How Meh Saved Thanksgiving

So, my wife suffers from infrequent but severe middle back pain--roughly twice a year she is laid up in bed for a few days when it hits her. She's tried medications, hot pads, ice pads, and everything else the doctors can suggest, but it never really works.

So back in September the TENS pain relief bundle went on sale on Meh, I said: why the hell not give a try? After it was delivered it I stuck it on a back shelf to wait the day her back began giving her problems again.

So, that was yesterday. Now, Thanksgiving is a big holiday in our house, and my wife likes to make it a multi-day cooking affair. Sometime yesterday her back began to hurt her and she really began suffering. She struggled through making pies and cranberry sauce and so forth, but at the end of the day she was pretty much laid up in bed. Which was bad, because there was still plenty of cooking to do today (Thanksgiving). And the rest of us are kind of useless when it comes to cooking Thanksgiving meal, and anyway, who wants a wife in pain on Thanksgiving day when there's all sorts of relatives visiting and little kids running around and so forth?

I pulled the TENS unit out of the closet. Actually I thought this was something of a gimmick and I really didn't have much hope for it, but I applied it to her back and followed the instructions for turning it on. It's a lower-back-pain unit and her pain is in her middle back, so that was another reason why I thought it might not work.

You can see where this is going. She was able to sleep the entire night with only two TENS applications of 20 minutes each. Today she is up and active and happy, busy preparing the turkey and interacting with the kids. She's had to zap herself about five times in all in the last 12 hours or so, but the pain relief is real. We've been through this enough to know that without the TENS unit she's be in bed right now and for the next couple days.

And so my children, that is the story of how Meh saved Thanksgiving. Tune in next time when Burl Ives narrates the tale of how the staff at Meh collectively and unselfishly, with no regard to their own safety, rushed into a burning building to save a group of orphans who had been praying at the nativity scene when a nearby homemade portable meth lab exploded.