Holy Tony's Restaurant and Bar

I decided to leave my last blog "as is" simply because it so cleverly reveals the mind on pain meds. All I can say is, you had to Be There. St. Anthony's, or "Holy Tony's" as the folks at Harrison call it, is one terrific place. I felt as if I had died and gone to Heaven and, for all I know, I nearly did. After six and a half hours of surgery, however (how can there be ROOM on me for that much time? My lover wants to know).... I was down for the count for a couple days and made lots of friendly relationships with lots of nurses, all (except for one who shall remain headless) I learned to love. By 11:45 p.m. on the night of my surgery, one of the younger nurses got so carried away in our love-fest that she asked me and my friend, "Would you like me to see if I can get a bottle of wine up here?" My friend's face and my face lit right up. "You bet!" we said at once. "We do this, sometimes," the other nurse smilingly informed us. "Our cafeteria is well stocked with pretty much anything." "Yes", said the first nurse, "we'll just have to call your doctor."

Now, I knew...I KNEW....that calling my doctor for a bottle of wine at midnight on a day when he'd already done four long surgeries was not a well-reasoned-out idea. But, as Eleanor Roosevelt said about something else, we decided to live life to its fullest and call Doctor anyway. He was not amused. Two days later, when I was standing in his office, he STILL was not amused. It's nutty what exhaustion will do to a person's sense of humor.

And the morphine. Could there be anything better than morphine? I had been put on morphine years before for a chronic pain situation I walk around this world with, but never realized what a highly terrific drug it was because I couldn't "handle it", as they say, during my hours with my patients, and therefore my interest in it simply dropped. Not this time, though, boy. Swear to God, that stuff kept me alive. And I got to have it whenever I wanted it! Sweet. I was hugging everybody in sight.

The first time they got me up to walk after my surgery was one of the funniest/nonfunniest events I've ever taken part in. One nurse pushing the IV, two nurses holding me AND the walker-thing up, my socks on wrong so that the tracks which were supposed to be on the bottom of my feet (so I wouldn't slide) got put on upside-down, which caused me to slip and slide from this side of the hall to the other side, sort of like an Olympic skater on....well,....morphine.....was funny. I'm sorry, but there is just something extremely comical about a weary, bruised, cussing, crying person who is worried about flashing somebody from behind - - trying so hard NOT to slide hither and yon, trying so hard NOT to lurch and jerk down a hospital corridor. I asked the staff if they ever made videos but all I got was a somber, "No, we don't."

No. We don't.

The surgeon did fine. The nurses did fine. The man who came to see if I had any complaints or tips about the menu or the hospital's nutrition plan did fine. I told them him the ycould put real suger back into the food if they wanted to, but apparently nobody wanted to. The woman who brought around free TACOMA TRIBUNES in the morning did fine. Even the Pastor did fine. He stayed away. The television had a nice big screen and I always love the ham and cheese sandwiches in the middle of the night, eating them at such an hour feels so thrillingly illicit.

So I've been home for nearly two weeks and this week I've gone back to work. So far, so good, I haven't taken any pain pills during the day so I'm lucid as the morning robin. I try to walk in a modified bent-over position like they showed me. I hate it. All of life's mundane daily chores have become huge enterprises. I need somebody to help me take out my garbage. I also need somebody to come alone and help me MAKE garbage.

Am I glad I did it? Not yet. But, since homo sapiens is pulled by but also fearful of risk-taking, I'm not in a bad psychological place at all. I am right in the center of the nature of Life.