It’s pretty interesting that I’ve never written about this, considering it’s almost certainly the most interesting thing to ever happen to me; Part of me thinks that’s why. Anyway, this piece will probably have a pretty light tone (in case you couldn’t tell, I don’t really plan out my posts before I make them). That being said, I want to let it be known that pretty much everybody around me was everything I could have hoped for an more.
It was a dark and stormy night. But it was the rarest type of dark and stormy night, the kind that’s actually a clear morning. And I was running late to the airport. Fuck.
Sure, enough, I got to the airport after the plane had taken off, and despite the wad of greasy ones I waved in front of the ticket agents face, they wouldn’t turn it around. Which meant that I would have to wait an hour at JFK, and another 5 hours at the airport in Denver. Double Fuck.
It was an exciting time for me, and I was anxious to get started. I was visiting Pomona, which wasn’t my first choice, but Columbia and I decided to remain friends. Apparently, they thought I was totally a nice guy and everything, but weren’t really looking for anything serious. Anyway, no matter what school I decided to go to, a weekend at a college, in Southern California, in late spring, is about everything a high school senior could want. Plane issues aside, it looked like it was going to be a good time.
Sometime around 10 p.m., I made it to campus, found my host and got myself settled. There was a party going on on the floor I was staying at, as soon as I got there. Don Juan that I was (and still am, ladies), I did what I always did at parties - grabbed half of a drink that I would hold and pretend to sip for the rest of the night, and stood around decently large conversations and laughed at what I hoped were the appropriate times. I’ve always been an excellent poser, and using my chameleon-like adaptation skills, I blended seamlessly into the crowd. Four different girls propositioned me for sex, in the way girls usually do - by conspicuously avoiding eye contact and pretending to talk to any and everybody around them. College girls are coy.
The next couple days alternated between Good, Boring, and Ugly. The good was visits to various places in Southern California, the boring was a vast array of meetings that each offered a new set of papers to be carefully filed and then forgotten about, and the ugly was, well, all of the ugly people that I saw. The last day was a more open tour day, with class visits and whatnot. I couldn’t really find the building I was looking for, since the map was kind of an awkward shade of green.
I woke up in a hospital. “Alright, this makes sense,” I thought to myself, “I’m in a hospital.” That sense of calm lasted eight seconds. The realization that I was in a hospital made me a panicked, kind of like a squirrel who suddenly wakes up in a hospital. I had no idea what day it was, why I was there, or who had brought me here. All I knew was that I had the overwhelming desire to get up and use the bathroom. I tried to do so, but people kept pushing me down and forbidding it. It was somewhat how I imagine Catholic potty training to be. Ultimately they realized that I wasn’t trying to escape, and calmly told me that I couldn’t leave.
I suppose, if you’ve read this far, that you have a few questions. First and foremost, what exactly is postmodernism? Also, who were these people around you, and why were you in the hospital? All fair questions, and I’ll answer all of them. “Postmodernism” is actually short for “Postmodernism is a vague term that doesn’t really man anything and is really only used by pretentious douchebags”, the people were my parents, and the reason I was in the hospital was because I had nearly drowned, a fact that I was apparently told several times before I remembered.
I’d like to say that I nearly drowned surfing giant waves in hawaii, or saving orphan children from sure doom (actually, I do say this, but that’s not the point), or even that I was just incredibly drunk, but none of those things are true. It was the middle of the day, I was sober, and I was amidst a crowd of people in the shallow end of the pool. So all of the wild rumors about my reckless behavior are sadly false. The long and short of it is that nobody really knows and all the theories are basically speculation.
I guess this is the best time to thrust in the link to one of the articles about it: http://www.tsl.pomona.edu/author.php?article=701&issue=25
I have a gap in my memory of about four days, during which time I apparently flat-lined, and when I finally began remembering things again, I realized several things; I was hooked up to a bunch of machines, I had a tube in my penis, and I was thirsty.
Incredibly thirsty.
You can’t appreciate how thirsty I was. You know that saltine challenge, where you have to eat a whole bunch of crackers in a given time, but you can’t do it, because all the saliva in your mouth dries out? I was like that, only for about four days. The first of those days, I wasn’t allowed to drink anything, but I was allowed to swab my mouth with these lemon things, which basically consisted of q-tips (brand cotton swabs) dipped in pledge. That being said, I teased myself with those things relentlessly, until I graduated to ice cubes. Now, because of all the machines, I couldn’t reach my mouth properly, so somebody else had to feed me ice cubes. This, I’m sure, could not have been more annoying, but bless their hearts, they willingly complied (ultimately my parents, sister, brother, great aunt and grandmother wound up coming out).
At that point though, I wasn’t thinking about their sacrifice. I wasn’t thinking about going to college. I wasn’t thinking about sex, or cars, or Pokemon, or whatever it is teenage boys are rumored to be thinking about. I was thinking about the fact that my mouth was dryer than Rosie O’ Donnell spooning with The Donald. Sweet jesus, those ice cubes were sweet temptation. They would inevitably melt before satisfying, leaving me aching for more like the heroine in some romance novel, only I didn’t want some stud on horseback to take me from my dreary life as a stewardess/vampire/cliche. I wanted something to goddamn drink.
You might be wondering why I’m spending so long describing how thirsty I was. The answer is fuck you. If you’ve ever gone several days without drinking anything, you would understand too. An IV does nothing for a dry mouth.
Eventually, they deemed me fit to drink liquids. Now, I’ve had sex. I’ve caught touchdown passes as time expired. I’ve been to Disneyland, and I’ve had pocket Aces. None of these things is even close to the feeling of that first sip. I finally understood what crack was like. The nurse made me control my breathing (I had a tendency to hyperventilate, for various boring medical reasons) before I would be allowed a sip of juice. I’m sorry I can’t think of a less prurient analogy, but this is like Adrianna Lima standing naked in front of you and telling you could only come forward once you’d stopped sprouting wood. I did not like this nurse.
Eventually I went from intermittent juices to an all liquid diet. Then, suddenly and for medical reasons that escape me, I was given a huge cheeseburger. I threw it up. Another cheeseburger was summoned. Again, my esophagus hit the rewind button. A third cheeseburger was summoned, but before I gave the room a double feature on this one, they thought to wonder why I was throwing up. Turns out one of my breathing apparatuses was pushing air down my throat, which made it hard for food to get down. With that switched, I finally was able to keep some of it down, even though I wasn’t really hungry.
I wasn’t really ever that hungry, and I have no really interesting food stories, except that I ate a bunch of salad, and once tried to eat a hot wing with a bunch of little cuts in my mouth. This was not a smart idea.
I didn’t really have a huge interest in food, but I was certainly willing to pretend for the sake of the nutritionist. I’m not sure it’s because everybody else in the hospital was either a guy or a 50 year old nurse, but hot damn. The nutritionist was smoking. Which I thought was medically irresponsible in a hospital around somebody who had just suffered two collapsed lungs, but I forgave her because she was incredibly hot.
Bed-ridden though I was, I still had my wits about me. So next time she came to talk to me about a food plan, I suavely laid my game down.
“Y-y-ou are pret-ty…” I croaked.
“Oh, would that you could leap from that bed, pull that long snakey tube from your penis, and ravish me among these almost-certainly disease-ridden sheets!!” she cried out passionately.
You must understand, however, that I’m inferring here. Her actual words were “Aw, thank you”, but I think you and I are both more than capable of reading between the lines. However, professionalism eventually won out and our romance was held off, at least temporarily. I did, however, score several sponge baths from nurses who were about half a century older than I. But hey, they didn’t complain, and neither am I.
They weren’t the only ones that got a front row seat to my glory. The hospital I was admitted to was a teaching hospital, and a class had been studying my case. Which means that several times, groups of med students came by and prodded me. I had a bunch of tiny air pockets under my skin, which meant that touching me was very much like touching a bean bag chair. The students were in awe of this, as apparently some had never felt it before, and asked if they could touch it. I obliged, and poke they did. Now I kind of know how the animals in the zoo feel, except nobody was trying to get me to reproduce.
Not that I could have. You know how I said there were a bunch of air pockets? Well, there was also a bunch of air in my, uh, pocket. That’s right. My scrotum had inflated like a balloon for some reason, to quite comical effect. When I wore sweatpants, it looked like I was trying to steal a softball. Which meant that sex was pretty much the furthest thing from my mind. And this particularly lovely side effect didn’t go away until some time after I had left the hospital, and then only in stages. For a while, it was impossible for me to tell whether or not I was a eunuch. To add more happy times, when it was time for me to leave the ICU my decatheterization was done without warning, unless you count “what’s that over there?” as a warning.
Apart from that fun, though, being in a hospital sucks. I had tubes in my chest, which hurt and made it hard to sleep; the bed was small and uncomfortable; the fact that I was hooked up to a bunch of machines meant that I couldn’t ever really get comfortable; and every so often a lovely attendant would make me get up so he could shove a cold board up the back of my gown and introduce me to a bunch of radiation. Hospitals feel profoundly lonely at night. All of the sounds are cold and mechanical, and they are institutions devoted not to life, but to the avoidance of death. Depressing.
Eventually it got somewhat better, as I got a cd player and a few cds to keep me company. Actually, the list is pretty varied, and I think a pretty good one: Modest Mouse’s Good News For People who Love Bad News, Jay-Z’s The Black Album, Kanye West’s The College Dropout, John Mayer’s Room for Squares, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP and Maroon 5’s Songs about Jane. What this list says about me could very well be it’s own post sometime, so I won’t go into it.
After I moved from the ICU, the story gets pretty boring. Most of the medical work was done, and it was just a matter of recovering to the point where I could recover at home. I did, however, receive several lovely flower arrangements, a care basket, fifty mylar balloons, cards and letters, and a graded essay. I’m sure all of you Sesame Street fans are playing the “one of these things is not like the others” game. If you guessed the graded essay, you were correct. My Dostoevsky and Tolstoy teacher had thought it relevant to send me the latest paper he had graded. I know what you might be thinking; had it been a terrific A + to boost my spirits? No, it was an A/A-. Which was my average in the class, so it wasn’t exactly news. I could have waited for that. And if he was going to send it, he couldn’t have bumped it up to an A? Furthermore, why the hell would I want to read a relatively straightforward paper THAT I WROTE about a book I didn’t even really like? Seriously? It’s the thought that counts, and that showed that he wasn’t thinking.
More importantly thought, the deluge of love from people who if pressed, probably wouldn’t even consent to liking me, made me look really popular. The nurses and doctors were all shocked at how much stuff people sent, and eventually it got to be almost too much for the room. When I could walk, I began walking around giving most of the stuff away.
Eventually, I was well enough to head home. I wound up spending a couple nights in the guest house at Pomona before beginning my trek back. One of the delightful side effects of the accident was that I couldn’t fly, lest I blow up to Michelin Man proportions. My only option was to take a train some 4000 miles across the country with my mother which is not as sexy and exciting as it sounds. There are a couple interesting tidbits from that experience, but that’s fodder for another post.
That’s basically the extent of my hospital visit. There are definitely things that I left out, and some things that could be fleshed out. But I think this is far more than enough to satisfy the curiosity of even my most hardcore fans.
