Monday, February 08, 2010

The Scar, Revised



A little section from the essay, "The Arms of God." Still working it out! Thanks for the read, as always, my dears.

The last night I spent on the trauma unit, a nurse with a thick Romanian accent changed my bandages. It was my first and last encounter with him and he was easily the best of my stay, shielding my eyes from the bright lights while changing the wound (a painful process of taking out pieces of gauze from four wet/dry sections and replacing them) and making me laugh. Everyone says that the appendix does nothing, and I had begun parroting this notion. Heavy pain medication made everything I said seem interesting to me.

"Maybe it does nothing, but it did make itself known, yes?" he said, his face lit up by the machines in the room. "You will want to have the scar revised. You do not want memory of such sadness on your body."

In a strange bit of coincidence, my ex-boyfriend had almost died during surgery to remove his lung a couple of months before my near death. He was the only person that I knew who had been in the hospital longer than I had besides my mother. I mentioned this to the nurse and he said, "It is right that he should suffer. What joy is there in life except to see those who no longer love us have more pain than we do?"

Michelle's Spell of the Day
When asked by Dinah Shore what influenced his music: "The industrialism in Detroit...what I heard walking around...boom boom bah - 10 cars...boom boom bah - 20 cars...I get a lot of my influence from the electric shaver..." Iggy Pop

Cocktail Hour
Drinking HBO television suggestion: Am really loving Big Love this season. Makes me incredibly anxious just to watch it with the various twists and turns. Anyone out there watching?

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Monday!

3 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

A very old world type of attitude. I tend to agree with Kirk from one of the movies, "I need my pain." Or, I need my scars.

the walking man said...

What an odd way of thinking from the nurse. Spend all the hours getting to the point where scars no longer matter and then revisit them who caused the scar with satisfaction that they hurt more than I do.

Like the telling of the scene though. As usual you pulled me right in Brooks.

Anonymous said...

My Iranian heart specialist telling me there's a shadow on my MRI: "There is an artifact on the drawing." Just to be safe, I eat only one pizza a month now.--Michael DeBakey