The goal was written in dry erase in case it should be changing. I wondered about pain as I sat in my father’s hospital room Wednesday, May 29th, 2013. The day of his bypass surgery, and my little brother’s 34th birthday. I wondered about how much pain a person can endure before it kills them, feeling grateful that my own comes with frequent pause. I am more up than down. I remember my dad telling me once, “People like to get high Amber. All people. If they try to tell you different they are lying.”
I can’t even argue with him for the most part because almost everyone I know medicates in some fashion; booze, weed, killer pills (the kind doctor’s give to relieve pain), and the ANTI, anti-depressant. I experimented with all of them before I realized that I would have to walk around with an I.V. drip of heroin to kill all the things I feel. These days I just run with it, as in I lace up my Nike’s and run. You bet I get high, but pain. The pain is there.
The wound was green, leathered with tendons near bone. My father cringed and howled as the nurse pressed to clean the meat of it. “Breathe..” She urged gently. He howled to the bowels of torment until a second nurse popped in to ask, “Did you change your mind about the pain medicine? Are you ready for it now.” The question was a dose of inevitable. He shook his answer like a fiend on the edge of losing himself, and he was, as the first nurse continued to tear into the gape of his “big” wound which was white and green like a maggot squished to guts. “Big breaths,” she coaxed to cheer lead, “Big breaths… You can do this.”
His hurt was proof that he could.
