MikeyOpp.com

Today marks the eleventh consecutive morning that I have woken up, lying on my back, with a clear plastic jug full of my own urine glistening in the sunlight, beside my bed.

Today marks the eleventh consecutive day where the highlight of my day will be marking off another day of May, the month that no matter how quickly my bones can heal, I will be unable to stand up on my own two legs and walk like a normal person.

Today marks the eleventh consecutive day where I wake up forming a battle plan to figure out how to most effectively brush my teeth, floss, take a shower, fix myself a cup of coffee, and bring said coffee from the kitchen to my “homemade handicap station” in my living room, without risking further fracturing my broken pelvis, hip, four broken ribs, and that other bone I broke that I’ve never even heard of, and can’t remember the name of (at least I’m still too lazy to bother and memorize the name, or even research it for this column; this proves that not everything about me has changed).

Today also marks the eleventh consecutive day in which I will obsessively think about whether or not the fact that I am not dead from a car that clearly ran a stop sign and struck me on my bicycle as it accelerated into me (read: did not make an attempt to brake its own speed) was a wake up call from some spiritual being, a completely random event in a random universe, or some combination of the two preceding theories concerning the existence and meaning and purpose of my own conscious existence.

Today I will have moments where I will optimistically try and believe that this accident was a blessing in disguise, because my injuries are forcing me to learn the art of patience, which, if artists could be objectively graded on their ability to perform said art, previous to my injuries, I would have set the bar for the lowest grade possible. (Do they give Z’s?)

I will also have moments where the pain from my injuries will be so severe that my own body will have to make up new ways to alert me of my pain, like chattering teeth, blurry vision, and heart palpitations, so that I give in and give it the rest it needs to actually heal.

And there will be moments where I will read cards, letters, emails, and text messages that will make me want to cry because it’s impossible to believe that so many people I’ve met actually care so much about the fact that I didn’t die the other day.

On Saturday, May 3rd, at 11:40 am or so, I was hit by a moving car while riding perpendicularly into it on my bicycle. According to several eyewitnesses, I was not speeding nor traveling recklessly, I had the right of way, and the car that ran the stop sign was estimated to be traveling at around fifteen miles per hour at the time of the collision*. (*All of these facts and figures are based on a police report I have read. I AM NOT offering my own testimony in this article, concerning my own version of these facts, given my current unresolved situation involving insurance companies).

Most of the doctors who have examined me said that if not for the fact that I was wearing a bicycle helmet, I would probably be dead, or at the very least, have massive brain damage, given the fact that I slammed my head once into the side of the car, and then once again onto the pavement as I bounced from the car onto the pavement.

Having a brush with death is kind of odd. I don’t know how many of my readers have had one, or several of their own in their own lifetimes, but this was my third such ‘traumatic-event-that-could-have-killed-me,’ and I find it incredibly compelling that each one has occurred to me during a period in my life in which I have been mid stride in an attempt to create a major positive change in my own life. The only thing that makes this third such “brush” so different from the other two ones is that the lingering effects from this “brush” will effect my life for at least one full year.

I am currently confined to my own apartment and in a wheel chair. My parents had to come and visit me, and in the process they had to spend several hundred dollars in order to make my apartment “Handi-Accessible”. I am now the proud owner of a Nova 5000 series wheelchair, with anti-tipping wheels (for solo excursions up a ramp), two crutches, a dining room table that is tall enough to fit my wheel chair underneath it, and many other small necessities that allow me to do so many of the basic, mundane tasks that previous to my injury were not even on my radar of “things to consider as a task.”

But, readers, while it does certainly, as of late, appear to “Suck To Be Me,” I am still the type to look for a good laugh in any experience, because I believe, as Kurt Vonnegut did, that in the face of all of the miseries that accompany the human experience, the only thing you can really do to make life worth living, is to learn how to laugh along with life.

So let me just pop a few more of these handy “laughing pills” that the doctors have prescribed me (also known as Oxy Codeine, a synthetic Heroin), and I’ll be right back to make you all laugh at what it’s like to get hit by a car and spend three days in a hospital!

Okay, you ready? I sure am! So, instead of trying to compose clever sentences that fit together into paragraphs, which are then juxtaposed to my liking to create a clear and coherent essay, per my usual style, I’ve decided to reprint my notes from the hospital, verbatim, in note form, so that you can live vicariously through my own experience of transitioning from an athletically motivated 26 year old on a bicycle into an atrophying wheel chair bound 26 year old pain-killer taking grumpy curmudgeon…

- Why is hospital food so bad? I’m paying thousands of dollars to be treated like shit by a bunch of busy bodies who don’t even ask for my name, and then they expect me to get excited for food that makes me long for the Grade F prison food they used to serve in my college dorms? Universal Health Care used to sound like a decent idea, now I equate it to Universal Malnutrition.

- Why is it that every nurse and doctor in here expects me to be familiar with hospital etiquette and lingo? They act astonished when I admit to not knowing what a pelvis is, nor how to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and furthermore, they keep telling me that I don’t have to thank them. No wonder people are so rude to restaurant workers; they must assume the same rules apply—they don’t.

- Some of the world’s best and brightest are involved in the medical supply industry, yet the best water bottle the hospital can offer me comes with a dysfunctional straw that is too short to reach the bottom of the bottle, and seems to have trouble sucking in liquids without also inhaling air, which gives me the hiccups, which causes my four broken ribs to tremble with immense pain (and no, I don’t know which number that pain is at, how about the number “@#$#@$!” ??

- Given all of the absurdities I’ve experienced, like having a team of professional X-Ray physicians lose my body and then talk about losing me in the third person while I am resting within ear shot of them with a neck brace on, I sincerely hope that I am currently part of a pilot episode for some FOX reality show that pays someone to ignore a basic traffic signal and then send some idiot like me to the hospital for a reality show called “putting Libertarians who hate hospitals in their worst nightmare scenario just so we can laugh at them!” And I really hope the host is some celebrity that I hate, like the early nineties MTV Vee-Jay “Kennedy”, that way when she comes on screen to reveal to me that this was all a farce, I can punch her in the face and not have to go to jail for it. Wow, I’m bitter.

- So I’ve been paired up with the neighbor from hell. He was in a major auto accident, which necessitated the installation of a ring in his neck to allot for “phlegm and bile release” which makes the most disgusting noise on Earth. This process is involuntary, and happens at all hours of the day, and when he’s not busy “phlegming” himself, he suffers from severe dementia and keeps asking Jesus for forgiveness, asking me what the Mets’ box score is for some random day in 1972, and then he apologizes incessantly to his family members (who are not in the room) for past grievances that are VERY personal. It’s awkward.

- You’d think a hospital would be prepared for anything, but apparently, they don’t have any earplugs, and I’m also, apparently, the first patient to ever ask for them.

- Getting embarrassed from peeing while lying down, in front of attractive nurses and strangers alike, into a plastic jug is Sooooooo April of 2008. I’m over it. As a matter of fact, the next time I’m in public, I’m going to whip out my partner, mid stride, and continue to walk while I pee, indifferent to the social customs I will be breaking. It’s really nice to pee when you feel like it, and not to feel ashamed by it either. I think we need to get in touch with our caveman roots! Down with social customs (except the one where you don’t “phlegm in public”)!!!

- Doctors are too busy to care, specialists are too special to try and use layman’s terms to explain what is going wrong with me, and only the nurses seem to understand the basic elements of human empathy and compassion required to make a hospitalization bearable for someone like me. But the intern “station nurses?” They are the worst! Watching my poor neighbor get the total shaft by these station nurses is awful! They get so annoyed at him for “bothering them” with requests for attention when he is freaking out that they ignore his call requests, and now I have to sit here listening to his alarm going off for minutes at a time. I am so sick of hearing his alarm that I’ve started using my call signal to call them, on his behalf, but now they are on to me, and now I’m getting the shaft as well. Luckily, despite my attempt to play the role of Peter, It appears that I’m getting discharged, and so the real Wolf won’t be able to come and get me.

- When reflecting on this accident, I find it odd that while many little things surprise me, none of the bigger consequences weird me out. I think, ultimately, this is because I am a writer, which means that I spend most of my waking time imagining how it would feel to be a participant in all sorts of odd events that occur in other people’s lives. I mean; I spend so much of my time thinking about imaginary events that major events like this one seem like déjà vu: It’s a previously imagined scenario that I’ve already attempted to vicariously experience. If anyone reading this is a shrink, I’d love to know your take on this.

The only new thing, besides patience, that this accident is really teaching me, is how to actually be selfish. And I don’t mean in regards to securing myself a suitable portion of chips, salsa, and guacamole from the spread at a party. What I mean is that surviving this accident has enabled me to realize that the purpose of my life is not to make sure that others are safe and enjoying their own lives. It’s also for me to enjoy for myself, because at any given moment, everything you think is yours can be taken from you, regardless of how careful and safe you are in your own actions.

Whether or not there is a true meaning behind the events that led me into my current state of affairs, my mind has elected to view the accident and its repercussions as follows: I somehow suddenly accept the fact that everything in life just sort of happens, and you can either get upset by and try to resist the unexpected changes that occur, or you can learn how to accept them and embrace them, and learn to love the bizarre twists and turns for making the experience spontaneous. I choose the latter!

This is why I find myself waking up every day not just to the aforementioned thoughts about bottles of urine, tasks to accomplish, and why I am faced with the challenges I currently face, but also with the incredible freeing feeling of experiencing a life in which I respond to events, instead of trying to control the event in itself; it’s suddenly fun.

I mean, if I can survive getting hit by a car without losing major internal organs and suffering any brain damage, then really, this event, in the very long term, is just footnote in my biography. It’s just another hilarious anecdote to tell my grandchildren someday.

Not too many people get to use “when I got hit by a car” in their every day, casual conversation. But now I do! Talk about a personal analogy trump card to use during a boring moment at a dinner party! And I love using these sorts of trump cards!

I feel as though all my life, puzzle pieces have been falling from the sky and connecting themselves into a jigsaw puzzle for me. I just never expected one of the positive puzzle pieces to be a station wagon running a stop sign on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. This is further proof that attitude is everything, and the world is as you are! I love it!

So really, the way I see it, everything in my life is rolling along just as it always has, and therefore, it still “Sucks To Be You”, and not me! Stay tuned for my next column, tentatively entitled “Let’s Roll: My exploration of life in a wheel chair.”