Counting

I know better than to count the days, hours, minutes of my life, especially in anticipation of some future event or date that promises to solve every problem I ever had. I've learned the hard way. Turning 18, graduating from college, getting married, getting divorced... none of those dates/events met my expectations. Each time, it was Just Another Day. Change doesn't take place at the pace of days or moments, but on a whole 'nother scale.

However, I'm reduced to some very basic units of vitality right now, so I'm back to counting... I can't resist. It seems like a slightly higher order activity than just existing. A strict medication schedule, I've learned, is essential. That enforces the counting of hours and pills. I obsess over measurements of time, though between intervals of red ink scrawlings on a legal pad to note the time and dosage of two varieties of morphine, I fall back into the mist of timelessness. The date and time mean something that I once knew very well, like a neglected foreign language I could speak with some fluency. Now I stutter, Donde esta el bano... or Is it time to take a pill now?

The strange, enforced counting causes me to feel some grief about this lost chunk of time. I want to quantify other units to make this worthwhile, but I will probably have to be well out of them to appreciate what these long days have meant in terms of my larger life.

Anyway... here are the numbers.

By Wednesday, September 5th, it will have been 48 days since Something Bad happened. (It will have been 57 days since my original surgery.) It will have been 25 days since the latest plunge out of any level of functionality to an existence of utter agony and pain.

I've been suffering relentlessly from spinal headaches that have come in various intensity of explosion since my July 11 surgery. There were times in the hospital when several types of intravenous pain medication blurred the edges a bit.

There have been long moments of relief here and there, in or out of the hospital, from the angels in my life. The best medicines have been gentle hugs from little kids, soothing hands rhythmically and softly stroking my hair and face, strong arms helping me to and from the toilet or shower, insistent hands presenting small portions of food, soft voices checking in on me, fresh clean sheets, rainstorms, quiet music and guided meditations, fresh spinach and strawberry salad, and SLEEP. Mostly I don't know I've slept until I recall vivid dreams.

Somewhere around me swirls a drama of epic importance, a quest, various subplots in a tragic comedy. But now I just count. Two more hours until my next Morphine tablet. Only that much time left of any intellectual coherence at all. Tonight I use it on this Blog, feeling inarticulate and impotent and frustrated at the small payoff from so much effort.

I could cry, but this close to the end of a morphine cycle, tears would hurt in their crystaline hardness. Well into the peak of relief, I'll be too tired to cry, or too numbed out by this weird drug to dip into the emotional well for a good cleansing tear-fest.

I hope my counting down to September 5th surgery will result in much-anticipated relief. I'm gonna get fixed, for once. I'll just have normal post-operative pain and then a few weeks later I'll be sweating in physical therapy, then lying on my back to read, looking up to see the red numbers on my digital clock and having a casual and innate understanding of what those digits are calling me to do next. The school bus schedule and school start and end times and rush hour and lunchtime may all come back like Spanish after a few days in a Mexican village. Total immersion in the language of time will make my current bafflement and deliberate accounting of moments seem like a silly lapse in intelligence, like the foggy memory of a drunken binge in a strange city.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'll emerge from this weird realm with a curious calmness about time. Maybe I will learn that hurry is useless. Maybe I'll earn a graduate degree in serenity and patience and an immunity to the time disease.

Metaphors of travel, language, disease... all of these swirl around me as I look for some way to define myself in terms of time. Three more days to go, then I'll be headed into a transition.

Judy Collins sings, "Who knows where the time goes... who knows where the time goes..."