All the Holes at Once Are Coming Alive in The eye of every storm

“You should start feeling something in a minute.” He left the three-walled room, the curtain partition fluttering as if a breath of a memory ghosted through an unnoticed eternity. The Price Is Right was on the Television, and the volume laid on my chest, tied to some cable snaking through the rails, beneath the bed, to its jungle home. I barely heard the television. I wasn’t feeling anything.

My arms lost a hard fought battle, baring the pits, bruises, and blues proudly. Eventually, my left hand yielded a blue vein where the fourth nurse to attempt such a feat plunged a needle directly through the wall. Blood jerked onto the napkin beneath my hand before she plugged the vials, filling three of them. I stared the whole time, watching her stab me, detached and immune.

“We’re going to send these downstairs for some blood work and we’ll be underway,” she said. The ghost moved the curtain and gone was the nurse. The shallow voice of Drew Carey beneath my blanket and the drugs not working held my focus. I closed my eyes, wondering if I’d ever wake up again, after the drugs did work.

I asked if I needed to be forgiven, if I needed to confess my sins. There on my deathbed, I confirmed what I most feared: my lack of faith. My heart as empty as the first four needle plunges from the first three nurses, I mustered a sigh and looked at my hand, taped and taped, an IV dripping fluids whom started their journey as a solution held by a stainless steel pole directly overhead.

Dr. Lancaster, a tall man with white hair and a resounding voice appeared. A spot of blood on the lapel of his lab jacket, a blemish from his previous surgery that morning, held my gaze as he spoke. I moved my gown and he autographed my left leg in a purple sharpie. The voice of God, he spoke, “we’ll be ready to go soon, just relax for now and let us know if you need anything.” The curtain fluttered, and he too became an apparition, a memory, a time in a moment passed.

The drugs weren’t working.

“I’m nervous and scared,” I said to no one.

“One dollar,” I said to Television’s Drew Carey, and I won a China Set from Mikasa, though I’d opt for Waterford if I had any say in the matter.

I regrouped, took a deep breath, and went over the facts:

I’m thirty three. I’ve hiked the Florida trail and the Appalachian trail. A girl broke my heart. I moved to Texas five years ago, and now they have to drill a hole into my hip.

Sounded about right, though I wasn’t sure which one of these events bore the fault of my current indictment. The girl liked to suck other peoples dick’s but that didn’t kill my hip. Texas is a fine place, and sometimes the weather is even nice, so Detective Paper Cut Scenario ruled him out shortly. It’s the hiking.

The medicine wasn’t working, but my mind drifted and floated through time like a freeway. The first exit I took brought me to a blue room with a steel gray accent wall and a examining table. A man with a booming voice, Dr. Lancaster, explained the best he could why I was in pain.

At some point, some trauma happened to the tip of your femoral head, your hip bone, if you will, and that trauma cut off the vascular system for maybe up to even a week. You wouldn’t have noticed it, but while the vascular cells regenerated- and the human body is remarkable this way- the tissue that makes up your hip bone began to simply die. And when one part started its necrosis, the surrounding tissue became susceptible to the death.

That’s Doctor for: Your hip bone is a soggy, mushy, oozing poisonous deathtrap that no longer has any weight bearing integrity.

He quoted a study, and the year. He’s like that.

He played for the Detroit Lions but left to become a doctor, so in a way, the Detroit Lions are responsible for the preposterous conclusion he’d drawn. While he mowed over the defensive line of the Chicago Bears for his ninth touchdown during the ‘84 season, he certainly wasn’t thinking about power tools and their applicability to the human condition, but fate spun its yarns for ours to tangle.

The drugs weren’t working, but I jumped on the freeway to the next exit and got off somewhere around early March. The pain in my hip unbearable, I left work one day and never went back. March 6th. It was a dreadfully boring time in life. I took hydrocodone as if it maintained the same breath freshening properties Altoids boasted. Katrina handled the paperwork between my doctors and my job and the insurance. Occasionally, I said, “okay,” or the last four of my social into a telephone.

I needed help getting dressed. I sat on the bed, Katrina holding my underwear, my cock small, tiny, vanished into a mess of hair, and I felt weak and frail. I just stared down. I didn’t say much to anyone. The drugs had hold of me, powerful hold, messing me around. I was humiliated and defeated, in front of the person I am meant to be the strongest, and the eye contact she desired became lost somewhere next to my left foot and the space between anything.

The injection into the IV wasn’t doing anything, but I took the next exit I came to on this Interstate Memory Lane and it brought me to Baylor Uptown Medical Center, filling out paper work, handing a nice lady my debit card to take $400.00 from me, and then I was whisked into the back in a wheelchair. They told me not to drink anything and I was so thirsty. I drank beers the day before, so dehydration set in fiercely.

Our freeway has ended and we’re here, at the last stop, the present.

The drugs weren’t working, but I didn’t notice Drew Carey had left the television screen, or the nurse asking me if I was “smthghtnwhun kdls neudgng.”

What?
Are you allergic to anything?
Oh yes, shellfish, pecan trees, and bullshit.

She laughed, I laughed and my eyes became lazy as they wheeled me through the curtain. I became a phantom, like those who’d passed before me. The anesthesiologist asked me what my favorite book was and I told him.

I like Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. It shows how we have no choice or power, and we are of the earth the same as a moth or a sparrow.

He told me I was going to sleep now, and he injected a syringe into my IV. The bed crashed through the highway barricades of the double hospital doors, and the pleasant colors of the hospital gave way to the harsh reality of the Operating Room. I held my head up one last time.

Lime green shower tile walls, presumably to be sprayed down easily, in case my blood splattered all over them.

Large lights, like Scully, on the X-Files in season 2 above me.

People clothed in white, gloved, and masked asking me to count backwards.

I had forgotten how to count. I closed my eyes. Panic set in. I thought I would never wake up, that I may be the case that goes to sleep and continues to sleep forever, even while they’re pouring dirt over my coffin, even when the sun explodes and engulfs the world in flames, millions of years from now. I feared I’d be the statistic, the one out of nine hundred and ninety nine patients.

The Doctor’s booming voice, “We’re drilling the hole in the left leg,” and I at the mercy of their shimmers and their spells. I drifted off, and as I drifted off I prayed to the God I didn’t beli-

Last updated May 10, 2016