Seven Stitches Later

“This may be a little uncomfortable,” the surgeon says briskly, “I need you to stay still.”

Knowing “A little uncomfortable” really means it's going to hurt like hell, my heart starts to pound like a runaway jackhammer and then I'm totally distracted by the pain. I whimper, cuss and clench the paper sheet in a death grip. I feel branded, like a half dozen red hot pokers were suddenly rammed into the back of my neck. Sweet Jesus, I think, why did I turn down out patient surgery and being out cold? Meanwhile, somebody - good God, it's me - is moaning and while every muscle I have is freezing up, the doctor asks for additional anesthetic. Three times. Each fresh stick and burn feels like a blowtorch. Several more minutes pass.

“Tell me we're almost done,” I plead desperately, “Dear Jesus, please tell me we're almost done!”

“Just a couple more hours,” he tells me dryly just before another white hot stab of pain shoots into my neck and almost immediately I feel/hear/sense/visualize the slice of the scalpel. It hurts far less than the injections and I somehow manage to force my body to relax. Visions of horror movies begin to play in my mind - “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the most prominent – but it's quickly followed by variations of a mad scientist reanimating Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. Scalpels and scars and stitches and dear God, please let me survive this. My last coherent thought is wondering how much pain a person can actually tolerate before they pass out mixed with how fortunate I'm not a spy, I'd sing like the proverbial canary.

 Troop strength?

Not a problem. 

 Names of double agents? In alphabetical order or by country?

Nuclear codes?

Just give me a pencil.

“Am I going to have a hole in my neck?” I ask, not quite realizing how ridiculous the question is.

“Big enough to drive a truck through,” the doctor says calmly, “But I'm going to stitch it up for you.”

“How thoughtful,” I mutter into the pillow, “A surgeon and a comedian.”

Seven stitches and five minutes later, the nurse presses on a bandaid, and it's over. I leave with a script for pain, a return appointment to have the stitches removed, and an urge to celebrate my survival.

An Ewok at the Door

There's no other way to put it. Standing outside the front door, in a navy blue hoodie with a muffler wrapped around his face, our IT guy looks like an overgrown ewok. As unpleased as I am to see him - these website sessions are like learning Arabic from someone who thinks and speaks at the speed of light and assumes I can keep up - it still makes me smile.

I've never enjoyed having to do things I don't do well and combined with the fact that brilliant people have a knack for making me nervous, I find myself wanting to wish away the next couple of hours. Computer literacy has always intimidated the hell out of me and everything I've ever learned has been through trial and error or stubbornness and luck. Website design is hard and complex and in a language I can't make heads nor tails of. What is second nature to our IT guy might as well be Mandarin to me. Despite my having expressed these sentiments a dozen times, he waves my uncertainty away and assures me I'm one of his best students. I tell him I feel fortunate to get a word every now and then and he tells me I'm a natural and laughs. I am not especially reassured.

We muddle on for the remainder of the morning with me taking as many notes as I can and hoping they'll make some kind of sense when he's gone.

It strikes me as odd that once upon a time I loved to learn and now I find it an exhausting and nerve wracking experience. I wonder if it's not that my memory banks are full of trivia - a half dozen telephone numbers that mattered when I was ten, the piano lessons I took at eight, the lyrics to “Calendar Girl” by Neil Sedaka, “100 Pounds of Clay” by Clyde McPhatter or from when I was a little older, the complete score to “The Music Man”. All that is fresh and readily accessible but I can't remember three simple steps to add an image to a website unless I've written them down.

No Bad News

“Don't nobody bring me no bad news.....”

The Wiz

We've known each other for better than 65 years. She is my oldest friend and impossibly dear to me. She writes that she's been diagnosed with a genetic mutation that predisposes her to certain cancers. I read her email slowly and carefully, three times in all, and then once more. The spectre of yet another precious friend with cancer turns my emotions into a kaleidoscope and I see all manner of jagged edge'd chaotic colors and shapes. They push and shove and grate against each other violently and I'm paralyzed with not knowing what to write back.

Later that same day, I visit with another dear friend just diagnosed with stage three throat cancer and facing a long, uncertain road of radiation and chemotherapy. We sit by her open bedroom window and talk while a warm breeze stirs the curtains and her beloved dog sits in her lap, looking at her with absolute devotion. The daffodils she planted in the front yard wave and bend gently in the promise of spring wind. I see the kaleidoscope still but it's less raucous and the colors are more pastel. Even so, I can't make sense of any of it.

It's all part of God's plan, my well-intentioned and more religious-minded friends like to tell me.

We're not supposed to understand it, they say with a confident, chin up smile. Be that as it may. It doesn't save lives or bring back the ones I've loved and lost. If there is a God (and agnostic or not, I do want desperately to believe) I can't see that He's paying much attention to this little world. Maybe, so often as I am tempted to do, He's had enough and has just given up. We have, it seems to me, made our own beds. Perhaps He thinks we should lie in them awhile.

And yet, as the poets say, hope springs eternal. How or why is often beyond me, but it does.

And I'm grateful if suspicious.

Another spring is right around the corner.

“The truth is that we know so little about life, we don't know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”  Kurt Vonnegut