Well, fudge.

2/23/08
8:00 a.m.

Someone stole my clipboard. Well, no. It's their clipboard, but it feels like "someone stole my clipboard." And now I want to write truly breathless prose. And the clipboard is gone.

But Dawn knew where it was, and so now nothing can hold me down. I shall write a masterpiece among the "almost had a heart attack but refused to die" genre. I will be famous. People will date things from this date, February 23, 2008 - the day Joycelyn woke up and it seemed like people were swarmed over her and taking readings and giving pills and deciding she should pee more, that she had been good so she could have a new mask. I am, the therapist says, entitled to a new mask every three months! Well, damn it, why didn't anyone tell me earlier?

Why, I wonder, did I think I wasn't allowed coffee? It is such a pleasure - and I wonder how much I've been missing due to the impression that I'm doing well to get by with this?

Until yesterday, the world seemed to revolve around a quiet, perhaps contemplative sort of genteelness that was the way "our" folk get sick - in a ladylike manner, not asking too much of anyone. Actually, having 'good' medical care provided over a faint protest of "Oh, this isn't necessary. Surely not this much. I just want to go out to breakfast and buy some cat food. No need for all this fuss. Well, that shot which makes the upset stomach go away. That would do. No need for Richard to get shoved into the end of a jet and flown to Anchorage alongside his poor helpless mother's body with a damned tube stuck down its throat." Yes, that kind of too genteel to-find-myself-HERE sort of thing.

But what I notice, today, is that this hospital wing doesn't end at my room. When Dawn isn't with me, she is with someone else! Her life consists of things beyond my blood pressure and volume of urine and meds and did the doctor come and see me? I'll bet she leaves here at night and people love her. And there are other patients in those other rooms! Who knew?

Do you know how I know it's Jenny on the phone? Am I already doing something that means I can't talk to her? Then it's Jenny. If I'm alone and lonely and would give my right arm for a call from Jenny? Then I can bet it's someone I've already talked to!

2/23/08
1:05 p.m.

Yesterday was a foggy in and out type of day. Mostly the world was my world - it didn't go much beyond my toes or include much that wasn't me. I remember thinking in the afternoon that they had brought a black child to the person in the next room - wondered why no one had sent me one? And when I walked past there to the shower, I remember thinking that they must be using that room for an emergency simulation, and wondering where the Coast Guard had found an entire multi-generational black family for their drill?