How Long Have I Been Away?

Right now I feel my skull descending against the heel of my hand and I listen to the unending drone of the I. V. pump issuing fluid into my veins, mixing with the blood, carrying my blood through my cursed body.

This is where I sit now, the Infusion Services part of the hospital, where most patients come for their chemo treatment--a club of patients, here, in which I feel I am an invading impostor, pretending to be sick. Yet, my problems are real, and need some sort of explanation, because there is no name for my little problem, nor title, only misunderstood, even by my personal doctor.

This morning, when I walked in here, everything that is wrong with me, is wrong with me. This leg straining under David Smith’s overturned log truck. These unrecognizable intestines. They are compressed from within, in varieties of sections like a dozen overused prophylactics, braided together in places and shanked in rubber bands and stretched out to Size Flabby in other places. These guts, they plead with an effort to prolapse, to perforate, to surface and I am so often reaching over for a fetal coexistence with it. I am in a stupor of dreams and shaking because of a lack of the simple water in my head and in my heart because these alien intestines refuse to absorb and I feel not awake or I am as a drunkard, here, and all things looks dusted and shimmering, a crowd to my brain cells crushing in to strangle even these, my thoughts.

To myself I argued with resistance, to take another tablet, maybe fifteen, of these narcotics. I have waited long and in fear of the dependence it has brought me, my anxiety’s thirst, or my pain’s dominance. I can distinguish both and separate fools these are, competing, shouting. One hammering never to dullness. The other really is like an anxiety with voice. I can feel it in my muscles and tendons, aching, I hear it. And for some strange reason it crawls down my back and into the tissues of my buttocks to pick me up and walk me along and down the vinyl covering of this reclining chair. And I ask my buttocks, why he thinks he needs these narcotics. Isn’t it enough that my guts above you are in need and that leg below you? And my head aches to give its complaint to all the other parts. And so I finally give in to all the noise of pain.

Still here, now calmed, pain dampened. Always, I am confronted by the background sounds of this hospital I’ve long lived in; this second home I’ve returned to, all my years. Next to my head is the familiar running of the I. V. pump. Its music plays on in a never ending set of two notes with an unusual time signature of 3/3; one quarter A Sharp, followed by a whole note in some low C. I have asked myself why it is a comforting sound. I do not know why I am comforted by this, this genre of Industrial Rock(?) Maybe it means I am still on, still working, still Rockin’. Today it will play until I am refilled. Today I am here for a three hour song. At other times I’ve been here for a week of this music--three times this year.

Still here, and more sounds. I can listen to the murmur of talk near and in the halls and discussions of vital life sustaining decisions shared and the trivial things of lunch or planet. Somewhere is a television playing. Always, the acoustics of hospital hallways can bounce a show out of one room, down the hall, and into my room and underneath from under the bed. Sometimes I will close my eyes and listen to the show in progress, my ears rubbernecking the floor, decoding the echo of voices and song. This morning I can make out a show with incessant voices, funneled, exacting syllables in which a male voice is barking every word. I think it is from a different time. The laughing is different; newer somehow; more like a laugh of novelty rather than today’s laughter of jaded and expected boredom. I must conclude we are watching a television comedy from the 50s.

Still here, now two bottles of I. V. Fluid. I mentioned to my I. V. Therapist, “I didn’t know I have been unconscious this whole time.” I am think of the past week, maybe three. Have I really been this dehydrated? It always amazes me how dehydration creeps up from behind and snatches from you your life force. How long have I been away?