Month: February 2005

Color Me Impatient

Overall my recovery seems to be proceeding normally. Though I’m still confined to the house, neither allowed to take outside walks or to drive, I will be able to drive short distances as of Friday.

In some ways, this may be the hardest part of recovery for me because now that I’m feeling relatively well and have managed to sleep at least four or five hours straight the last two nights, I want to get on with my life, want to get back to the things I’m used to doing. Of course, I don’t want to jeapordize my long-term health or risk re-injury, so, for the most part, I’m trying to be a good patient.

If you wonder why I’m so impatient, here’s a list of my recovery from surgery with landmark days:

Thursday: prostate removed.
Friday: catheter replaced because of blockage.
Saturday: first walk around nurses’ station
Sunday: first bowel movement; first sold food.
Monday: sent home, exhausted climbing stairs to bedroom
Tuesday: climbed stairs several times throughout the day
Wednesday: blockage removed in emergency room
Thursday: filled bird feeder.
Friday: first drain removed.
Saturday: most of day spent napping
Sunday: more sleeping. but with longer computer breaks
Monday: brought in garbage can; helped cook dinner.
Tuesday, final drain removed.
Wednesday: paid bills and walked up steep hill to mailbox, and back obviously

It’s all too obvious that I’m not getting much done and, certainly, nothing exciting has taken place so far, isn’t it?

I’m not even allowed to exercise yet so that I can do more than this, not that I really feel like doing too much exercise.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is that it’s difficult to sit or lie down without taking pain killers. As a result, I haven’t had much luck trying to read or even write yet.

It’s most comfortable just to stand, which may explain why I spend a considerable part of the day just plain pacing back and forth.

P.S. This really isn’t meant so much as a complaint, which I’m sure it is, as a factual statement of where I’m at at this point in my healing. Anyone considering this kind of surgery should probably plan accordingly, as I seem the norm rather than the exception.

Robert Lax’s A Thing That Is

I just finished reading Robert Lax’s A Thing That Is for the second time, partially because I liked it that much, but also because it’s easy to read because it’s only seventy-seven pages long, and most of those pages are made up of white space.

In reading this selection, I also have refined my feelings towards his unique style, one that places extraordinary empahsis on individual words. In short, I really appeciate its potential when it’s used in a poem like:

be
gin
by
be
ing

pa
tient

with
your
self

la
ter
you
can
be
pa
tient

with
oth
ers

(name
of
the
game

is
pa
tience.)

His style seems like a cross between Japanese haiku and e.e.cummings’ poetry, forcing each word to take on a special meaning that it often loses in everyday language.

In a poem like this, the emphasis on patience is reinforced by the very patience it takes to read the poem. The same thing can be said when Lax attempts to write meditative poems, and each word seems like a separate thought strung on a rosary.

Unfortunately, the style seems to me to get in the way in longer poems like “solemn dance,” which goes on for eight pages like this:

the
dance
of
the
waves

is
an
order
“d
dance

the
dance
of
the
waves

is
a
solemn
dance

…

Unfortunately, by the time I’d finished the poem I felt like I’d been lost at sea, and it wasn’t a comfortable feeling, certainly not one I’d pay $20 for again.

It Depends

Six and sick,
I loved to lie abed
ringing the little bell mother
gave us to ring
when we needed
or wanted something,
mostly her undivided
attention all day long.
I’d ring the bell constantly
’til we were all out of
orange popsicles,
or she finally
took it away.

In the hospital there’s
no need for a bell,
the IV unit’s flashing
red lights, piercing scream
bring aides, LPN’s or RN’s
rushing to my side
to poke and probe
places no man,
and few women,
have gone before.
Defeated, I beg
for a popsicle,
orange, if you please,
just to appease
this growing dis-ease.

Released from the hospital,
still no need
for mother’s bell.
Leslie awaits
my every beck and call,
can barely stand
on my own two feet
before she’s there
to help me put
my pants on,
one foot at a time,
stuff this tube here,
that tube there,
replace bandages
in places I don’t
even want to see.
Finally, I send her
to the store, supposedly
for orange popsicles.

Hell isn’t fire or ice;
it’s ending up senile
in a nursing home
blabbering literary nonsense.
I ring mother’s bell,
and some sweet, charming
ex-student arrives,
wipes drool off my chin,
calmly sucks an orange popsicle
God clearly intended
for me.

Not Just Piss and Blood

Tethered to this gurney
by IV drips, oxygen hoses,
catheter tubes
lying in this pool of pain,
surrounded by flitting
shadows of loved ones,
it’s not hard to imagine
some means of escaping
a pain that transcends
even this morphine drip.

Following the morphine
button’s cord,
one could silently slip
into the comforting darkness,
lie on the forbidden side,
curl up into a fetal position
silently slipping
into that next dimension,
the one just
to the left of this one,
that left-hand of darkness.

Though something vital
has been sliced away,
some secret part
of me left behind,
these voices
from the shadows
pull as tightly as
umbilical cords,
until it seems I must be
tied to this world
by love as much as
by piss and blood.