Man Came Alive and the Clock Struck Five

Why do I always seem to be in the hospital in August?

Well, it’s not every year, but when it happens, always seems to be August.

When I was young, early teens I think, I had a strange dream. There was a…monster sort of creature with me, smaller than me, but I think could have been dangerous if it wanted to be. I gave it something, I don’t remember what, and in return it answered a question I don’t recall either. It said, “Late August.” Just that. So, each year as summer mercifully dies, taking its foul heat away, I wonder if something is going to happen. If it will be THIS August.

I was in for about 8 days, getting dosed with heavy antibiotics and equipped with a drain in my abdomen to try to take down my bacteremia (infection) before they could finally remove my gallbladder. Hurrah, you might think, no more vomiting, then, right? Alas. Doctors keep lying to me that it will stop. Some days, none at all, I’m fine, but also days like today, when nothing will stay down. On Friday, I’m getting blood work done for my cholecystectomy surgeon to puzzle over, since, you know, I’m supposed to be better. My first surgeon, the one who placed a stent somewhere in July, I’m still dodging. I just really don’t want to go back to him, he’s, like, an hour’s drive away.

Time passes…

Another, brief, hospital stay, inability to keep fluids down which thankfully seems to have subsided. I’m grateful for liquids the way you are from health your first day after the most horrific flu. And I’m wondering if life really is meant to be suffering, that there’s no painless way. That my daydreams of a perfect, slow, painless, dignified death makes the universe laugh at me.

Animals flinching from humans, pushed to high alert by the ancestor-memories of hurting at our hands. Earlier man cowering from storms and eclipses. Faeries, supposedly, drawing back in fear of the sight of the Christians’ Nailed God. Odin the All-Father hanging from a branch of the World Tree, his sacrifice for knowledge left a bloody hole where one eye used to be. Life is not itself without some measure of pain. I think I wrote that, in something, I can’t remember now.

If only I could either know what the point of this life is, or I could forget everything before, after, and around it, so I’d stop being tormented by the memory of home, and peace.