I Have Turned 72

I know, it’s been forever since I posted. I blame, as we all blame him for everything, He Whom We Wish We Never Have to name again.  The godfather of this blog, a high school friend of Nancy’s, and I began emailing a few years ago, and he said I was so funny I should write a blog.  I don’t know how funny it’s been.  Then Trump came along for the second time, and I definitely was unfunny.  So I quit for quite a while.  I don’t know for how long I’m back, and you probably don’t care, so let’s see what happens.

I originally wrote this back in November and just resurrected it today.

And now I’m 72 and a day, and, as it’s 3:11 a.m.on the morning after my birthday, I am apparently going to stay up all night writing this dreaded history. 

My sleep patterns have become as erratic as my appetite.  I am, however, despite a respite before my birthday, back to hard drinking habits.  I’ll cut back again after my Birthday Week, as befits my status as Family Miser.   I care more about our expenditures than my liver.

It was a helluva ten days leading up to my birthday. On November 4, I fell in the driveway and cut open the back of my head.  I called Nancy telling her I didn’t feel right, so she drove right over.  We ended up going to the local emergency room, at St. Michael’s in Silverdale, a hulking brand spanking new white edifice.  Yes, you can tell the MD’s from the vagabonds, but just barely, as the latter are more helpful.

Still they determined that I had neither a fractured skull nor was bleeding into my brain nor was suffering anything else so horrific—who knew such awful things could happen from falling on concrete!--so they let me go home.  By then I had quit being confused enough so that Nancy wasn’t so worried.

Speaking of Wife of the Year:  she drove me the 50 minutes to the hospital, hung around for a couple of hours, then drove me home. Though today (yesterday?) was my birthday, I bought her a fuzzy coat that has a hoodie and drapes down around her knees, perfect, as she reproduced my thoughts, for our suddenly freezing house.

If there’s a couple in the world who has been separated for nine years and still gets along as well as we do, respects each other as much, and, if I may say so, still loves each other like we do, I’d like to meet them and punch them in the face for lying.  I practically wish Nancy could get sick again so I could take care of her as selflessly as she has me for the past four years of this hell.

Four years ago, I developed severe lumbar stenosis.  Look it up:  then you’ll understand it better than I do.  Unfortunately I was somewhat misdiagnosed and at first people kept chasing around a flapping goose called epidural lipomatosis, which wasn’t the problem at all. 

I was considered for surgery that no one wanted, especially me, due to a 100% chance of complications.  A psychologist at the hospital put the kibosh on the idea. After a 45 minute conversation and forcing me to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which I’ve taken so often that I feel that I wrote it, she determined that I was suffering from

"anhedonia, introversive tendencies, malaise, helplessness, self-doubt, worry, anxiety, behavior restricting [sic] fears, disaffiliativeness, and social avoidance."

OK, I admit that I hate people, so some of that is accurate. But I mean, ‘behavior restricting fears"? What does that even mean? And “disaffiliativeness”?

I wrote the surgeon that she probably wasn’t very bright but there’s a less than nothing chance that she’s just barking mad. I told everyone who would listen that she could come over and have a couple of drinks and I’d show her some real hedonia.

So two more fruitless years went by, this time in the company of some charming surgeons at UW who still couldn’t fix things. Finally I was referred to this guy who mixed “platelet rich plasma” with my own stem cells and then injected the dubious liquid into the painful area and, within a couple of months, pain relief!  This procedure sounded at least as dubious as everything else I’d endured, so why not?

The magician who cooked this all up is a hoot; he prescribes eight bottles of supplements which he himself takes religiously, and he is the very picture of energetic good health.  When  we met the first time, he was going over my records, and suddenly he swivelled to face me and asked, “Are you still drinking so much?” A little stunned, I could only nod.  He asked, “Are you drunk now?”  I grinned, suddenly liking him: he could shoot me full of whatever; no one else had done anything that was effective.

But the next week and a half or so after the fall were nightmarish.  I had dreams that were completely toxic and vivid and endless and partly hallucinatory.  They were so powerful that they bled into my thoughts the following day.

One was based on three sources:  a novel titled Good Night, Irene, about two women who run an ambulance van in France in World War II; a movie made based on that novel; and my own dream based on both.  The facts in the movie and my dream existed only in my head. I woke up one morning after the dream wondering how I was going to entertain the woman, the main character in the novel, and her daughter, who never existed.  I talked to Nancy about this and she assured me that this obligation couldn’t exist, at least because the individuals would have been dead by now.  I was relieved.

The other dream, even more hallucinatory because there were no facts to back it up, involved a vodka swilling, hard-partying, sexually adventurous family to whose middle daughter I had become unaccountably engaged, which delighted a fellow who was married to the oldest daughter.  He hugged me when I disclosed that I was marrying his sister-in-law the next day.

I knew almost nothing about her and wasn’t enthusiastic about the engagement.  Dreams are real bastards; I realized that her breasts resembled those of a woman in a Nabokov novel, shaped “like champagne glasses”.  In what part of my brain did my memory go searching for that 50 year old image?

I think I must have had that dream Friday night, because when I woke up in my condo on Saturday morning, I was surprised to find how quiet my condo was.  This family, from the mother on down, was noisy fun.   I glanced up from my bed; my whiskey glass was empty, a true shocker.  I listened:  there was no one.  The truth was inescapable.  They weren’t there.  They didn’t exist.  They had never existed!

At this point in the week I was becoming somewhat accustomed to things, people, and events not existing.  I also couldn’t keep track of what day (Friday or Saturday) or what date (12^th or 13^th) it was.  As if in sympathy with this disconnection, suddenly my right hand couldn’t locate certain letters on the keyboard: I mixed up l, o, u, i, {, and p.  A paragraph took forever.  People may have thought I had expired because I had no incentive to write.

I got out of bed, wincing at my sore back, but anxious to discover that the family was truly not there.  Oh…one point.  My condo has no basement level, where they would have spent the night.  They weren’t there. 

I didn’t have to marry this champagne glass-breasted girl after all.  Her loud brother-in-law, whom I had notionally met during a boys’ baseball home run derby I was helping to run, wasn’t there either.  Or his wife or her mother. 

The father had never appeared, but I was happy to imagine him as a red-faced, white-haired, indulgent, slightly overweight patriarch of a sporty, hard-drinking family. He'd made the family money, not a builder but in something construction-adjacent, a supplier who, with nothing finally at risk, was completely relaxed.  He and I would never have gotten along.

I have truly never been so relieved in my life.

In the meantime, something was occurring to me:  I wasn’t testing my lumbar spinal stenosis, but it wasn’t hurting at all.  Instead, a spot a few inches higher was hurting a lot—but I had just fallen on it.  It didn’t burn and sting, like the spinal stenosis, but just ached like soft tissue when I fell on it, like I had!  I was better!

I continued having weird but not quite so toxic dreams through the weekend and into the next week.  I couldn't help wondering if they were concussion inspired. Then I developed this strange emotional state, when everything sent me into tears: memories about my family, my youth, very old memories about my Polish forebears, my mother’s WASP relatives, my deceased brother, always my father.

There’s an Amazon commercial involving three elderly women watching kids sled down a slope and remembering how they did that as kids and looking a little mournful about it.  One of the women suddenly has a thought, and then she’s ordering stuff from Amazon to fit into three sleds that they (magically) have, and then they’re sledding down the slope, laughing, arms raised, while the children around them watch and smile (don’t believe it: they’d only wonder where these three old witches blew up out of.)  And in the background is an instrumental cover of an old Beatles song, “In My Life.” 

OK that of all things got me.  I started sobbing like I owned the rights to the music.

Then I remembered how James Brady, Reagan’s press guy, was shot in the head during Reagan’s assassination attempt. At first they didn’t think he’d live, but then it developed that the part of his brain that controlled emotions had been damaged. He couldn’t control when he started crying.

I was being irrational because the CT scan didn’t show any damage, but I suddenly wondered whether I had suffered a similar injury.

I called my long-time therapist, who knows everything, for an appointment.  When we met online I asked why was I so emotional.   I was already crying. 

He said it was OK, to embrace it.  After four years of not knowing if I was going to improve, I had my answer.  That was a long time to hold it all in.  He said that this was a good thing, that my heart was opening up again.  I kept crying.  Larry even knew that Beatles song and started singing it.

Eventually I quit crying.  And by the next day, I was done.  I was exhausted, but it had been cathartic.  He was right; I needed to reconnect with my emotions.  I feel just great now.

What’s left is to ask my doc why my upper back still hurts.  But for a change, for the first time in four years, I have a feeling that a doctor will have an answer.  It’s been a long four years.

The Blogger at 72