Pain is nothing but putting up with some demented leprauchaun bayonetting your head with one of Satan's spare tridents, warm off the barbeque of Hades. It isn't much at all really. And having brain surgery, well that's overated too. No lights at the end of tunnels and relatives beckoning you onwards - its just about shivering to sleep in the anaesthetizing suite and waking up feeling sick and cold and hungover in ICU.
And then the boredom, which in hospital is fairly easy, believe me, it is. you're surrounded by the gratefully alive and after a while the heavily arrow-rooted chicken fricasee starts to taste good. And doing nothing is a kind of guilt free occupation.
I managed to screw myself up, physically and psychologically less than 24 hrs after discharge. Despite the fact that the prognosis for a ruptured cerebral aneurysm is so poor my notes (which I read several times a day) noted: Anxiety/ Dying: None expressed. I was safe behind those doors, I wasn't afraid.
So why am I laid out just a few hours after begging to be and granted my desire for discharge wandering why for flip and Bob's sake my entire life has gone down the pan? Everything I had ever wanted was there, for a moment, right in front of me, and now it has been cruelly snatched away and left me reeling. I felt my stomach churning, and panic rising, displacing the strands of normality that I had tried to weld into the fibres of my being. I swallow some of the minor tranquillisers they gave me to help me sleep in the dark hours, but my blood pressure is too low to handle them. I am slipping slowly through the evening unaware of time and space. I feel like I'm drunk on cheap wine, siphoned into my coffee cup by the angel of death who decided to tap gently on my door.
Next day, once I get my blood pressure restored, the leaking arteries fixed, I go sit and lie in the warm sunshine to decide what to do with the rest of my life. I fancy bunking the country, to a new Eden where nobody will hold my arterial problems against me. I really want to finish my book. I mean ,no-one can say "Hey you can't do that you're too sick." And maybe in the meantime I can mail Dr Gallagher and ask him for a job with "The- Scientist" in Philadelphia. I might do that later today.
You see I have forgotten what it is like to be alright but I am absolutely sure that if someone could remind me how to live again, I could manage it.
