Reports Of My Drinking Are Greatly Exaggerated

On Thursday, September 20, 2012 I entered a major medical center in New York City to have my fifth spinal surgery.  I really don’t want to go into all the details of why it was my fifth.  Let’s just say there was an “accident” at a gym in November 2001, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.  My third and fourth spinal surgeries (both fusions) were done back-to-back (ha, nice pun) in 2005.  I recovered, and I can walk.  However, gradually, over the past seven years, I began to lose feeling in first my right foot and then my left foot.  I didn’t lose all feeling, because the numbness would alternate with excruciating, acute and sharp pain.  It was the type of pain one might experience when, say, sticking a fork into an electrical outlet.  I saw a neurologist, had two days of tests, and was referred back to my orthopedic surgeon.  He told me that I had some screws loose (big news to those of you know me) from my last fusion which needed to be removed.  The surgeon also informed me I needed a laminectomy, a procedure which would relieve the pressure on my nerve roots and, ultimately, bring back the feeling in both of my feet.

Well, the surgery went well, but, after it was completed, I awoke in the operating room and could not breathe.  I was drowning in my own lung fluids.  The anesthesiologist gave me a steroid, intubated me and placed me on a ventilator.  I spent the next eighteen hours in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit.  Sometimes the ventilator would go off, “Bing!  Bing!  Bing!”  I realized that meant the machine wasn’t working so I wasn’t breathing.  Oh dear.  I made it through this horror because I had two wonderful nurses, and a very good resident.  Also, they gave me as much paper as I wanted and I scribbled frantically.  I was writing for my life because I could not speak.

Amazingly, I remember this in vivid detail.  Why would this be a feat?  I have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).  My mind has repressed many of the horrible events which have so deeply wounded my psyche.  I'm relieved, and yet, because I have a superb memory, I find it annoying.  Yet, who am I to question the wisdom of my subconscious?

Although I consider myself as someone who is “in recovery,” and have faith that someday I won’t be plagued by the attendant anxiety, panic, nightmares and depression, I presently can only be who I  am.  Am I strong and resilient?  You betcha!  Yet, this post is about how I have been coping with my close-death experience.  I am terrified of sleeping, and my body needs rest so very much.  There have been complications, and sleep is a key to the body healing.  Insomnia is my arch nemesis.  The longer I lay awake, the more vulnerable and terrified I feel.  I feel as though I’m a “bad patient,” one who is not fully compliant and cooperative in the act of restoring my body to good health.  What to do, what to do…?  I know!  I needed to be out among other people, AND I happen to live in “The City That Never Sleeps.”  So I have been going out on the town for the past 3 weeks in the wee small hours of the morning. 

Now, after living here for decades, I have a few things going for me.  I have street smarts, oh, yes I do. I know how to use public transportation; a skill which I believe is greatly undervalued.  Finally, I have a little money in my wallet.  But since most of my friends who live locally actually do sleep between midnight and six o’clock in the morning, where should I go?  Where do people gather, and speak, and listen to music, and build a temporary community?  Bars!  Or, since I’m Irish-American, I prefer the term pub.  I have been visiting a lot of taverns, alehouses, watering holes, drinking establishments, and even after-hours joints.  Naturally sociable, I can sit down at the bar, make friends with the bartender, mind my own business, or chat with other people.  I can read a book, or use my smart phone to go on Facebook or Twitter.  I simply can sit, sip a beer, or some other type of beverage, and relax.  I do not really have to explain myself to anyone.  I’m having a few drinks over the course of five to six hours.  There have been no arrests for public intoxication or other criminal behavior.  Sometimes I go and sit in a McDonald’s and drink coffee.  Also, going through a Duane Reader at night is like an archaeological excavation of in advance of our civilization’s decline. 

But, friends, I don’t want you to worry about those check-in’s on Facebook at The Hibernian, McElroy’s, The Auld Dubliner, The Irish Rover or The Rose of Tralee.  I’m safe, I’m sound, I’m sober, and when I get home, after some good craic, I can sleep snug.

Fool's Gold

FIELDS OF GOLD - Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE, aka “Sting” (born 2 October 1951)

You'll remember me when the west wind moves

Upon the fields of barley

You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky

As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love

For to gaze awhile

Upon the fields of barley

In his arms she fell as her hair came down

Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love

Among the fields of barley

We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky

As we lie in the fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so

Upon the fields of barley

Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth

Among the fields of gold

I never made promises lightly

And there have been some that I've broken

But I swear in the days still left

We'll walk in the fields of gold

We'll walk in the fields of gold

Many years have passed since those summer days

Among the fields of barley

See the children run as the sun goes down

Among the fields of gold

You'll remember me when the west wind moves

Upon the fields of barley

You can tell the sun in his jealous sky

When we walked in the fields of gold

When we walked in the fields of gold

When we walked in the fields of gold

I literally left a field of gold yesterday.  And it was a lovely 7 weeks.  People seem to think that because I’m almost 50 (I know, can you believe it?  I DO look that good!) that my dream of finding romantic love must have ended long ago.  Why?  Is it because I never actually married?  Is it only those who officially had a marriage, which ended by divorce or the death of a spouse, who get to stamp their life passport with “I loved and lost?”  Am I someone who never had her heart broken because I am and always have been “single?”  We “singletons” (thank you, Helen Fielding) do still dream.  We do still find love, even if it’s for a brief encounter.  Yes, like the David Lean film, Brief Encounter (1945), we meet someone and realize that we really enjoy the other’s company.  What begins as something light and fun metamorphoses unexpectedly into something sincere and real, and it is sobering.  But I am nearly 50, so I know how to hold back from falling in love as I did when I was 25.  By now, I have the experience to wait and see, and hold back, and really look at this new lover.  The waiting is important because I have learned by trial that the monsters can jump out of the closet and falling in love would be falling into a pit of despair and hopelessness.  I believe being in love is more important than falling in love, and “being” means the present.  So I judge by whether or not this relationship carries tell-tale clues of my past, so that history doesn’t repeat itself.  So before I allowed myself to fall in love this time, while the smoke and mirrors were in place, but the man behind the curtain, behind the facade, was stepping closer and closer into the light of day, I grabbed myself and said, “What is happening NOW?”  My observations and my intuitions, and then the shocking revelation that everyone else had known about this man’s particular personal demon, held me back.  Yet, the air carries the unfulfilled potential of “what might have been.”  Until I get to “what actually is,” I won’t fall in love.  But when I meet the man who makes me feel that what is shall also “be”--I will hurl myself into love.  I won’t be singing sad but beautiful songs about a few months of illusory golden days.

FIELDS OF GOLD - Sting

BRIEF ENCOUNTER (final scene)