First Nice Weekend

Yesterday morning, Jess convinced me to go to the ER. My brother had optained some script level painkillers and we drove all the way to Nashua to pick them up. He had already left, I could barely stand up or sit down. We had the dog with us so we drove to my mother's house. She loves that dog, and I think that her chance to dogsit offset the normal mom-anxieties.

The doctor at Lowell General was great: talked about JFK, core strength, and climbing Mt. Rainier. Turns out it wasn't a herniated disc, but just a serious muscle strain that I reinjured this week. By Friday, I could barely eat or sleep because I felt so uncomfortable. Those who know me ought to be shocked. At my worst, I don't lose my appetite.

A shot and a painkiller still left me hardly able to walk, so I gave in and gobbled a handful of the pills. I'd been putting off taking anything, even refusing the spare percocents offered by a friend, but, at this point, I no longer cared.

An hour after the fistful of pharmaceutics, I could walk, bent but free. In relation to my struggles earlier in the day, I was flying, weightless. After spending three days lying down, being able to walk without pain counted as one of my life's great joys.

Late last night, Jess got up to go to bed, and, while feeding the dog, slipped in the water around the dish and banged her head. She became dizzy, mumbled incoherently, and showed signs of a concussion. I was still under the effects of the drugs, but was aware enough to make sure she was okay, even if I couldn't do much about it either way. This morning, she woke up and started vomiting, so it was back to the ER, this time in Groton.

The stay there was even longer: the doctor was sharp -- I overheard him talking knowingly on the phone about neologisms and aphasia, just where the writer and the doctor are closest -- but it was a small hospital and the staff were hit by a string of emergencies after our arrival. Sitting, first next to Jess on the gurney, and then in a chair, caused a lot of stress on my spine, and, by the time we left hours later, not only were we hungry having not eaten all day, but I was back to walking with my body bent like a cheese curl.

Having not eaten all day, but having been kept right across from the nurses's station, where chips and bon bons and cake and sandwiches and sodas were nearly constantly consumed by the team, Jess was famished despite the day's difficulties and we loaded up on subs, chips, nuts, and sodas as soon as we got back on 119. The sun was starting to set. We had to go pick up the Dufflebag. First nice weekend of the year, and we saw it pass us by through hospital windows.

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Thankfully, living in the horizontal world gives me plenty of time to read and watch movies: finished Yates, started Geoff Dyer; saw Mongol, Bourne Ultimatum, The Changeling, and four of the recent South Park episodes. Enjoyed all, except for Bourne -- spy thrillers don't have much of a pull on me. I'll leave it to others to figure out why.

I have been reading Sherlock Holmes stories recently, but that is different, because, in Doyle, crime is incidental to a probing of the nature of reason, and questions about the perfectability of thought, about the nature of cognition, of aesthetics, and of intellectual freedom. Side note: Holmes dispatches his great adversary Moriarty with a modified judo throw -- Holmes practiced a British self-defense style called bartitsu, a mix of judo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and stick fighting. Another side note: I remembered that Holmes did cocaine, but never realized how much. A final side note: the passages on Holmes's love of music are beautiful and profound. Holmes is a musician and a love of music, and he seems to use music to deliberately offset the parts of himself drawn to a too-mechanical objectivity and to isolation.