Ah, the sweet blessings of anasthesia. I had to go for a surgical procedure on the 20th and spent most of the next two days meandering in and out of oblivion, clutching lightly to the coattails of beloved Euphoria as she flitted twixt and fro, finally depositing me back with ever so light a clunk into reality in the wee small hours of the 22nd. Some people suggest that I don't handle anasthetics well at all. I suggest quite the opposite, but this time-- I immediately knew that danger was afoot.
The world ended on the 21st. Those miscreant misanthrope Mayans promised!
As I stared up into the darkened room a ghastly and pallid figure suddenly loomed over me in my bed. I leapt into action, ripping the ridiculous faux wood top off of that stupid thing they always have beside your hospital bed that is too small to use as a table and too big to not be in the way. I swung with all my might, clearing the brain-sucking zombie's head off of it's shoulders with one gruesome bloody swipe. Advantage Alcorn, you cadaverous fiends. Or so it seemed to me; to the nurse checking my blood pressure I probably looked like some feeble weakling groping helplessly for a Kleenex. No zombies. No zombocalypse. Quelle disappointement! (I don't think that was really French, but it looked cool there)
By dawn, I had come to realize that it was true, I was just another guy stuck in post-op and the world was chugging along as usual. I became bombarded several time a day with insistent whiny demands that I: get out of bed, go for a walk, sit in an armchair, live on jello and sit in an armchair. They were big on the armchair. These demands were foisted upon me by usually rather attractive (in that cookie cutter vacuous stare kind of attractive way) young women who apparently had received post-secondary educations that included learning to speak to your patients like your working at BP's or TGIF's or Appleby's (Hi! I'm Kandra, I'm going to be your nurse this morning! Isn't that great? Would you like a couple of minutes to look over the....no, wait, that's the other job...) Converssations tended to go like this:
"OK, let's get you off that bed and sitting in the chair"
"Uh, sitting really hurts, how about if I get off the bed and just stand around?"
"Great! then after that, maybe we can get you sitting in the chair!"
That was pretty much the level of conversation across the board. Try getting solid food out of such folk when somebody wrote liquid diet on your chart 2 days before. "But that was two days ago, I'm really hungry"..."Great, maybe we can get you to go sit in the chair!" I actually got to hear a physiotherapist telling a man who was close to 60 to do his breathing exercises by ....brace yourselves..."Smell the flowers, blow out the birthday candles" Like asking him to inhale through his nose and exhale out his mouth was going to be too hard for him to understand. It made me yearn for the zombies.
But all's well that ends well and after four days that felt like a month I escaped the clutches of those ham fisted poltroons which are the best and the brightest of socialist medical care and was escorted home by a friend, well, acquaintance. Please don't get me wrong. This fellow did me a huge favor and I am sincerely grateful. The drive home, however, should have been prefaced with a couple extra shots of morphine so that I could have really enjoyed the nuances of the conversation. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the the end-of-the-worlders, New World Order alarmists, and general conspiracy theoristas all seem to fit under one big happy down filled blanket together? I got to listen to "well turns out the Mayans had it wrong this time,...." I'm not kidding. It's the EMP that's going to get us, he's been studying Nostradamus' predictions. He's also convinced himself that his 99 Caddy is one of the few cars that can repel the giant EMP when the rest of the world is blacking out or frying or whatever is going to happen. I asked him what good that would do him with everyone else dropping dead behind the wheel at 70mph simultaneously. It stumped him long enough to get him restarted on North Korea starting the next global conflagration. The only thing missing is the tinfoil hat. But it also made me think, this guy seems happiest when he's got the end of the world to worry about. I'm pretty sure he's not alone. We can rail and shake our fists at the sky and curse our lack of political leadership over the wrongs of our world. We can shed true and sincere tears for those who fall for no apparent reason in harm's way and legislators turn a blind eye to the real problems behind the symptoms. We can feel nauseated by the hatred and discrimination, racism, sexism, blundering bureacracies (health care!) but the end of the world? Hey, whattya gonna do?
After having had a couple of days to sleep off my usual caste of cynicism and my decidely jaundiced view of the world, I realized something else. We are learning more and more every day to be desensitized to real world ending events. The news beats us down with mass shootings, with children being murdered, with some nut job shooting at firemen, with serial rapists and murderers romping around willynilly. Why? Why is a culture of violence not only tolerated, but celebrated? When I was a child John Wayne was going to save us, he didn't but Clint and Charlie and Bruce and Sly and Arnie all stood in line to take his place and whoever is the matinee idol now. So we celebrate violence as a way of life. Want to stop the shooters? Shoot them! Utah school teachers are being offered weapons training. Have we really come to this? When I was a child I was taught that my father's generation stopped evil and used violence to do it. Maybe that ingrained the notion in our minds, but then something much smaller in scale, but perhaps not scope happened and I think it influenced a world's thinking and that impact is still felt. Novemeber 22, 1963, Dealey Plaza, Dallas Texas. If someone can kill the President, then it's ok to kill..... Maybe the world did end, we're just the last twitching nerves. Certainly, if anyone reading this believes that we were created by some manner of Supreme Being, what we are today cannot be what that Being envisioned.
On a somewhat lighter note, what is up with those stupid little rolling bedside table things in hospital rooms? All of my life, except from changing the tops from an ugly puke green metal to an ugly fake woodgrain metal, they've never changed. Do you think somebody that...like..makes things could go...hey, these tables are too narrow to be good for anything and start making them a few inches wider? Seriously, this could be a big business if somebody just got on it. You could even recylce the old ones to make new ones out of the parts, eco-friendly. Where are all the budding entrepreneurs out there?
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