What Bad Knees, Good Drugs, and Teenagers Are Made Of

So the boy jacked up his knee doing some ungodly, torturous exercises called the "clean and jerk," and "squats" in his weight-lifting class, and more than $8,000 in hospital bills and thousands in rehab later, my stepson, Mazi, is finally getting to the point where his leg kills only a few of the day's 24 hours, and maybe only six out seven days of the week. He's been a trooper about it; the first few days after his corrective surgery, the boy was in such pain he'd use his cellphone to wake us out of our slumber just down the hall to bring him his pain killers; I could hear his half-moan/half-anguished cry through Nick's Samsung, the pain so apparent, so searing, it made my doggone knee hurt.

Thank goodness for the drugs.

Now Mazi, trooper that he is, was back at school a few days after surgery, limping on his sad little crutches on his broke-down knee. For sure, the crip walk gained him a bit of attention. Just not the kind we expected.

"You know, you can sell those painkillers, dude."

That's what more than a few of his friends said to him when they got a gander of his crutches and gimp. They didn't bother asking him how his leg was, how long he'd be on crutches, whether the surgery hurt, or if he'd be able to play football in time enough for the recruiters to check out his game on the field.

"You know, you can sell those painkillers, dude."

Now, Nick and I are no dummies--we know there are kids up to no good up there at that high school. I wrote earlier this year about the astounding number of students expecting babies at Mazi's school, which means they're not really listening to Bristol Palin and her mama and them about the whole abstinence thing. And of course there are kids who smoke weed and drink, too, and get suspended for dumb stuff that high schoolers tend to do. But good grief, for some reason I just didn't latch onto the whole "prescription drugs=candy" thing.

Not familiar? Check out the PSA I found on The AntiDrug.com, titled "All My Pills."

Great... one more thing to add to my worries.

Does it ever get easier?

[Note to my I ♥ Faces visitors: Thank you for stopping by! The picture illustrating this post is of my stepson Mazi; he started giggling like a loon when I commanded him to "look hard." Yeah, right. This is about as hard as he gets.]