About ten years ago I woke up to find myself in a hospital. It was a situation that I had often joked about. You know I need to be careful or one of these days I’m going to wake up to the sound of beep beep… bleep. It was a bad siuation, I had somehow walked out in front of a car and my right fibula and tibia had suffered a compound fracture, which means that my lower leg snapped in half with bones sticking out of my skin. I don’t remember much. There is a weird moment that I think of a lot of times that I’m not sure if it really happened or if in my drunken shock my brain made it up.
But in my head it plays out like this. I tried to stand on my leg that was literally in pieces trying to stuff the damage back in my leg so I could get out of the street. This guy I’m not sure where he came from (if he even existed) rushed to my side and convinced me to lay down and quit moving because I was going to mess myself up worse. There was calmness about the guy; he kept his shit together even as my seriously injured self tried to resist help. Acting like an idiot, I passed out and woke up in an ambulance, passed out woke up in the ER crying, passed out woke up with a catheter inserted and a leg full of pins. I immediately started crying till I fell asleep again, at some point they were able to start administering morphine.
It is was one of the dumbest points of my life I was in the hospital for a little over a week. My very closest friends came to see me. By that I mean none of the people I had been hanging out with at the time. My true friends, the clowns from my high school days. One friend came every single day, sometimes twice a day. He would sit and talk with me through my medical drugged up haze. Sadly I don’t talk to him anymore, but I always remember him coming and chatting me up as I sat in that room feeling sorry for myself.
Of course my little brother came everyday to check in and see that everything was all right. Another friend came and said one of the most profound things to me, that at the time made me want to leap out of the bed and kick his ass. He said “you did this to yourself” At the time I was blaming everyone else for the way the situation turned out. As I spent the next year and a half slowly healing, I chewed that phrase around in my mouth like a rotten piece of gum. Slowly I was less angry with the guy, he was right I had done this to myself. As the years have gone by this phrase has become my chant in times when things are not he greatest. I think about how all of my choices have helped me arrive where I am at now. When I started running and I started making changes to my life style I would think “you are doing this to yourself” When I started saying that I would not be at the next drinking event because I had to run in the morning I thought about how I was at it again.
I have had some pretty bad slip ups with drinking since this event. The phrase is never too far from my mind. I understand that if I drink too much that bad things can happen. Most of the time bad things do happen when I go that one step beyond. But I’m working on it.
This was not supposed to be some kind of AA post. It was suppose to be about how I know my tight group of friends that I don’t see a hell of a lot but I know would be there if I called any of the four of them out of no where, how my life can be defined by which guy named matt I was hanging out with at which age, and how much life has changed in ten years.
Separately I have to return that stupid bike I bought, there are already all sorts of issues with it and I am extremely mad about it. But not mad enough to write about it here. YET
Bravo.
ReplyDelete