That’s, going to catch up with you! No, it won’t. Yes, it will! No, it won’t! Wait and see. Dang, it did!
By Benjamin Groff II GroffMedia© | benandsteve.com | ©2026
November 09, 2026
Good morning, my fellow coffee drinkers.
Everyone who ever told me, “You’ll feel that when you’re older,” was right.
Damn it.
Sliding across a car hood looked much easier on television. So did jumping down a flight of stairs to get ahead of somebody.
When you landed on your feet and kept going, you figured you had gotten away with it.
Apparently, those bumps and bruises kept records. Years later, they found my forwarding address.
For about ten years, pain management treatments helped me keep moving. Injections. Nerve treatments. Another appointment, another attempt to quiet something that had decided to holler.
Then the treatments stopped helping enough.
It was time for surgery.
On July 24, 2025—my birthday, because apparently cake wasn’t sufficient—Dr. Yeung performed surgery on my lower back through an incision below my belly button.
When I stood afterward, the pain in my left leg and foot was gone.
Gone.
Unfortunately, my right leg and foot had decided to contribute.
The doctor explained that this could happen during recovery and should improve as I healed and became more active. I had questions. Several of them.
But as recovery progressed, that pain eased, too.
Now we could turn our attention to my right arm.
That arm vibrated, hurt, and woke me at night feeling as though it had died two years earlier and nobody had notified the rest of me.
It had become a headache attached to my shoulder.
On March 5, 2026, Dr. Yeung operated on my neck.
By then, I felt like a Volvo arriving for scheduled maintenance.
Up on the rack. Replace the troublesome parts. A little time in the recovery bay. Then Steve could collect me and take me home to Otis.
I arrived wearing a substantial neck collar.
Otis looked alarmed. I suspect he remembered wearing a cone himself and feared he knew what they had done to me.
I assured him there had been no such procedure.
I still had my deep puppy voice.
With my back repaired and my neck recovering, I thought we might finally have completed the overhaul.
Then, in September, I took a turn across the den floor that nobody should ever attempt without a choreographer.
