence, I hurled myself into the powder room, slammed the door behind me, and then emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet. I felt a bit better.

When I came back out, the customer was gone. She never said anything about me abruptly jumping into the bathroom, which I thought was weirder than what I had done in the first place. I went back to work, but the nausea came back too. Many years and many colds later, I would discover that I had built up a sensitivity to acetaminophen.

How Quickly We Forget

Of course, that discovery was made years before this gloomy, rainy Friday that I tore my gastrocnemius. I had long since stopped taking anything with acetaminophen. In fact, I went a whole decade without taking any sort of over-the-counter medicine of any kind. I just suffered through every cold, flu, and any other ailment I caught.

About 2 hours after taking the pills my wife gave me, I began to feel nauseous. I don’t know if you have ever had to throw up just hours after tearing a muscle in your leg, but I 0/10 recommend. I’ll tell you the secret, though. You have to pick one. Either you favor your sore leg and puke wherever you can, or you endure the pain and get every last drop in the toilet. There is no way to find a comfortable position for both your injury and your vomiting.

It was not unlike the time I was sick with what I suspect was Norovirus, and I was exploding from both ends. I would sit on the toilet and shit, and then quickly turn around and throw up. I reached a point, though, when both ends were about to go off at the same time. There was nothing I could do. One of them was going to have to be spilled indiscriminately like so many loads of semen in a young man’s life. I stuffed my head in the bowl, and shit on the floor.

Back In Good Ol’ 2019

It took 2.5 hours for me and my stomach to get square. I lay down on the couch, empty and defeated. I was cold, my leg hurt, my stomach hurt, my throat hurt, and I was just all around miserable. 

The next day, Saturday, was the sunniest and most beautiful day that we had had in months, and since I had spent the whole previous day in pain in the house, I wanted to spend the weekend in pain outside. A couple of weeks before, a customer had offered me an old recliner. Having no personal interest in it, I was inclined to refuse it, but since we were planning a garage sale in a few weeks, I accepted it in hopes that I could flip it for cash. I’m glad I did. I made my wife and my son drag it out back. I sat down and found that with the leg rest up, I could almost eliminate the pain. Bonnie put two pieces of KT Tape over my calf, and then I iced it for most of the day. 

The boy’s friend spent the weekend with us. And as the friends of your children are wont to do, he clogged the upstairs toilet, which continued to run and fill and overflow. I was, of course, in the backyard when this happened and had no idea what was going on inside the house. Bonnie was in the shower downstairs, so she wasn’t immediately aware of the situation either.

When she got out of the shower, she heard water pouring out of the ceiling in the entryway, and she, quite understandably, flipped out a little. She ran to the stairs wearing only a towel wrapped around her boobs yelling to our boys that the house was flooding. But when her foot hit the wet tile, it slid out from under her and smashed against the bottom stair. It broke. Her foot, that is, not the stair. She yelled out in pain and yelled at me to not get up, but of course, I ignored her. My wife is screaming out in pain, and I’m just going to sit there like a lump? Please.

So, now we were both gimped up. Sunday was even warmer than Saturday, so I returned to my recliner, only this time I was wearing shorts. I spent the whole day in my recliner in the shade, and I want to emphasize that point. I was in the shade for the whole day. At no point during the entire day was any part of my skin exposed to direct sunlight. So, how then, could I possibly get the worst sunburn of my life?

Well, you see, many, many years ago, we bought a portable car canopy from Costco. We used it for storage purposes for a couple of years, but then the top of it dried out and rotted in the sun. So I made a new roof for it with galvanized, corrugated steel. It worked very well and made a great roof. But it seems that it also harnesses and focuses the full power of the sun’s ultraviolet light to a single point that happened to be exactly where my chair was.

So, as if a torn muscle wasn’t bad enough, my leg was also now cooked. Neither of us could walk for the whole horrible month of April.

With nothing to do but wallow in pain I started making a series of Facebook posts that I called The Gimp Log that chronicled my experience confined to my recliner from the perspective of prison inmate in a Jacques Custaeuesque manner. In The Gimp Log the role of the warden is Bonnie.

2020: The COVID April

April 2020 was no picnic either. No one was sick or injured, but it was just about the most stressful month of my entire life. With the whole world shut down for COVID, the government was struggling to come up with any real response to what was happening to the people. My business phone stopped ringing that month, and it never really started again. I had booked a few jobs in March for the first week of April. Some of them canceled, but about five kept their appointments. After the first week, though, I had no money coming in.

Fortunately, back in March, Bonnie and I saw what was happening in New York, and we started to prepare. In the middle of March, I heard that banks were offering forbearance plans for mortgages, so I called the number and was able to defer my mortgage payments for April, May, and June until July. And since my mortgage was in forbearance, I saw no point in paying any of my other bills either, so I just stopped paying anything.

Interestingly, I had been in a similar situation in 2014. I was behind on my mortgage for the same three months. When I went to pay them in June, however, the bank wouldn’t take my money unless I paid them for July and August, too. They wanted five months, not three, to bring my balance current. I expected the same would be true this time, too.

One of the bright spots of the COVID lockdown was that tax day was postponed until July 15th. I have always waited until the very last minute to file my tax return, mainly because I owe money every year and don’t want to give the government my money one second before I have to. If I ever thought I was owed a refund, though, you can bet that I’d be racing Ned Flanders to the post office on New Year’s Eve. The downside of tax day being in July was that, in addition to five months of mortgage payments, three months of electric bills, gas bills, water bills, and insurance premiums, I also had to come up with money for taxes.

With no idea how long this situation was going to last, no money coming in, a few thousand dollars in the bank, and bills quickly piling up, I didn’t know what I was going to do come July. We thought very seriously about selling our house or at least refinancing. Bonnie spent the whole month of April calling banks to figure out our options. I spent the month getting the house ready to show if the time came.

On top of our financial struggles, we were dealing with some toxic extended family drama happening in our house. Bonnie’s nephew was living with us, and he had joint custody of his six-month-old daughter with his crazy, cocaine addicted baby mama. He had her for half the week, and she had her the other half. When she was with her mom, she bounced around between three different houses and the manager’s office at Target. When she was with us, she was with us.

The obvious thing to do during a global pandemic of a highly transmissible virus is not to shuffle a baby all over creation, exposing her to dozens of people every day. Her mom, however, didn’t agree. She acted as if she had never heard about the raging pandemic, and like the baby staying with us was a plot to kidnap her. After a volatile fight one night, I put my foot down and kicked everyone out of my house. If the baby couldn’t stay with us, no one could. Really, though, it was just an excuse to kick Bonnie’s nephew out. I was tired of his baby mama drama.

By the end of April, with no prospect of any money starting to flow in, no possibility of selling or refinancing our house, and no hope left that we would be able to come up with the $30,000 I estimated we would need in July to catch up on our past due bills, we gave up. We decided that whatever was to be would be, and we would wait to find out what that was.

2021

I couldn’t have imagined what April had in store for us in 2021, but I should have known something was coming. It was actually turning out to be an ok month. The weather had been nice if not a little cool, and nothing daft had happened to us in the first half of April, and tax day was postponed until May, which was nice, but not great, seeing as I had only paid my 2019 taxes nine months earlier. It seemed like we had a shot at escaping April without any serious drama or trauma. But it was not to be. 

Bonnie and I were out riding our bikes as we always do, and when we were about 1/4 mile away from home, we drifted too close to one another and our handlebars locked, dragging us both to the ground in a spectacular and violent crash. (I mean, I assume it was spectacular for the 6 – 8 people who saw it happen.) Bonnie went down first, and as I followed her to the ground, I saw her head, covered in bright fluorescent green hair, hit the pavement. I landed on my handlebar with a sharp and intense pain in the middle of my back.

We both got up immediately and took stock of our injuries. Bonnie complained about how bad her head hurt, and that seemed to be the worst of her injuries, for the moment. People were coming from both directions, and they all asked us if we were ok. I tried to answer all of them, but I couldn’t get the words out. I couldn’t fill my lungs, and when I tried, there was a sharp pain in my back. We barely even took a minute to rest before we straightened our bikes out and rode home. 

When we got home, Bonnie took off her long-sleeve shirt and her yoga pants to reveal scrapes and cuts that were remarkably deep for having not torn any of her clothes. Her right arm and both of her legs were covered in cuts and bruises. I was in shorts and a t-shirt, and my arms and legs, while scraped, were nowhere near as bad as hers. My right foot seemed to be undoubtedly broken, as were my ribs. The pain in my back was manageable as long as I was sitting up.

The pain in my foot, though, steadily increased as the night approached. It continued to get worse and worse until about 8 pm., and then the pain stopped and never returned. Apparently, it wasn’t broken after all. That night, I went to bed but could not find a way to lie that didn’t hurt. I had to get out of bed, but I got stuck like a turtle on its shell. Bonnie came around to my side to help me out of bed, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the two of us. It felt like we had traveled 40 years into the future to see ourselves as a feeble old couple.

We spent the weekend in pain. Bonnie hurt all over due to the bruises on her arms and legs, but her worst pain moved from her head to her neck. She couldn’t turn her head to the right, but she found that it was easier to manage the pain if she was up and moving than if she just lay down, so she kept herself occupied with chores. I, on the other hand, couldn’t stand up and breathe at the same time. If I sat in an upright position and remained perfectly still, though, I could sort of forget my back hurt at all.

On Sunday, I discovered that our backyard patio furniture was more comfortable than anything we had inside. So we sat out back for a bit, but Bonnie couldn’t get comfortable, so she decided to move to the new hammock that she had bought a couple of weeks before. I tried it out the day I installed it and told her it was the worst hammock I had ever seen. It’s made from outdoor upholstery fabric, but it’s very stiff and also very slick. You have to find the very center of it to balance, or it will toss you out. Of course, that assumes that you were able to get into it in the first place. 

Bonnie attempted to conquer it, but the hammock tossed her out onto the ground. She landed square on the base of her neck. It was exactly the spot that had a huge knot that was causing the pain in her neck for the past 3 days. Now that knot was three times bigger. She sat there balling. I hobbled over to help her up, but she couldn’t even speak. Her right pinky toe was inexplicably torn open, and blood was oozing out and running down her foot. After a few minutes, she got up and we went inside to clean up her toe and lie down.

On a slightly brighter note, two days later, I began feeling much better. It wasn’t to last long, though. As I was pulling the trash cans away from the wall to take them out to the curb, I hurt my back again, and the diminishing pain that I had been feeling all day was replaced with the sharp, stabbing pain from the week before. We were quite the pair that third week of April. 

I’d like to say that we finished the month strong, but on the 26th, we got our 2nd round of the COVID-19 vaccine. We all had sore arms but felt ok. But then on Tuesday morning, Bonnie woke up feeling bad, and she only got worse as the day went on. She slept 6 hours in the middle of the day, a totally unheard of thing for her to do. She spiked a fever in the evening and became nauseous. The optimist in me wanted to believe that this was the worst of it and nothing else could happen to us with only 3 days left of this awful month, but then I didn’t dare to tempt fate to show me what she could do in so little time.

2022

So here we are, beginning another miserable April. Our bike crash the year before, coupled with another crash 6 months prior and years of playing volleyball, left Bonnie with the ulnar nerve in her right elbow bound in scar tissue. The trapped nerve caused her to lose strength in her hand and made her pinky and ring finger numb, causing her pinky to drift away from the rest of her hand.

At its worst, it was at a 45º angle to her hand. She started getting it caught in things. We were walking past the school, and she was gesticulating while she talked, and her pinky got caught in the chain link fence between the sidewalk and the playground. Then, a few weeks later, in a similar manner, she got it caught in the hole at the end of a pot handle that was sticking out of the sink.

But the worst one, the one that got her to finally make an appointment to find out if something could be done about this wayward digit, was yet to come. It was the 8th of August and she was walking out of the garage and as she passed my bandsaw she got her pinky stuck in the end of the fence lock knob. It yanked her whole arm backward as she passed it. Seven months later, she would have surgery to fix it.

Now it’s April 1st again, and she’s three weeks out of surgery. She went to her first physical therapy appointment yesterday. Insurance has approved her for 5 weeks of therapy. All of April. There is a chance she’ll be able to ride a bike again before therapy is done, but I’m not counting on it. The doctor said she’d be able to by summer. In any event, it’s going to be yet another April where our bikes sit idle in the backyard.

2023

April 2023 delivered us a vile and disgusting gift in the form of a softball-sized tumor on our little dog’s leg. It had been growing slowly, but in April it ballooned suddenly and popped open. As we walked, it squirted blood everywhere, and it smelled like a Red Lobster dumpster on a hot summer day.

Bonnie had to keep it bandaged, and when she got home from work one night to change the dressing, she got glazed. She was not happy.

2024

I spent most of April 2024 sick. I assume it was COVID because it lasted for three weeks, but I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know who gave it to me, but when I find them, they’ll pay big.

2025

So, here we are, April is completely behind us, and nothing painful, traumatic, or demoralizing happened to us the whole month! Perhaps I’ve paid my debt for the mirror I broke in 2018, and the curse is lifted! More likely, though, the other shoe is just late to drop.