Six Days Later

The pratfall wasn’t really a surprise…I lived inside my head so much that I often forgot that I was living in the world and bumping into and over people, places, and things was an everyday happenstance…that I awoke six days later in the hospital was, on the other hand, something of a surprise.

The doctors and nurses fussed and poked and prodded and waved lights in my eyes and, with a discernable (and, to my way of thinking, wholly unprofessional) amount of bemusement in their eyes and tones of voice, told me that I would be okay as I long as I remembered to watch where I was walking from then on. I thanked them and filled out the telephone book thick stack of insurance forms; I gathered up the get well cards (leaving the balloons and floral arrangements behind after noting down who sent them) and my iPod and wandered back into the world (from wheelchair to taxi seat to the cool solitude of the recliner my Dad had given me when I moved out of his house and into my so-called adult life.)

Carrie, my ex-girlfriend who had discovered she was a lesbian after we broke up (though she swears it wasn’t because of me…and I choose to believe that), had watered my plants and fed Giacomo (the haughty black cat who deigned to share living quarters with me) and collected the mail and the newspapers…in some ways, Carrie was a better girlfriend after we broke up than she was when we were together.

Giacomo sauntered over to the recliner in the aloof way that only cats can truly make work and, without ceremony, he jumped up into my lap and curled up in ball and went to sleep. As “welcome back” expressions went that was pretty good for an imperious cat like Giacomo and I put my hand across his jet-black back and smiled to myself.

Being in a coma had been pretty much like being awake…I had replayed the triumphs and tragedies and slights of my time on Earth…and I found myself laughing in the same places and crying in the same places and feeling sorry for myself in the same places over things days and weeks and years and decades past.

The theater in my head goes back over the same ground so often that it’s sometimes hard to separate the now from the then. And yet the show goes on…and the old tears and smiles and sighs and whispers become the new tears and smiles and sighs and whispers…and living inside my head stays a constant part of living in the world.

I went back to work a few days later (Carrie and Andi, Carrie’s girlfriend, picked me up because the doctors had said it would probably be best if I didn’t drive for a week or two and took me to the office.) Joan, my boss, spent a good twenty seconds (something of a record for her when it came to non-work related matters) inquiring about my health before she handed me a stack of work and left me to it.

My co-worker Deborah, who sometimes seemed to be positioning herself to be my future ex-girlfriend, took me to lunch and told me how she had spent a fair number of hours at the side of my hospital bed knitting and reading, drove me home and came up to make dinner (Giacomo acted like he liked her…more than he usually acted like he liked me…thus giving his approval for her to be my future ex-girlfriend; Carrie would be less enthused for some reason but Deborah would stick around just the same.)

The coma hadn’t completely shaken my habit of living inside my head…lifelong habits are not put to rest with six days of seemingly blissful unconsciousness…but it did seem to put it in more perspective (and the pratfalls, as a result, became easier to avoid…that’s something anyway, right? I chose to see it as a good thing and moved forward…though still often looking back…from there.)