Making It Up As I Go Along #379

Keeping things short these days as the thumb, while improving, doesn’t really lend to a comfortable hour or so of typing. So combining recent experiences with some poetic licence and a few phrases/words I’ve either heard or though up lately...

Emergency
A war zone.
That’s what it looks like outside of the hospital.

With barriers up and machines rumbling through.
Construction zones are battlefields to be crossed panicked and with vulnerability.

Inside is as if the war zone is true.
Defeated souls slouched in chairs clinging to blankets that pose as skirts.

Around the corner clatters an unstable man.
Drifting into a chair as if walking on the deck of a ship in a heavy swell.
He catches the dislodged chair, shuffles it back a few inches, and carefully raises finger to mouth.
Wide eyed, drooling out a pronounced “shhhhh” before stumbling on, content that he’s fooled us.
This is the life of a stealthy drunk.

I’m surrounded by a new family. A fellowship brought together by pain and misery.
An endurance of time and boredom brings us closer. We talk in an effort to survive the hours.

In the real world, talk is fake. Weather and sales noticed in mailbox fliers.
In this fake world, talk is real. The wish to follow parents into death. Without suicide, of course... nice to meet you.

My thumb brings me to this feverish biker.
Who misses parents so much he wishes for the grill of a big rig while enjoying the freedom of the highway.

The biker talks of Harleys. Unreliable bikes ridden by posers.
My eyes are opened as a mean machine is suddenly transformed into a bean dip bicycle.

Next to him sits a mover who battles demons within his head.
There with the wife of a church goer. She lends him strength as he waits to get his hernia seen to.
A hernia seven years in the making.

Seven years enduring a muscular protrusion.
And two weeks of a battered thumb.
Have brought us here together.
The roots of our meeting took hold when I lived on another land and his stability was not in doubt.

My life has been blessed compared to that of my new friends.
Perhaps the church goer’s wife is more fulfilled but the others are barely getting by.
Battered by life. Telling stories of crashes and falls and the use of three of their cat like lives already.

I’ve needed no extra lives so far. And my thumb was damaged in recreation on my left hand.
So the inconvenience for me is minimal. Seven years of hernia it is not.

Where they’ve had hard lives and I’ve had an easy time,
it seems only fair that they are seen and done first here today.
Tend to the more battered first. I’m destined to spend ten hours here while they’re due to leave happily and soon.
They know it. I’m resigned to it. And they seem happy, for once, to be catching the breaks.

But it is not to be.
Less than four hours in to the stay, I’m called in and seen.
My injury seems not as bad as first thought. No pain in the examination. No need of a cast. Surgery appears unlikely.

They tell me to go on home.

So I return sheepishly.
As my damaged family remains in that marathon sit in the hall.
I shrug apologetically and admit my freedom is at hand.
They smile and wish me well. But I can see the betrayal they feel. Another hope dashed.

And as I walk out into the daylight.
The war zone has disappeared. Sun shines down and birds praise summer.
I think of those I’ve left behind.

Such an odd way... to learn the truth... about a Harley.


SATURDAY...
— Quiet day at work. I’m glad... me alone with a sore hand, headache and general tiredness. Timely drugs help.

SUNDAY...
— Work until around 10:00. Then I go home and sleep... and deal with my thumb.

MONDAY...
— Another day much like yesterday as far as the sticking close to home thing goes. Geoff arrives in the evening. We hang out for a bit catching up.

TUESDAY...
— On the way in to work I get a call from the doctor’s office. Got to go see them tomorrow about my x-rays. Such a call is never good news... oh dear oh dear.
— Work starts quite busy. I don’t stop to get supper before 7:30. By 1:00 it’s pretty quiet again though.

WEDNESDAY...
— Doctor day... part 1. Clinic says I indeed fractured my thumb. They tell me to go to hospital to get it seen to.
— Hospital tells me it’ll be about four hours before I’m seen. That’d ruin supper with Geoff so I leave. $3.50 parking for 15 minutes... good good.
— Supper downtown with Geoff is great. Keg steaks on the patio... lots of good catching up going on.

THURSDAY...
— Up early to go to hospital... part 2. Three and a half hours waiting to be done. Doctor there says the fracture isn’t too bad and the ligaments seem to not be overly loose. Three more weeks in the splint and the hope is it’ll be good. I also have fun listening to the stories of the biker dude who’s sitting in the waiting room next to me. All topics covered... from French women to Harley’s... from his buddy “Hillbilly” who had numerous bike accidents to his girlfriend’s ex banging on the door at night.
— Walk the pond in the afternoon. Hot out... around 35 with humidity and sun... great.

FRIDAY...
— Go for another pond walk. Bring the camera this time. Still 35 degrees. Nice.
— Watch some Fox News tonight. They are ridiculous. Everything they claim democrats did when Bush was in office... now they do. Just a constant democrat attack with commercials for the network saying “fair and balanced.” Idiots.