catheters


of all the years in my life, i don't have gratuitous amounts of memories from any. there are reasons for this. and then are reasons for this. for whatever reason, though, the way that i see myself looking back is like staring deeply at a 1000 piece puzzle of an ocean, only 900 pieces are missing. i have enough of it to cobble together the "big picture", but the facts of the matter are so few and far between that i am left with a great bit of grey area to fill in the blanks in other ways. pictures. stories. songs. family. now facebook. i'd like to think, looking backwards, that the way i represent my history is mostly accurate, but i would be more of a liar than i already am if i said there wasn't a good bit of revisioning in the process. for better or worse, leading up to june 2009, what you got of me was a fragmented understanding of my former self with a bent towards growing up to being a better husband, father and friend. that's it.

maybe this is how it has always worked. with everybody. but the last six months, i have a feeling, may singe their way into my own long-range planning unlike any six month span of my so called life.

"what you are looking at here is your left kidney. this is what a normal sized kidney looks like."

<nods, approves>

"this is not."

<oh, ...shit>

one of the more vivid memories from my stay in the hospital was the morning after my first night. the friday following the surgery, sarah had gone home to get the girls ready for their day. amy had stopped in to see me on her (out of the) way home from work. a couple girls from jeff. st.'s nursing program came into my room. they asked me for permission to take out my catheter. nervously, i looked over at amy (a nurse, herself) and asked if i should think handing over to them my permission would be ok. she shrugged at me and said that it should be fine, and so i said "yes." the girls left the room for a minute and amy and i were able to talk about what was going to happen.

"don't worry", she said. "anybody can do it."

what???

well, ok.

the nurse-in-training and her supervisor came back into the room to do their thing. evidently, the process goes like this. deflate the balloon that's been forced up into your bladder, pull tube out. easy-bake oven easy as that. i guess the nurse-in-training handbook didn't mention that, if the patient has just had an organ pulled out of his belly-button area, she shouldn't use the patient's abdomen area for leverage. not that she was balancing her entire weight on me, but she pushed down just hard enough to make everything between my navel and what-felt-like my neck spasm. i groaned. the nurse jumped, sure that she had hurt me with whatever they were attempting to do "down there". she hadn't, but i was ready for them to finish and leave. now.

finish, they did. i think amy had left the room for them to do the deed. my memory goes grey at this point again. but, in that moment, i knew something major had happened to my body. what i didn't know was how long it would take me to get back to where i once was.

i am still waiting.

sure, i am perfect push-upping again. crunching. lifting. i can carry whatever whomever needs carried to their car. hell, i am even sleeping some now.

but i am not back to where i once was. maybe i never will be. and maybe that's the point.

kiker had some surgery a couple nights ago. scared me to death. even got his own catheter story that i can't wait to hear. what? is something wrong with that?

the latter half of this year has been a rough one. rough enough that i think i am going to remember an awful lot of it. and i am not sure that's a good thing.

to be continued...