Possibility of losing this most basic biological occurrence. Still, I tearfully shared my revelation with any willing listener the day of my apparent re-animation. Being illiterate for the rest of my life failed in comparison to not being able to get a boner. My male nurse shared in my celebration by making me painfully sit up in bed for the first time in weeks. I paid homage to him before leaving Denver by having him shave my scabbed and stitched-up head to resemble his handsomely smooth cranium.
I had been kept in a coma for around seven or eight days following my accident on June 24th. The first date I can remember fully is July Fourth. A day or two after the return of my masculinity, my friends Bryan and CJ stopped by on Independence Day. We watched fireworks over the Rocky Mountains from my room’s window. The exploding fireworks were an easily made metaphor for the explosions of pain my body kept igniting even after those over the Rockies had long faded, and my friends returned to their pain-free lives.
During my last days in Colorado, I was never alone. Nurses, hospital staff, friends, family, and pain kept me company. I eventually remembered how to decipher written words, but my most constant companion could prove to be a formidable distraction to any task. Even today, pain can make the words fall off the page, and I'm left with a jumble of letters at the bottom margin.
Pain can be so intense it supersedes visual metaphor. White, hot bursts; spiky, gold flashes like lightning; steady, red thumps, these familiar descriptions fail to compare to the screaming your body makes as it starts to realize how much of itself is missing or has been replaced by metal. Pain doesn't need to breathe. Its screaming is incessant. On an awful night, I could hear stitches stretching or the sound of my bones pushing their way through torn muscle to rejoin fractured ends; the screws in my body squeaked as they turned in the wood of my bones.
On quieter nights, the sound of blood being pumped through recently torn sutures would lull me to sleep like ocean waves. If not, there was always more morphine.
I left DGH on July 9, 1999. It would be three years before I returned to Colorado for a friend’s wedding. In 1999, I was leaving Colorado, having enjoyed most of my five years there. I did what
I wanted, when I wanted, just as I had since deciding to do so back in high school. Being an adult just gave me carte blanche to behave as juvenile as I desired. I was paying the consequences for being in a hurry to get from one good time to the next. It would take a couple more parties for me to figure out what he meant.
In my last hours at Denver General, the irascible Dr. Ferrari brought a group of interns to the foot of my bed and told them, “We’ve done all we can do for this one. He’s either going to get it, or we’ll see him again.”
I could barely sit up in bed. It hurt me to breathe the words, “You won’t see me like this again. I get it.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was lying to Dr. Ferrari. It would be quite some time before I figured out what it was.
It’s been nearly ten years since I ran that stop sign. Even after learning to throw a baseball left-handed and earning my Master of Fine Arts degree, I’m still not sure if I know what Dr. Ferrari meant on that day. I do know, however, that if it were not for the selfless efforts of countless people that I would neither ever meet nor have ever personally thanked, I would not be here still trying to figure out what it is. I also know it’s because of the dedication of strangers that I am alive to say “mahalo” to them all—and mean it.
Maybe that’s what Dr. Ferrari was talking about.
PRORADER
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