I'm Free!!!
It has been a harrowing few months laid up in a lumpy hospital bed at the Center for Indigent Care in Halifax. I want to thank Steakbellie for wiring me the money to pay my cable bill and finally freeing me from that Nova Scotian prison.
Tetanus is not something to joke about, and lockjaw is not something one wants to experience in the throes of passion. But this is what happened: a hooker is dead, a good pair classic Pro-Keds have been torn to shreds, and I have paid the price by losing four months of my life, which I will never get back.
I can't say this has been an entirely awful experience. Thanks to my Haitian orderly, the man whose name I never learned but whose counsel I will never forget, I have come to understand that life does not exist for the purpose of gluttonous eating, a prideful need to self-promote, or a lustful zeal for attention. No, I have come to reject my slothful best buddy whose envy of my blog has unleashed his wrath and has opened me up to ad hominem attacks. Without sounding overly bitter, I must tell you how betrayed I feel by this friend. We will call him "EDL NAMBLA--charter member" for the purposes of clarity.
While my Haitian friend sponged my lower back sending a steady stream of warm soapy water down the contours of my ass and thighs to its terminus—a gentle pool of liquid on the center of my threadbare gray sheets just below my relaxed and dangling balls, he said something unintelligible yet at the same time uplifting. Since I don't speak Creole, his actual words meant nothing to me. What I heard, though, was prophetic.
“Mister Artie, if you can come to accept your own failings, you will begin to understand that right or wrong, good or bad, have no relative importance. The human life is as frail as a gosling’s feather. Now bend over so I can thoroughly clean your bud cheese.”
I did as he said to do and then cried the cry of Hemingway and Thoreau before me, a manly cry that signified neither sensitivity nor sadness, it was merely a literary device to spice up a rather mundane plot line.
I am too hardened to go on with my story. Perhaps I will continue at a latter day. I am back. I am well. And I look forward to hearing from you, my literary friends.
I am attaching a photo of my last day in the hospital, taken by one of Nova Scotia’s greatest photographers, groundzeroprodukt. Isn’t he the best!!!
I am still bed-ridden in the pic, my Haitian friend is in the white coat on the right.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Bad Literature about a Great Man.
The young doctor ran his sinewy fingers through his dark wavy hair. He paused and sighed, measuring his thoughts; buying some time. His jaw was square, his teeth were white and straight, and his skin--dark and moist--was fertile ground for the black stubble of a 14-hour workday. He was all together a beautiful man: probably hated by his high school classmates, envied by his fellow med schoolers, and worshiped by his neighbors and everyone else without a Mercedes convertible and beachfront home in Stone Harbor.
His life was as smooth as China silk, but his body language at that moment was 60 grit rough.
I hate doing this, he thought.
Giving patients bad news is not something he was good at. Mostly, because he hadn’t had much practice. First in his class at Hopkins, a choice residency at the Mayo Clinic, an esteemed fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic—Young Doc had, indeed, faced adversity in his career. In fact, he was usually brought in on the most difficult cases. Yet for Doc, adversity was like a fertilizer: deepening his roots in medicine and blossoming his creativity for a solution. He was bad at delivering bad news, because he was so good at delivering good news.
But today would be different. For this case he had no answers. The patient had three boys--all blonde, all deeply in love with their father, all nervous and unsure of what would come next. They huddled on the bed around their father like survivors on a life raft, their limbs tangled, heads and hands everywhere, they struggled for real estate on the narrow mattress.
Doc thought of his own children, three girls, whose ages probably matched-up perfectly with these three kids. In order to gain some private time with his patient, he tipped the kids off to the ice cream in the doctors’ lounge freezer. “Help your self,” he said, “and feel free to watch some TV, too.”
As the children left, the patient could see the doctor’s hazel eyes turn a shape of somber. Lids lifted, eyes down, the patient could see in his doctor’s out-of-focus gaze a telegraphed punch of bad news. That is a merciful thing to do, he thought, giving me some time to brace myself before impact.
As the doctor began to preface his prognosis, the patient’s mind turned to a simpler time, when physical goals were measured by time and distance, not dogs and buns. His ears tuned in to the doctor as he transitioned his speech to the things that matter.
“Mr. Steakbellie, I am afraid there is nothing we can do for you,” he apologized. “Your intestines are hundreds of yards long and able to pass mountains of food, but only at a measured pace, only in reasonable amounts.”
“The eighteen hotdogs you ate in twelve minutes were just too much for your intestines to handle. Your stomach did its job. It expanded to meet the demand. But the food bottlenecked in your small intestine. It’s like a six lane highway full of traffic narrowing to a hiking path. Those Nathan’s are a jackknifed tractor-trailer to your system.”
“Mr. Steakbellie, and I’m so sorry to have to tell you this…” tears began to roll down the doctor’s cheek, he trembled with the next few words, “but you have to pass those hot dogs and buns on your own. I can’t help you. Eighteen hot dogs, you see, is a lot of food to eat in twelve minutes.”
Eighteen hot dogs are a real lot to eat in eighteen minutes.
The young doctor ran his sinewy fingers through his dark wavy hair. He paused and sighed, measuring his thoughts; buying some time. His jaw was square, his teeth were white and straight, and his skin--dark and moist--was fertile ground for the black stubble of a 14-hour workday. He was all together a beautiful man: probably hated by his high school classmates, envied by his fellow med schoolers, and worshiped by his neighbors and everyone else without a Mercedes convertible and beachfront home in Stone Harbor.
His life was as smooth as China silk, but his body language at that moment was 60 grit rough.
I hate doing this, he thought.
Giving patients bad news is not something he was good at. Mostly, because he hadn’t had much practice. First in his class at Hopkins, a choice residency at the Mayo Clinic, an esteemed fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic—Young Doc had, indeed, faced adversity in his career. In fact, he was usually brought in on the most difficult cases. Yet for Doc, adversity was like a fertilizer: deepening his roots in medicine and blossoming his creativity for a solution. He was bad at delivering bad news, because he was so good at delivering good news.
But today would be different. For this case he had no answers. The patient had three boys--all blonde, all deeply in love with their father, all nervous and unsure of what would come next. They huddled on the bed around their father like survivors on a life raft, their limbs tangled, heads and hands everywhere, they struggled for real estate on the narrow mattress.
Doc thought of his own children, three girls, whose ages probably matched-up perfectly with these three kids. In order to gain some private time with his patient, he tipped the kids off to the ice cream in the doctors’ lounge freezer. “Help your self,” he said, “and feel free to watch some TV, too.”
As the children left, the patient could see the doctor’s hazel eyes turn a shape of somber. Lids lifted, eyes down, the patient could see in his doctor’s out-of-focus gaze a telegraphed punch of bad news. That is a merciful thing to do, he thought, giving me some time to brace myself before impact.
As the doctor began to preface his prognosis, the patient’s mind turned to a simpler time, when physical goals were measured by time and distance, not dogs and buns. His ears tuned in to the doctor as he transitioned his speech to the things that matter.
“Mr. Steakbellie, I am afraid there is nothing we can do for you,” he apologized. “Your intestines are hundreds of yards long and able to pass mountains of food, but only at a measured pace, only in reasonable amounts.”
“The eighteen hotdogs you ate in twelve minutes were just too much for your intestines to handle. Your stomach did its job. It expanded to meet the demand. But the food bottlenecked in your small intestine. It’s like a six lane highway full of traffic narrowing to a hiking path. Those Nathan’s are a jackknifed tractor-trailer to your system.”
“Mr. Steakbellie, and I’m so sorry to have to tell you this…” tears began to roll down the doctor’s cheek, he trembled with the next few words, “but you have to pass those hot dogs and buns on your own. I can’t help you. Eighteen hot dogs, you see, is a lot of food to eat in twelve minutes.”
Eighteen hot dogs are a real lot to eat in eighteen minutes.
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