Landslide

  I’ve been out of the hospital  a week and change but the foot is just not healing up. It keeps vacillating between looking slightly better and much worse. Both the podiatrist and surgeon decide I need to be hooked up to a wound vac, which is just what it sounds like. Everyone says they’re amazing devices but the thought of having this contraption attached to me 24 hours a day is the proverbial last straw for my somewhat fragile state of mind. My mood plummets immediately and nothing seems to be able to raise it.

   At the podiatrists’ office, they pump in a music station which exclusively plays covers of 70s soft rock hits slowed down even further and warbled by sweet-voiced nymphs. I’ve been here enough times to hear the songs repeat. Have You Ever Seen the Rain is always followed by Here Comes the Sun, and then I'm On Fire, somehow even creepier than the original. 

    Dr. B comes in and asks how I'm doing. I tell her I've about reached the end of my rope and am tired of living. She smiles through her mask and says she understands but notes that the foot is looking much better. I don’t think it looks any different but say nothing. A woman’s voice coos a syrupy rendition of Landslide, a song which has always turned my stomach. 

    The doctor brings her assistant in to attach the wound vac, but ends up doing the whole thing herself. She asks if I have anyone to help me at home. I tell her no, I had to fire my butler. "Oh, that's too bad," she says. I tell her I'm joking. She looks at me, puzzled, and says, "Well home care will be constacting you. In the meantime we have some supplies for you to take with you." The assistant lugs in a box the size of a big screen TV. 

"You're fucking kidding me," I say. The assistant assures me that she is not. She says my medical leave paperwork is waiting for me at the front counter. I go out and make my appointment and the woman at the counter says there's a charge for them having filled out the paperwork. "You're fucking kidding me," I say, but apparently no one around here kids about anything, so I hand her my card.

    As I sit waiting for my ride to return, I see a familiar face beaming up at me from the coffee table. Henry Fucking Winkler is on the cover of AARP, beneath headlines promising How to Stay Safe Driving at Night and Love Lost and Found after 47 Years. A man comes in to repair the automatic door opener, and for the next hour I am treated to blasts of cold air accompanied by a high-pitched drilling. I try to make myself some coffee but the coffee machine serves me a cup of hot water covered with a film of coffee grounds.  I give in and read the AARP rag. “Don’t think about what you don’t have,” Henry extolls us at the end of his interview. “Embrace and enjoy what’s in front of you.” The machine on my shoulder gurgles. I want to throw both it and the magazine at the wall. 

    At home I eat lunch and immediately black out. When I reluctantly come to, it’s dark outside. I warm up some leftover black-eyed peas and sit and watch the dark thoughts circle ever closer. 

    All the while the machine in the shoulder bag ticks like a drunken clock, occasionally emitting a deep gurgle like a burst of flatulence. It’s not large –about the size of an old portable cassette recorder- but it’s heavy. Crimson beads dart along the clear tube that leads from my bandaged foot to the vacuum itself. It’s not as off-putting as a colostomy bag but it’s still disturbing. Every once in a while it shuts itself off for no apparent reason and emits a high pitched shriek to alert me. As the night progresses the ticking sounds wetter, like someone taking slurps of bubble tea through a straw. 

    My first home visit nurse arrives the next morning to interview me. She’s very young and very kind, her hands covered in rainbow tattoos that look like they were drawn on in crayon. Olivia is obsessed with her but she says that while she loves cats, she’s deathly allergic. We talk a while and I somehow manage to convince her I’m no threat to myself, something I’m not all that sure of at the moment, and she leaves and says I’ll be seeing three more nurses this week; the nurses of Christmas past, present and future, I assume. I don’t look forward to the stream of strangers into my filthy, cluttered little burrow. 

    I try to sleep the afternoon away again but my body doesn’t cooperate. I manage to read an entire issue of the New Yorker but it’s so depressing I feel nauseous afterwards. I just want to close my eyes and at this point I don’t really care if I ever open them again.