This by-pass surgery stuff is getting old already, but I’d like to share some of my adventures with you before we get back to the important things in life.
Although I was in the hospital for only seven days, many events took place, and time seemed to elongate, giving the impression of a much longer stay.
It was my intention to keep a journal during my stay, but lack of discipline and kind-hearted drug dealers, (we called them nurses) reduced my attempt to a few pages of random, incoherent ramblings, completely lacking in structure and logic, ( much like the majority of my posts to this board ). Today, however, I pored over my notes and seperated the wheat from the chaff. I’m sure some of you will be wondering why I neglected to include some of the wheat. Wasn’t any.
There were eight of us in the wing. On the third day, we were permitted to walk to the patient’s lounge and sit around and get to to know one another. It became a ritual to meet there between visiting hours.
Tony was an Italian patriarch. He had two dozen visitors at a time, half of them children. There is nothing more pleasing to the eye than a passel of brightly scrubbed children cuddling up to their grandfather. His fractured English was a delight to my ears. He told me that when he was a boy in Italy, his favourite pastime was to shoot “brown dogs.” I eventually deciphered that to mean “groundhogs.” His family owned several hundred ships. Yep, sheep.
Fred was a police constable. He was regarded with some suspicion by the rest of us, because some of his war stories were scarcely credible, and because he only had a double by-pass.
George was a some kind of finacial analyst. He was educated, articulate, cheerful and very witty. The rest of us despised him.
Ralph was an enigma. He told us nothing of himself and showed no fear of the nurses. We came to believe that his incision was a fake and that his purpose was to spy on us.
Gary was one lucky duck. He slept through most of his stay.
Bill was an unapologetic punch line killer. He knew the tag line for every joke known to man. We were helpless to take corrective measures, because he made certain that he was in sight of one of the staff at all times. On the last day, I devised a long, rambling story with absolutely no point to it. He was pissed, but the rest of us had to ask for painkillers. Imagine a half dozen heart surgery patients howling with laughter at a long boring joke with no punch line.
Tom was my roomie. He rarely spoke, but his wife made up for it when she came to visit. I was certain that at one point in her life, for reasons known only to herself, she swallowed a radio. She never stopped. She’d pass some kind of refrigirator magnet across Tom’s chest, claiming it would speed the healing. I think I frightened her a little when I said that there were powers in the universe that were best left untapped. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it in such a low, ominous voice.
I also have some notes on the food and the Angels of Mercy, but I have yet to decode them, so I’ll leave that for another time.
Voted as: The poster you’d most like to meet.
I demand a recount.
