Tomorrow, tomorrow
Provided that everything goes according to plan, I’ll be back in Tampa tomorrow evening. I’ll have lots of photos and various tales to post, I should be more enthusiastic than I am right now. It’s just been a very long and often difficult trip. I have a lot to write, but not just yet, not in this hotel. I’m a little too uneasy to write anything important. So, until tomorrow, I rest.
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Out of Cedars
I’m out of the hospital, sitting in a hotel, the Embassy Suites by LAX. I’m tired, beyond tired.
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How I got here
So, after thirty-five hours in the Cedars-Sinai emergency room, I’m officially in a real room. See, yesterday morning the little balloon inside my trache tube decided to burst, meaning that the air usually directed toward my lungs began coming out of my mouth. A few minutes later and I’m on a stretcher heading for an ambulance parked behind the Beverly Hilton. It was clearly the perfect way to start my day, and end my vacation, the perfect way to say good-bye to Sara.
I get to the e.r. and the trache really needs to come out, but the ENT (trache doctor) is about two hours out, so e.r. doc decides to go for it old-school style. I get a little subcutaneous morphine, he yanks out the dead trache and jams in the new one, while I simply gurgle and gasp. At this point the doctor’s really crankin’ on my neck, he looks nervous. It’s exactly what you want to see dance across your doctor’s face as he fucks with your air-way. He’s nervous because he can’t secure the new trache, I’m bleeding and not looking particularly good. He decides to pull out trache number two and toss in a third. Fortunately, blood-loss and pain aside, the third time’s a charm.
However, I’m still here in the hospital because, as it turns out, I’ve been traveling with a faulty ventilator all week and after the trache trauma I couldn’t stand the shallow breathing. Apparently, the vent has a leak, which is why I’ve felt kind of funny since I left Tampa. I’m nervous a lot lately, so the tightness in my chest seemed like my usual dumb fucking idiocy. At least I’m an accurate dumb fucking idiot.
I’m sitting in the hospital, waiting for a replacement vent, trying to get new flights back to Tampa. My neck hurts, I’m exhausted. Everything good seems far away. Ira, the red-carpet, the parties, Sara, it all seems like it’s behind L.A. SMOG. I wish I could find my way out.
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