POST-OPS FOURTEEN
Death can strike fear into you; yes, that I've learned. If it wasn't there before, it was soon all over me - creeping from every crevice or dripping from every socket. Even in my post-op Geisinger Cardiac room, each of the days I spent there were spattered yet with fear - of some new bad news entering the room, some floundering non-starter me, tumbling out of control. With each new heartbeat (which in the depths of night I'd hear and which, holy cow, sounded louder to me than ever before), I'd tremble at it as if it were a ghost instead of a new patch of glorious life! I had to learn to put all that aside. Even now, almost four weeks later, it's into me like a new philosophy, to learn to live with, look past, achieve over. It's sometimes difficult to just 'get along' - but it has to become a mission.
I can't live with my own personal history having this operation taking top billing. I was a person before it, and a fully-fused one, and I want to be one after it too. But, thru the haze and fog, I yet can't see how that will be or what kind of a person I'll be. It's hard to live that one out - too many cross-channels and worrisome moments. It's funny - and I may have said this before - how in those immediate post-op days, the only place of solace and wonderment I had was in my large and solitary hospital room. It was a refuge, almost like a cave, into which I'd been granted try to somehow re-connect with my brain. Everyone should have such an opportunity after a traumatic operation - I know I was for sure glad not to be in a shared room, or have to listen to someone else's chatter, telephone gibberish, or television crap. The solitude was a vital right then as blood. All those parts of me that had been disconnected needed time again to reconnect and remember each other.
I held no grudges at that point. I loved the world. Oftentimes that's just something that people say, but this came from within me - a recognition and a deep valuation of particular times and places. If this was all I was to have left, and whether it was for a short time or long(er), I'd take it and relish each second. To a person in a bad mood, that's takes some convincing. My bad moods were all gone.
When it got to be Sunday, a Catholic priest came in, making the rounds. He asked if I wished to partake of Communion. I declined, saying I wasn't, nor hadn't, prepared. He was OK with that and then just asked if I'd mind if he prayed over me. I said OK, and when I left all it did was depress me more. It seemed at that point that so many minds had 'prayed' over me that it was closer to say they 'preyed' over me. I was as lost as a lost sheep, and I possessed, sadly, few of the certainties they all professed. That must be such a wonderful certainty. Perhaps I can find it too.
Below me, yes, the Scranton I saw was stretched out as lights and streets, all in the huge bowl that is Scranton, surrounded by all the upland hills and rises. It's a strange predicament to view from. Now, I'm much more used to it all, having made, in 4 weeks, enough trips back and forth between Scranton and home, to know and sense the land very well : in all its turns and twists along the way. Berlin, and Beach Lake, down to Honesdale, over along Route Six, bounding through that little stop/town oddly called Waymart. Two gas stations, and a deli. The hills rise up, with their windmills, looking ridiculous, and then they too disappear, and around the hillside bend is the prison, vast and running. Some sort of USPS bulk facility too. Mostly, these days, it's all Wintry-weather stuff. I've pumped gas in sleet, snow, fog, and rain. Cold weather, and not so cold. (This ain't Jersey; you have to pump your own. No attendants). I can't drive for another two weeks, so, yes, I have to put up with my wife's paltry version of same. I'm used to it all, by now. 51mph is a dangerous and toppling, top speed. I sometimes think what people call 'caution' is more like fear. Behind the wheel anyway.
There's an Arby's in Scranton, down by the High School, which is my signal for turning up and into the hillside parking lot for one of the blood labs they keep making me return to. For some reason, most of these medical buildings are paired, and petty much they look alike, with only slight differences. That day I'd gotten out of the car at the wrong one. It was half-rainy out, and I ended up in some Women's health facility, with a bunch of pregnant ladies or ones with newborns. I had to wait in line, just to ask where the damn bloodlab was. Instructed it was in the next building over, I grimaced, and said, 'Is it walkable?' The clerk/girl said yes. So I beelined out the door, almost angry already. It was hardly walkable, especially for me, dumb-ass heart patient having to walk through bad weather and an uphill incline for quite a distance. The ticker was ticking, and I was incensed - this was for sure the practice-walk of the century. I somehow finally made it, and told the bloodletter lady, Christne, that they really ought not to pair their lookalike buildings so perfectly, because all it does is cause confusion. She agreed! Oh, sure, it was easy to agree, but whatever. She got her blood, and I got released.
Then, finding my wife again - who had so nicely brought the car around to right where I was standing - I got in and we had to re-cross town, completely to the other end of Mulberry Street, at Nay Aug Park (craziest name for a nice place, ever), to enter again the actual Cardiac Hospital section I needed to report to.
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