Random #73: Easily Distracted

I’m not much of a closer. The deck on my balcony needs to be re-stained and the screws need to be replaced. A couple of the bolts on my bike need to be drilled out and replaced and parts of the frame need to be treated for rust. Several art projects are still just ideas swimming around in my head but never put down on paper. Numerous blog entries are half-written on my computer. I have the numbers of a couple of girls who I can’t be bothered to contact despite finding them more than mildly attractive.

I have a tendency to be somewhat of a perfectionist, obsessing over the smallest detail and spending hours and days and weeks on a single project, but I have an equal tendency to suddenly abandon the same project and never to revisit it. There’s a word in Korean that’s absent in English that can properly describe how I am most of the time, daechungjueui, which means that I’m guided by the principle of doing things just adequately enough, as in, “Eh. That’s good enough.”

Much of it is due to sloth. My room is a pigsty. I throw garbage in the general vicinity of the trashcan, even if I happen to be standing next to it. I can’t figure out why I can’t take the extra five seconds to hang up a jacket instead of tossing it on the ground right next to my dresser. My room would never be clean if there weren’t occasions where I thought there was a remote possibility of bringing a girl back to my place. More than a few flings have felt the need to clean my room and even my bathroom while I was deep in post-coital slumber.

The rest of it is due to distraction. I’m absentminded and forgetful, debilitatingly so. I can think of something that I need to do all day long, but an errant thought can block out the thought completely. I can set an alarm on my phone and write notes on my hand and still not remember until it’s too late. I can focus really well but only on one thing at a time, and the moment something new pops into my head, all of my attention moves over to that new thing.

I think that this forgetfulness is a defense mechanism. If I had a better memory, I’d probably be completely incapacitated, mired in depression and regret over a lifetime of waste and horridly stupid mistakes. The fact that I’ve been working on this book for so many years can be attributed to this fault of mine but is also a testament to how bad I want this. Remembering events that happened now ten years ago in detail is painstaking and time-consuming, and I’m constantly struggling for the right words. I know they exist but they haven’t been on the tip of my tongue for years.

That being said, I’ve finally finished the revisions on my first six chapters that I’ve been struggling with since the accident. Now I just need to push myself a little longer to start and get through the agent search once again.

Random #72: Back on the Bike

I’ve started riding again. The first time I took the bike out after the accident was actually a couple of months ago, but I haven’t ridden much since then. The problem is that I have nerve damage in my left leg and I couldn’t raise my foot to change gears. I took the bike out to my mechanic and I was in first gear the entire time.

In the months since, I’ve regained very little strength but it’s enough now that I can change gears by tightening my ankle and lifting with my leg. It’s not ideal, but it’s manageable. I don’t know if I’ll ever regain enough function to change gears normally but I’m learning to deal with it. (The doctor who administered my nerve exam told me that the nerves might recover some day but he was very noncommittal.)

This bike isn’t the bike I was riding when I got into the accident. That bike was totaled, which saddens me because it was a beautiful bike. My current bike is the same make and model but it’s like buying the same breed of dog after your previous dog has died. It’s just not the same.

The bike I was riding when I got in the accident/the aftermath (I don’t know where the red paint on the fender came from but all that damage on the gas tank and covers is where my leg was)

I bought this bike while I was still hospitalized. I still had a cast on my leg and had to use my crutches to make it to Suwon to take a look at it. It wasn’t smart—I normally would never buy a bike unless I could take it out on a test ride—but this strong desire to get back on a bike clouded my judgment. After the cast came off, I was going to jump on the bike and ride off into the sunset. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Some of my friends think I’m crazy to be riding again. They don’t understand because they don’t ride. There’s just something about being on a motorcycle. There is a freedom of movement, the visceral experience of the speed, the leaning into turns. Traffic is not an issue. You don’t have to worry about the asshole in the next lane letting you in. The road is yours for the taking and the cars are only obstacles to make the course more interesting.

If anything, the accident has made me even more determined to ride and to follow through with my plan to complete the cross-country trip I wasn’t able to finish in 2006. This bike was previously owned by a college kid with awful taste and a lack of concern for maintenance so I’ve been working on it over the past couple weeks, taking it apart, repairing or replacing worn or rusty parts, re-doing the wiring, and getting it painted. If I hadn’t been the same kid with awful taste and a lack of concern for maintenance back then, maybe I would’ve been able to make it all the way to Seattle.

Before and after pictures of my new bike (It doesn’t look like I did much but he welded a lot of the stuff on and fucked with the wiring so he could put on these tacky LEDs)

Not that I’m completely unaffected by my accident, but I’ve never been one to let a bad experience control my life. If I did, I’d be a very bored and boring person. I have sensed that I tighten up slightly when I ride through the intersection where the accident happened, that intersection—it’s an intersection I pass through daily—but it only serves to make me more cautious of the ever-present assholes who run red lights with abandon.

Today, instead of taking the bike to Nakseongdae, where I usually write, I took it all the way to Gangnam. I’m now sitting in a coffee shop, on the second floor, next to the window with a full view of my bike. It’s sitting there pretty on the street, beckoning me to take her out again.

I’m at the coffee shop trying to get back on the bike again with my writing. It’s September, the summer has come and gone, and I’m still working on these first six chapters, but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to turn that around soon.

Random #71: Stiff

It’s been a while since my last post, and it’s symptom of a larger problem—I haven’t been writing. I’d like to blame it on the hospitalization but I was discharged from Yonsei Bon about two weeks ago, and I’d like to blame it on work but I realized last night that I’m only teaching ten hours a week. Physical therapy only consumes about 30 minutes a day and going to the gym only slightly more than that. It could be the drinking but I think it’s really because I’m out of practice.

Of what use is a writer that doesn’t write? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and it’s a kick in the testes. My manuscript is gathering electronic dust on my hard drive, largely untouched since the accident last December. My second book is still a jumble of random scenes.

My leg has regained a lot of strength and I’m almost at a point where I can walk without a cane, but strength isn’t the problem. The problem I’m facing right now is a lack of mobility. While I was lying in the hospital for five months, I couldn’t use my left leg at all and my doctor keeps telling me it has “hardened,” which I assume he means it has stiffened from disuse. I’m trying to regain mobility and there is a high degree of pain in doing so.

My fingers have stiffened. My writing has stiffened. Even now, typing this, I find myself struggling to express myself and to make it to the next sentence.

There are only two things I can think of that should be stiff. Both begin with a d and end with a k. and neither of them gets that way through disuse.

Before I knew the details of my injury, I thought I’d be out of the hospital in a couple days. After my first couple surgeries, I thought I’d be walking as soon as I got my cast taken off. Almost two months since having it taken off (and posting my last blog entry), my left ankle is still twice the size of my right and the pain is fairly constant. I’m not healing as fast as I thought I would (delusionally so), but the fact is, I am getting better. It’s slow going but I’m getting there.

Hopefully it will be the same with the writing.

Random #70: David Dunn and Mr. Glass

“Don’t worry about me,” I said to my brother Jason and Mark from the gurney, bleeding from multiple gaping wounds, heading into my first of five surgeries. “I’ll be out of here in a couple days. You’ll see.”

Sixteen weeks later, I’ve just had my cast taken off and am walking to a taxi with my brother after a feast at Dos Tacos.

“Don’t ride anymore,” he urges, something he rarely does because he knows I’m just going to do whatever the hell I want.

“It’s okay. I’m invincible.”

“Whatever, Mr. Glass.”

My brother Jason momentarily confuses my statement as an allusion to a movie I often reference with regard to myself, Unbreakable (2000)*. I believed that if quasi-superheroes walked among us, I was one of them. I’ve survived countless collisions and scrapes and a few-near death experiences and survived with a lot of stitches and bruising but no breaks beyond a boxer’s fracture in my right fist from punching what I thought was a wooden door but turned out to be something like those petrified redwoods in California. I broke through the windshield of my first car in a head-on collision and walked away with about thirty stitches, a lot of bruises, and an ER bill that made me contemplate suicide, but I was fully functioning after only a couple days. This is one of the reasons why I believed I would die at 35 or live forever**.

This misplaced belief in my invincibility has not faded much, although I admit that I can no longer compare myself to David Dunn unless my superhero weakness is not water (which, coincidentally, I am deathly afraid of) but a sedan crushing my leg into my motorcycle at 50 km per hour. Aside from the first couple weeks of my hospital stay in which I was constantly asking for painkillers, the sixteen weeks of my hospitalization thus far has been relatively pain-free. Even after each step in my slew of surgeries, the post-operative pain lasted only as long as I was in the recovery room. This shit is a breeze, I thought.

That’s what I thought until I had my cast taken off on Thursday and tried to put a small portion of my weight on my newly unencumbered leg. The unbearable, shooting pains in my foot that brought tears to the corners of my eyes told me clearly—This is only the beginning of the pain, motherfucker.

The pains were right and feel the need to remind me every time I put a reasonable amount of weight on my leg. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. I was supposed to be walking, without crutches, within a couple weeks and be back on a motorcycle within the same time frame. I can’t even flex my ankle—every time I try, I can only manage to raise and lower my big toe—and I know that the pain I feel is only a harbinger of the pain to come.

“You’ll be on crutches for at least the next two, three months,” the owner of the coffee shop downstairs said, his wife nodding knowingly beside him. (My doctors don’t talk to me so I get most of my medical advice from my barista.) “It probably won’t be for another six months that you’ll be able to walk normally.”

Had he said this before I had my cast taken off, I wouldn’t have believed him. I would’ve done what I normally do when an older Korean feels the need to dispense his nonsense on me, nod and smile and pray that one of us will fortuitously get an important phone call. Having physically experienced the obstacles I will have to overcome in the coming months and the limitations of my healing ability, my nod was one of acknowledgement.

Comparison of my legs, the day the cast came off

* He wasn’t referring to Invincible (2006), the story of Vince Papale. Although I love fantasizing about walking-on and playing in the NFL, I was already far too small and out of shape for that to happen before the accident. Now, I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to run again, which would make it impossible for me to be the next Devin Hester.

** I really don’t want to live forever. I’d much rather go in a horrible motorcycle accident than in my sleep. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time left to make the first deadline in my prediction. Perhaps this accident was supposed to be it—it happened a few days after I turned 35—and the universe is telling me that I have no choice but to live forever. Not that I’m not going to try to struggle against the powers that be with alcohol and cigarettes.

Random #69: The Sun outside Yonsei Bon

An hour before lunch, I hobbled down on my crutches to the coffee shop on the first floor with my trusty Daiso* thermos for my morning coffee. The couple who run the coffee shop are real nice—it seems like I’m their only customer—and they dress too nicely for this neighborhood. Sitting outside with my coffee and occasionally puffing on a cigarette, I spent a good while soaking up some sun. No looking at my phone or talking to anyone or looking at anything in particular. Just enjoying the weather. Cats and dogs know the secret of life. There’s not much better than lying in the sun with not a thought or care in the world.

I’m still in hospital clothes, blue pinstripes which hide the kimchi and coffee stains a little better than the patterned white at CAU. The new “hospital” is a dump. I passed by the building practically every day before the accident and I always thought the building was abandoned and waiting to be torn down. There is very little regard for sanitary conditions, and when I get my daily morning shot in the ass, the hand that slaps my ass to distract me from the pain has freshly slapped the ass of the 70-year-old in the bed across from mine without a good slathering of hand sanitizer.

Food’s slightly better here, though, and the nurses’ disregard for our welfare allows me almost free rein to come and go as I please. My apartment building is even closer than I believed it to be, practically next door, and I slip out twice a day to use the bathroom and wash up. The bathroom in the “hospital” smells like stale urine and causes me to gag if I try to brush my teeth here. The other day, I went home and took my first shower in almost four months, sitting on a plastic stool with my cast resting on the toilet.

The back door of this place is open 24 hours for smoking and all I have to do is brave three flights of stairs on my crutches to slip out and drink at the bar I was helping with construction the night of the accident. I’d sneak out and sleep at home but I’d never be able to wake up early enough to make it back to this room in time for breakfast.

The patients here are very different from the ones at the university hospital. “Nylon,” people refer to them, meaning perfectly unhurt people scamming for insurance money.** It feels like a dorm for taxi drivers—probably 90 percent of the “patients” here—and every night the 70-year-old tries to get me to drink soju with the rest of them. Right now, they’re on the one unoccupied bed, talking shop and drinking soju and snacking on blood sausage, oden, and cow intestine.

The 70-year-old sleeping off a hangover

I still haven’t been able to write. I was finally starting to settle into a groove at CAU when they told me to leave. I should skip out on afternoon physical therapy—for my back, which is fine aside from the acute scoliosis I’ve had since I was a kid—and set up camp at the coffee shop downstairs. Even if it takes time to find a groove, at least I’ll be able to enjoy the sun.

* Forgive me for flaunting my status; I’ve been in Korea too long. For those of you who haven’t spent time in Korea or Japan, Daiso is the Japanese dollar store that seems to be more prevalent in Korea than in Japan from what I’ve seen. Maybe when I collect the insurance money in a year or two, I’ll be take a step up the social ladder. Probably not.
[correction 4/2/14]: According to one of the worst Wikipedia pages I’ve read (in terms of conflicting facts), there are far more Daiso in Japan. Apparently, there are also Daiso all over the world, including the US (all/mostly West Coast). This is what I get for trying to be a snob. The first American location is Korean-heavy Lynnwood, Washington, just north of Seattle. I have been in Korea too long. It opened in 2005.

** I asked a couple of people why they call them “nylon.” Nobody knew. Naver says that it comes from before the 1970s when nylon came to Korea and people thought it was great because it was a new fabric but then they realized it was artificial and weak. Over time, it got bastardized to the point it became an adjective meaning fake. It’s thrown around very often in places like this. Nairong.

Random #68: X-rays Are Fun

I’m finally leaving CAU Hospital after five surgeries and 13 weeks. I’ll be heading to a small clinic five minutes away from my place in Bongcheon for perhaps the next four weeks. One of the things I need to deliver to the new hospital is a DVD of all my x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. After I managed to find a computer with a working DVD player, I scoured through the many files and chose the ones that paint a picture of my progress.

Initial damage from the accident, 20 December 2013

Ankle, front: My foot looks weird because the specialist is holding my bloodied and mangled foot still. You can see the fractures in both bones of my leg if you look closely at the bottom of each one (the round parts that stick out).

Ankle, side: My heel was also broken but it’s hard to tell. You can also see part of my tibia fracture at the top.

Tibia, front: The break, while complete, wasn’t very clean.

Tibia, side: I didn’t know about that third piece of bone that broke from the front of my leg until I saw this x-ray. You can also see a mass of what must have been the shredded muscle where the bone broke through the front of my leg.

First surgery, 20 December 2013

Ankle, side: You can see the metal pins holding the broken ends of my ankles to the rest of the bone and the screw attaching the broken bone in my heel.

Tibia, front: The smallest piece of bone was screwed into the lower half of my tibia and an external rod was installed to keep my bones from moving around. There is a big gap between the two halves of the tibia that remained until the fourth surgery.

Tibia, side: The halves of the tibia may not line up from the front, but at least they line up from the side.

Second surgery, 3 January 2014

The doctors removed a hematoma from my leg, opening up the wound and scraping out the coagulated blood from my leg. All flesh, no bone, no x-rays.

Third surgery, 16 January 2014

Ankle, front: Same photo from my earlier post. They removed a few pins and screwed a plate on one side, the outer ankle. They also removed the external rod. I don’t know why. You can see where the screws used to be, the bone is lighter.

Fourth surgery, 29 January 2014

Tibia, front: There is a gap between the two pieces of my bone because my bone was infected. At least they screwed both pieces to a plate even if they don’t line up well.

Tibia, side: The bones line up from the side. I wonder if the gap will end up making me taller if I stand on one leg.

Fifth surgery, 13 February 2014

Tibia, front: There is a cloud of dark gray in and around the gap in my leg. The cloud is bone from my hip.

Tibia, side: It always looks a lot better from the side as long as you can ignore how long those screws are. You can see the screw still there in my heel.

I have to return to CAU as an outpatient for x-rays and, hopefully, to get my cast off. My foot is really starting to reek.

Rejection #6: The Longest So Far

When I woke this morning, I had a reply from an agent waiting in my inbox.

Dear Mr. Beck,

My name is [assistant name], and I’m [agent name]’s assistant at [agency name]. Thank you very much for your query and patience–we sincerely apologize for not responding sooner, but due to the sheer volume of queries we receive, we find it difficult to get to all of them in a timely manner.

We just reviewed your submission, and after conferring with senior members of the agency, I regret to inform you we are going to have to pass on The Accidental Citizen Soldier. We read your query with interest, but we’re afraid your project does not fit our current list, as [agent name] isn’t looking to acquire any memoir titles at the moment. Please do not despair–we are confident that with your talents and some perseverance, your book will find a home with the right agent.

Of course, our opinions are entirely subjective and other agencies may feel differently. I encourage you to query widely, as you never know who will feel that “spark” for your book as it currently stands. We appreciate the opportunity to consider your work and wish you the best of luck finding representation.

Regards,

[assistant name]

[assistant name], Assistant

[agency name]

After I read the rejection in full, I wasn’t even upset. So what if the rejection is three months late? So what if the agent’s website said she was looking for memoir? It feels like there was a lot of effort taken in writing this e-mail, perhaps more effort than I put in my queries.

It’s possible that this is the assistant’s standard form rejection, and if it is, this guy (lady? The assistant’s name is gender-ambiguous) is a fucking genius. If this was a sincerely written reply by an earnest young assistant, I would tell him (her?) to go ahead and use it for a standard form rejection. All it would take is replace my name and title of my book with whomever the agent was rejecting at the moment.

Yes, I’d rather get a lengthy standard rejection like this that seems sincere than a short, seven-word rejection that is clearly sincere. Why? Because the agent-writer dynamic in the query process is severely skewed toward the agent. The agent doesn’t have to write a polite rejection. The agent doesn’t have to write a rejection at all. At least the former tells the writer the agent has manners. The latter tells the writer that this book that you’ve worked years on is only worth seven of my words.

[Hospital update] I’m still in the hospital. Week 12. I’ve started writing again, mostly out of sheer boredom. But I’ve also started smoking and having my daily coffee and sneaking shots of whisky at night, all of which help my creative process.

Random #67: Hospital Update – Fourth Surgery

I’m hoping this is my last post from the hospital. The surgery was a week ago and the reason for the delay was mostly a lack of confidence that this surgery was really the last surgery, a bit of superstition—I don’t want to jinx it—and a bit of laziness as well. I’ve decided to post today because it has been a week since the surgery and this morning the head doctor came by on rounds and had his underlings staple up the drains for my wounds.

The doctor is in the process of stapling my skin, pinching the two sides together with tweezers

The surgery was shorter than the others and all the surgeons did was cut a hole in my side, scrape out some bone from my hip, open up a new hole in my leg, and stick the hip bone material into the gap in my tibia. I didn’t have any new metal installed in my leg—no intermedullary rod after all—and the plate from the third surgery will have to suffice in keeping my leg together while the hip bone stuffing cements the two pieces together.

The real problem is my hip

When I was a sophomore in high school, I started a game as fullback (I was a halfback) for our sophomore football team. Most people scoff when I mention the fact now because I’m not even five and a half feet tall—I peaked in the ninth grade—and the fifteen pounds I’ve gained since then are all in my belly. I was small, but I had strong, fast sprinter’s legs, and heart. I was a Rudy story that never got anywhere.

The first week of the pre-season was Guts Week, where the coaches sacrifice the sophomores as fodder for the varsity team, to beat up and deride and punish as the juniors and seniors saw fit. It was during that week that Sasha something-or-other, the starting fullback for the varsity, obliterated my side during a drill where I was supposed to run with the ball slowly and let the upperclassman hit me as hard as possible. He gave a boyish laugh at the applause from the other backs and trotted off, leaving me to pick up my tattered body on my own. I had pain in my side for the rest of practice and the nurse announced the bad news as I sat in her office while everyone else was washing up: “You have a hip pointer. The bone is bruised.”

Not actually me, but it kind of reminds me of that time

“It’s going to hurt a lot,” the nurse added. “And it’s going to hurt whenever you do almost anything.” She made a motion like putting on a seatbelt. “All of these muscles are attached here so if you cough or laugh or sneeze, you’re going to be in a lot of pain.”

“When can I play football again?” I asked.

“It’s going to be a couple months,” she said, matching up crutches to my armpits.

I was miserable, watching the team play without me, watching players from other positions taking over my position as halfback. And the nurse was right, every cough, laugh, and sneeze caused me immense, debilitating pain, like someone hitting me in the hip with a steel pipe.

Last night, I was lying in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come when I felt the damning urge to sneeze. I was stricken with fear, the fear of a man standing in front of the firing squad, hoping that a call will come to stay the riflemen’s triggers. Instead the pressure builds with deep breaths inhaled through my nostrils. Ah, ah…. No, please no. Ah…. Damn it!

The intensity of the explosion in my sinuses is matched by the intensity of an explosion of pain in my side. I have a healthy, powerful sneeze, like the backfire of an old car. My back is contorted in pain, an immobilizing pain which reverberates throughout my body for the next five minutes. In this moment, I envy an ex-girlfriend who described her dainty sneezes in writing as “etio.” Once the pain subsided, I propped myself up and checked my hip bandage for blood. I must have popped at least one stitch. Thankfully, there is no seepage. I lie back down and wait for the nurse to bring the painkillers.

The problems that come with having general anesthesia three times are hard enough without hip pain

General anesthesia fucks with the brain’s signals to the nether regions, leading to the problems I’ve written about previously—urinary retention and constipation—but the real tricky part is that the problems are like the cold virus, they mutate and what once worked will no longer work. After my first surgery, I could piss when a little bit of hand disinfectant inadvertently made its way into my peehole after four hours of effort. After my second surgery, intentional application of the sanitizer only caused immense, burning pain in my urethra, and I managed to piss only after middle-school pranking myself by dipping my hand in water after four hours of frustration. I was emptying my bowels but didn’t have true release until after I had a cup of coffee.

This time, nothing that had worked would work. Disinfectant still burned my urethra and dipping my hand in water did nothing. Listening to YouTube videos of waterfalls and running water and other people pissing did nothing and after seven hours of exertion, I felt the impending doom of having a tube stuck into my peehole and many, many inches of tubing snaked through my urethra and into my bladder hanging over me. There’s no way I’m getting a catheter stuck in my dick while I’m conscious, I pledged to myself yet again.

In the end, I managed to piss in a way that I thought was a problem in itself last time—by sitting down on the toilet to pee. I don’t know why it worked. I’ve been pissing in my pisspot in bed throughout the past eight weeks and I spent the seven torturous hours sitting up in my hospital bed and trying to pee. Was it the change in scenery? The cold temperature of the handicapped bathroom? Am I really losing my ability to pee like a man?

The next day I woke up to tackle the issue of bowel movements. I had skipped breakfast the previous day to focus all my attention on handling my urinary retention, but rewarded myself afterward by eating big meals for lunch and dinner and felt bloated in the morning. I wheeled myself out to the bathroom and nothing. I had breakfast and filled my already full stomach even further and still nothing. Not only was I constipated, but I was also so full of shit that it felt like my bowels were going to explode. Shit, they’re going to give me an enema. I guess it ain’t so bad, at least not as bad as a catheter. But no, I don’t want to have anyone sticking anything in my butt.

I knew what I really needed so I waited until Mom was getting sleepy and told her I was going out for a walk with my older brother, both of whom came to watch over me during the day. I rolled myself out to the elevator and took it down to the first floor and rolled straight through the lobby out into the fresh air. Once outside, I rounded the corner and to a stop near a pair of vending machines. I took a deep breath of fresh air and then I took out my pack of cigarettes and lit up. I’ve been lighting up once a day since before the surgery. I smoked that cigarette down to my fingers and flicked it into the ash tray and rolled back inside.

Once inside, I could already feel the gases in my stomach looking for release. I let out a timid burp and then one with a little more gusto. I don’t know if anyone would agree with me, but I truly believe that cigarettes help settle my stomach. I’ve had stomach problems since I was in elementary school and smoking was one thing that I feel helps. By the time the elevator hit the 13th floor, I bypassed my room and headed straight to the toilet.

I’ve noticed one thing about my difficulties with bodily functions and it’s that my hip is an issue. The muscles I use to pump urine from my bladder and the muscles I use to clench are connected to my hip. There was a day I didn’t have a bowel movement since then and I realized that I had to force myself to use muscles that would cause me pain in order to evacuate my bowels. I even need to consciously use those muscles to flatulate.

Now that I can walk, I can’t

I’ve been given crutches. After eight weeks of being bed-ridden and only being able to get around in a wheelchair, I can finally get around upright like a human being. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. The day I received them, I decided to take the crutches out for a spin. It was tougher than I thought possible. I’ve never had to do legs when I hit the gym and I’m not one of those freaks that look like those popsicles that you split apart.

Again, not my pictures, “Friends don’t let friends skip leg day.”

Now I know for myself how much bullshit all of those “wake up from a coma and start walking around” stories and movies and TV shows are. It’s only been two months since I last walked and my leg was shaking and I was sweating as I tried to make my way down the hall. When I could finally make a full lap down and back the fifty-yard hall, I had those chills you get after a particularly hard workout.

It’s not only my good leg that is struggling. I also have to keep my bad leg from dragging across the floor and my bad leg is dangling right below my bad hip. Bad hip? Damn, I sound old. It’s going to be a long road to recovery.

The verdict

The head doctor stopped by on rounds the other morning. He usually listens to the report, nods, and walks away as fast as possible. That morning, he decided to impart some knowledge on me.

“Your hip hurts, right?”

I nod.

“It’s going to hurt for another two or three months.”

And he walked away.

Entry #65: “Literally” Crippled

Every day around 10 in the morning, the Head Nurse makes her rounds of the patient rooms. She’s a kind lady who’s perpetually smiling and has this way of asking questions that may or may not be sincere but certainly seem sincere.

“Were you able to sleep last night?”

“Not so well.”

“Were these jokers making noise last night?” she asks, indicating the five other patients in the room in general and the octogenarian dementia patient across from me specifically. She doesn’t actually say jokers, but something in her demeanor makes me believe that she’s on my side.

“No, they haven’t been a problem lately.”

I’ve been ready and willing to blame others for my continued sleeping problems, but even the dementia guy and his loud wife have been behaving themselves at night and yet I still find myself rolling side to side restlessly for hours on end, trying to find a sweet spot that doesn’t exist. I’ve even tried sleeping on my stomach, which isn’t so easy with a bum leg.

I personally enjoy blaming others for my problems. It makes them—the problems, not others—easier to deal with. But when the fault is obviously not on other people, I’m forced to look at myself.

“It’s weird but painkillers help me sleep.” I feel like an addict trolling for painkillers. “I don’t feel any pain—my leg doesn’t hurt at all—but I can’t sleep at night.”

“Okay,” she says, patting my leg gently, not a tinge of suspicion betrayed in her expression. “I’ll tell your nurses to give you painkillers with your antibiotics before you go to bed.”

I still can’t sleep the entire night, but at least I can lie still long enough to fall asleep for the first four hours. I still don’t know why I can’t sleep and if it’s because of my leg. The important thing is that I can fall asleep and, regardless of what happens the rest of the night, that’s all that matters.

The problem that’s been really troubling me for the past eight weeks is that I haven’t been able to write. I can manage blog posts because it’s practically freewriting and I don’t revise. I don’t know why I can’t. I just can’t. I haven’t been able to touch the manuscript. Opening the Word file is about as far as I can get. And although being on painkillers and having trouble falling asleep has actually led to a cornucopia of story ideas, I haven’t managed to put any of them down in writing.

If I could find an easy fix like painkillers or had some idea why I can’t write like the guess that a subtle pain in my leg is keeping me from sleeping, I would at least be able to take some measures to get back into it. As it is, I can only hold out for the next couple of weeks and accept a ten-week break from writing until I can return to my routine of haunting the coffee shop, chain-smoking while sipping a tepid Americano.

* On a side note, Stephen King got into a traffic accident in 1999. He was hit by a minivan while walking on the shoulder of Route 5 in Maine. He had a collapsed right lung, scalp laceration, and a broken hip. He also had multiple fractures of his right leg—kind of like me—but after five operations in ten days, he was back writing the next month. He was only in the hospital for twenty days. (How is that possible? I’ve been here for almost sixty?)

** One consolation is that I’ve been reading much more than I usually do. Being unable to create, at least I’ve taken to study. I’ll probably post a separate entry on this later.

*** My fourth surgery is in two hours. Hopefully it will be my last.

Random #66: Third Surgery

This past week has been the worst by far, a distended blur of delirium and anger and frustration. It began last Wednesday. My third surgery was last Wednesday.

“Will this one be my last?” I asked the only doctor who’ll talk to me. I refer to him as the nice doctor because he’s the only one who will. He assured me it would be and I went to bed on Tuesday night, thinking that from this time tomorrow, there will be no more steps backward, no more surgeries to recover from, the days I’ll have left will be it.

I went into surgery at 7 in the morning, first in line. They wheeled me into the OR and the anesthesiologist started with the oxygen. She clarified that I’d be getting general anesthesia—due to the scheduled bone graft from my hip—and since we’d already been through the process together before, she put the mask over my mouth and said, “You know what to do. Breathe deeply.”

I again come to in the post-op recovery room and this time the pain is bearable to an extent that I don’t need to moan or groan or make any audible sign other than breathing deeply. My whole left side hurts—it must be from the bone graft, I think to myself—and I breathe deeply while they give me more painkillers.

When I’m wheeled out for a brief x-ray before returning to my room, my mother approaches the gurney. “There was a problem.” Not the words I want to hear after a surgery. “Your bone was infected so they scraped the infected parts clean and washed it with disinfectant, but they didn’t put your leg back together.”

What? Six weeks and they still haven’t managed to put bone piece A into bone piece B? It took three hours to realize that they couldn’t do shit? But looking at my leg, there was no splint, nothing holding the two broken halves of my leg together. The wrapping was thicker than usual but it was wrapped only to the knee, something I had unsuccessfully been trying to get the doctors to do with my splint pre-surgery.

I lied there in bed, borderline depressed for the first time throughout this ordeal. It wasn’t until later that the doctors stopped by to explain.

The head surgeon only bothered to tell my mother part of what happened because, as a Korean professor, he can’t be bothered to talk to patients and when he does, he only shares the least reassuring part possible. Yes, they would have to operate again in two weeks. Yes, one more surgery. That’s four major surgeries plus the two trips to the OR for opening up and cleaning out the coagulated blood in my leg wound. But for some reason, they decided to stabilize the tibia with a plate like the one in my ankle.

So why was my groin in pain after the surgery? I’ll never know.

“In the next surgery, we’ll probably put in an intermedullary nail,” the nice doctor explained as he re-wrapped my leg. His being nice also means that he’s very low in the hierarchy, and I don’t know how much of what he says will actually come true.

I didn’t ask any more questions because I didn’t want to hear anymore. I didn’t want to know why they even bothered stabilizing my infected tibia with a plate that runs almost the length of my leg (on the inside, right on the bone) when they could have done it with another external rod that would have been less invasive. I didn’t want to know if they were planning on taking out the plate once the intermedullary nail went in, and if so, I didn’t want to think about all these holes I’ll have in my tibia—four from the external rod and it looked like at least seven but possibly many more screws for the plate. I didn’t want to know what they would do if my leg was still infected and how many more surgeries I could expect to have.

So it looks like another wait, perhaps the second week of February for my fourth—I won’t jinx it by saying last—surgery. Of course, that’s if my leg heals well (which, all of a sudden, it isn’t) and the head surgeon doesn’t change his very fickle mind.

For some reason, this wait is determined to also be the worst. First of all, the general anesthesia really fucked up all the signals from my brain to my various body parts this time. Last time, all it took was a video of a waterfall and a little disinfectant unintentionally making its way into my pee-hole for me to feel the urge to piss. This time, the videos did nothing. I tried “relaxing waterfall” and “relaxing running water” and “sound of peeing” among other things and none of them convinced my pee-pee to sing, and I tried the disinfectant several times with no result other than considerable, burning pain at the tip of my member. I started to get creative with my positions and use of muscles, but nothing worked. I also noticed that all of this excessive handling did not cause the normal blood flow to the area, which scared me greatly because it has never been a problem since my first in the sixth grade (although finishing can sometimes be a problem, especially if I’ve been hitting the bottle). After four hours, I was desperate and decided to middle school prank myself. I poured a cup of water and stuck my hand in it and was finally able to pee.

Last time, after the breaking of the seal, I had no problems recreating the event. This time, I could only go with my hand in the cup of water, something I had to do three or four times the next day. I managed to end the day with a last go without having to put my hand in water and I figured I had finally made it. I was wrong. The next day, I couldn’t go unless I was trying to take a shit, my next concern. I was taking three or four trips to the handicapped bathroom a day, and sometimes it was only to take a piss sitting down. Between my blood flow problems and need to sit to pee, all I needed was a tampon machine. This continued for a while and now I just don’t know what the current status is but I think subconsciously I’ve started to cut down on my water intake.

The other reason this wait is going to be excruciating is that I haven’t really slept since the surgery. Prior to the surgery, the only disruption in the room was Du-hwan, a really old and feeble guy suffering from dementia. During the day, he wasn’t so bad. He’d exclaim, “Aiaiaiaiaiaiaigo!” every time he got a needle stuck in him and he couldn’t get that the channels on the television here aren’t the same as the channels on the television at his home (when he had the remote, we’d be watching static half the time and a Russian news channel the other half), but he otherwise kept quiet. But when it neared 10, he’d start shouting and threatening like only old, drunk Korean men can. They had to wheel him out every night but you could still hear him down the hall in the nurses’ station, screaming his threats to call the police and to walk right out the door.

We got our second dementia patient, Il-sun, the night after my surgery. He’s a 79 year old with the body of an 89 year old, with the spindly, bony legs with exaggerated joints like a third-world child or a desiccated corpse. He doesn’t have Du-hwan’s personality changes, but he does have an annoying family. I was kept up the next night because his wife insisted on yelling back every time Il-sun woke up and didn’t know where he was. When the room cleared out on Friday, his children convinced him to take the window spot across from me even though he didn’t want to move. Now, every time he wakes at night, the light goes on directly in my line of sight, a sign to wake up and listen to an old man peeing or crying in pain or arguing with his wife.

The next night, my newest pest was of a different ilk. It was a five year old, Hyeong-seok, who broke his leg falling off a slide while visiting his grandparents’ place for Lunar New Year. The damn kid didn’t sleep the entire night. I wanted to see if I could slap him hard enough that his mother could feel it because I was angry at her for not controlling her kid, too. She also somehow managed to give him the noisiest playthings, like that mini-megaphone he was always singing into, and talking on speakerphone to the boy’s father, which was a waste because the stupid kid couldn’t communicate over speakerphone beyond shrieking and giggling.

I ended up getting very sick on Sunday, very bad chills and back pain all day, and when the doctor came around to change my wrappings at night, there were green blotches on the gauze from my wounds. “It’s a sign of infection,” my Mom mentioned. I thought that’s all they did this past surgery was work on my infected leg. I guess it’s a work in progress.

Du-hwan is gone. He was moved to a single room for a night before the family realized they couldn’t afford it and he wanted to return to this room but the nurse thankfully lied for me and told him my room was full. His room is now next door. I can still hear him screaming in the middle of the night but at least it’s much fainter.

Hyeong-seok is also gone. Kids’ bones heal better and so he didn’t need surgery after all, which was the entire reason he was turfed here rather than pediatrics. He left on Monday after seeing the doctor and getting a cast put on his leg. Good riddance.

Il-sun is still right across from me. I still often wish that his family would consider euthanasia (and that euthanasia was legal, if it isn’t already). If I were old and useless like him, I’d want to be put out of my misery. But they’ve become a little more quiet and respectful of the fact that there are other people in this room, so it’s bearable.

The problem is, even with most of the problems gone, I still can’t sleep.As a result, I’ve been worthless for the past week and am only posting this now because I know that I won’t get around to doing it if not right now in this brief period of lucidity. Two of the three might be gone, but they’re like general anesthesia, the negative side-effects just keep going on and on.

* Pictures to be posted if I can get a hold of an x-ray. You do not want to see my leg.