Back inside

Okay.  I'm feeding Sue tequila shots and in a minute will put on Julieta Venegas CD and hope she'll get all Hips Don't Lie on me.  (Oh, yeah.  All you people out there who like to think she is "shy" need to see Sue dance!)

Tomorrow I have to go back to the hospital.  I got a follow-up X-ray and they found some blood on the lung.  So, they're gonna stick the tube back in and try to drain it out.  If that doesn't work they will take out a rib and scrape my lung with an ice cream scooper or something.

I'm not looking forward  to this at all.  And this has turned out to be a much worse accident than I had ever imagined.  (I want my ribs!)

They wanted me in overnight.  But I opted for the tequila shots and the Hips Don't Lie part.  I'll surrender to them tomorrow and will have to be in there at least a couple of days. 

I'm Back!

I've been away for a while, I know.

This is all new for me and so I guess I just let it go for a while.  A lot has happened.

First, I got married, and am going to do it again in a couple of weeks.

Next, I got into a fucking awful motorcycle accident that put me in the hospital for 8 days (four in the ICU).  My lung collapsed and apparently my heart stopped twice.  Not my best day -- but not my worst either.

In the picture Sue and I are goofing with the plastic tube that was stuck in my chest to drain out the blood.  I had the fucker in there for a week; and it had only been out about an hour when we took this picture.  (That's the percocet and morphine giving me the shit-eating grin.)

The bike went down in a parking lot on the Boca Raton campus of FAU while I was on my way to a faculty committee meeting.  I don't know what happened.  And I think bikers lie like motherfuckers when they talk about crashes.  You'll hear these guys say shit like, "Yeah, I had to lay it down, dude!  There was this puppy on one side and a sleeping homeless guy on the other, and so I just decided. . . "  You don't decide shit on two wheels.  One second you're up, the next you're not.  I had a new brake job the week before and may have grabbed them a little harder than was right.  But, really, I dunno.  I went down.  Not hard and not fast -- you know, parking lot speed.

Some young woman with a Big Gulp cup the size of her head was driving behind me and she laid on the horn before I hit the ground.  I got up, got the bike up, with her blasting the horn at me all the time.  I felt all right and the bike was undamaged; so I pushed it into an open parking place with a "Reserved for SGA President" sign over it.  I got the helmet off and was checking myself out -- I didn't seem hurt at all!-- when a campus cop came up and said "You can't stay here!"  I said, 'Yeah, I know.  I just had an accident.  I may be hurt."

"Well, you can't stay here."

So I got on the bike and rode to a bike shop I knew.  My breathing was bad and so I knew I was hurt by then.  My pal Bill locked up the shop and rode me to Boca Community Hospital.  I called Sue and she got there about an hour before my lung collapsed.  It was the worst feeling in the world, fighting for breath with my own body while my chest caved in on itself.

They threw me in an ambulance and rushed me to the trauma unit at Delray Medical, where a hot blonde nurse named Candy -- I'm not kidding -- said, "Okay, Mr. Harrawood, this is really gonna hurt," and jammed that fucking tube through my ribs.  Because my heart was beating so weakly, they didn't knock me out and I felt the whole thing slide through my chest.  Then I passed out and apparently coded.  Later I told Candy, who became the lead on my case for that week, that I had enjoyed many nurse fantasies with hot blonds named Candy, but none of them had involved exactly this sort of penetration.  The hospital was a nightmare, but she did right by me, and I'm grateful to her for saving my life.

Sue and Enrique took real good care of me in the hospital, but the whole episode has fucked up our plans to get married at the end of the month.  I'm pretty much done with motorcycles while I'm with Sue, because this whole thing was so much harder on her than on me.  I won't ask her to go through this again.  I'm driving a cherry-red convertible now, a proper mid-life crisis car.  You wouldn't know from seeing me in it that I'm spending my mid-life with a young latin hottie.  Not having much of a crisis, when I can breathe.

Right now, we're still planning to do the deed on the 26th.  But I've just learned I may have to go back into the hospital and get the tube re-inserted.  I'm apparently bleeding inside and my chest is filling up again.  We'll see.  If I can stand up and say "I do," well, I will.