back

I write to you from the hospital, where I’m busy being temporarily disabled. My back decided it had had enough of holding up my body, so it went on strike, in very dramatic fashion — an ambulance had to be summoned in the night, to rescue me from the place I’d become trapped after attempting to walk around my house and nearly fainting from pain. The many astute observers in the emergency room astutely observed that I was more or less unable to sit, stand, or walk without screaming. (Cue horror film soundtrack.) So they sent me upstairs to the regular part of the hospital to lie down quietly, though after two days in the hands of the nurses and physical therapists I can in fact walk, using a walker, without screaming but not without sweating and breathing heavily. Then I have to go back to bed for a while, lie on an ice pack, and think about nothing. I’ve become very good at thinking about nothing. I could probably choose to regard this entire incident as a sign that I needed to think about nothing a whole lot more.

You might assume that three days of lying flat on my back would give me plenty of time to write something more interesting than “My back got hurt and I have spent three days lying flat on my back,” but you would be wrong. That is exactly as interesting, at this stage of my temporary disability, as I am prepared to be. Don’t worry, though, I’m sure that soon enough I’ll forget how to think about nothing instead of something.

among the pills they give me a glacial erratic

intensive

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I just had occasion to spend three days in a hospital intensive care unit (I was working, not being sick, don’t worry). Alarms go off all the time there, all of which look and sound the same to me (basically, like ohmyGod someone’s dying do something right now!). To the nurses, though–big, big differences.

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October…
blood soaking
into the test strip

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Most of the alarms bore the nurses. They barely look up when the beeping starts. Even when there’s, like, a red flashing alert on the monitor about someone’s heartbeat being all out of whack. The nurses know what kind of out of whack is really worrisome and what kind is the monitor being, frankly, kind of a worrywart.

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October—my brittle teeth surprise me by not breaking

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When it’s a real alarm, though, they move. You look up and the nurse who was sitting two feet away from you half a second ago is nowhere in sight. Where’d she go? To check on Mr. Darby.

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October
the side view mirror
breaks off in my hand

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How do they know? I kept wondering. I never know. I never know what to worry about. All the alarms sound the same. And the world is full of alarms. (Have you noticed that? Or is it just me?)

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October
I quickly throw my life
into a suitcase

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June 11: 13 (Hospital Moon)

the moon not yet set
the long dim corridors
of the hospital