Drugs and Angels

I’m spending Thanksgiving weekend recovering from heart surgery and counting my blessings. Number one on my gratitude list is that I’m home, not in the torture chamber commonly referred to as a hospital.

Though I’ve been in the hospital many times during my 48 years and things have never been pleasant, this visit took the cake.

IVs are always difficult, since I don’t appear to have any veins, and those that can be seen quickly flee under the needle. Several doctors have wondered aloud if I am alive, as they often can’t find my pulse.

Nurses and phlebotomists—those vampires who roam the floors, taking “samples” for the lab—find a vein and poke it, only to have it “hide.” Not to let a vein get the better of them, they withdraw the needle slightly, wiggle it about, and reinsert it deeper and maybe a little to the side in futile attempts to stab and subjugate the rebel vessel. In response to my wincing and thrashing, the vampires finally give up on one site and try another, with the same results. Usually the fourth vein is a charm. If only there were a way we could skip attempts one, two and three.

Though the vein-vanquishing and blood-letting were as dramatic as ever, the actual surgery was the show stopper. In the past I have proved highly sensitive to sedatives. While other patients chat with the physicians during procedures, I am unable to tell them my name. Though I have always been given the normal dose anyway, this time—the time when I’m having HEART SURGERY—someone must have decided to cut back—as an experiment perhaps.

I’m on the table, I’ve been given the anesthesia, the surgeons are poised to make an incision in the artery in my groin and thread a catheter up to my heart. I say as clear as pain, “I’m not feeling the drugs,” to which someone replies, “You will.” Yes, but I want to feel them NOW! No matter, the incision is made and I begin wailing, “Oh, God! Oh God!” I’m feeling every move they’re making. Someone asks, “Where does it hurt?” All these years of medical school and he asks me that! Where you’re making the incision! Where do you think it’s hurting!

I hear some talk about milligrams of this and milligrams of that, but all that keeps coming to me is pain. I can’t move my arms or legs, as I’ve been tightly packed with rolled blankets and rails. The only thing I can move is my mouth and my left hand, which is clawing at my left thigh in agony.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I’m crying, not as a curse but as a prayer, as in “Oh, God, deliver me from this torture. And while you’re at it, could you smite the anesthesiologist?”

Now lest you think I’m a wimp, I’m on this table because of a heart attack I had a few years back, when is not exactly certain, since I didn’t go to the emergency room at the time. I’d been having so much pain in my chest and arms that I didn’t see anything different from the heart attack and the feeling of having been kicked in the chest by a horse that had been with me for months.

Finally, just as they’re finishing up, someone says that they’re getting me morphine. What, as a prize for having endured this?

The morphine comes, and, sure enough, that does the trick. My body is so relaxed that I have the muscle control of a bowl of Jello, just in time to be wheeled to the recovery room.

That night when the nurse removes the catheter from the artery, I have surgery déjà vu. The intense, searing pain returns as she wrenches the catheter from my body, through the hard tissue and blood clot that were formed during the traumatic surgery. She does this without any pain medication, though because of my cries, she calls for morphine. Because healthcare workers have been known to become addicts, the stuff is kept under lock and key. Morphine cannot be “at the ready,” as I suggested, just in case a patient needs it. If it is checked out of the supply room, it has to be used. So, I was squirming for 15 minutes before the morphine arrived.

My brother called last night from Wisconsin to see how things had gone. When I told him of this m.o. of giving morphine after the trauma is over, he quipped that that’s what happens on the battlefield. How right he is! Think how much better it would be to go into combat on morphine, before you get shot to hell. Another item on my gratitude list: I’m not in a war zone.

So, how was the morphine? Great. Not worth the trauma I went through to get it, but it was great nonetheless. A delicious feeling of being completely incapacitated, floating, unable to move. I simply closed my eyes and drifted off to vivid, random imagery, like a can of vegetables from which a man in a green zoot suit walked off the label and tipped his hat to me, or a large cat that transformed into a medieval monk reciting prayers in a belfry.

I also experienced some tactile and auditory sensations, but I don’t think this was the morphine, as they occurred many hours following the dose. Someone briefly held my feet while I lay in bed. And I heard the soft whispers of a woman from the other side of the footboard. I like to think these were not hallucinations induced by the residue of pain medication, but an answer, delayed as my cries for morphine had been, to my prayers. “Oh, God! Oh, God!” I had pleaded, and God had answered, sending angels to gently hold my ankles and whisper softly to me in the night. And that’s really something to be thankful for!

Any Suggestions?

I was rejected by a prostitute.

I hadn’t known this was possible. Isn’t a prostitute supposed to do anything you want—for a price? Isn’t a prostitute the last refuge for the ugly, the misunderstood, the deviant and the gross? Granted, I’m not an expert on this subject. In fact, this was my very first solicitation, and I was shut out before we even met.

I found this man on craigslist. Where else, huh? My friend had recently moved a thousand miles from her home and was having fantastic luck with craigslist, averaging three dates a week. As I’ve only had two dates all year, I thought I’d give Craig a try.

I corresponded with a few raunchy men—I couldn’t seem to locate any decent ones—but none of them stepped up to the plate and suggested we meet. My sexually satisfied friend had strongly advised that I stop making the first move, as I had asked five men out this year. Two had come up with I’ve-got-to-wash-my-hair excuses, whereas three had stood me up. Not a great track record, so I took her advice and played coy, which also yielded nothing.

Then I saw “Massage with guaranteed orgasm.” For just $75 an hour, Jim would come to my apartment and provide two services, let’s call them A and B. His ad said he would work with any woman and had recently pleased a 75-year-old. I wrote to Jim, expressing my interest in A, but not B. Truth be told, B has never done anything for me, whereas A figures prominently in my fantasy life. Jim replied that I needed to find someone else, he wasn’t interested.

Rejected by a prostitute, who would’ve thought!

Not sure where to go from here. It’s been nine years since a man shared my bed and seven years since I shared his. And this man died in April, so that road is blocked.

What else can I do but continue to be the tall, thin, beautiful, vibrant blonde I am and to keep my heart open for a man who might notice? And, please, if you have any suggestions, let me know.

Tights, the Ultimate Man-Deflector

Put down your pepper spray. And don’t waste time gaining a hundred extra pounds. If you want to keep men away, start wearing colored tights. Yes, those look-at-me opaque cousins of suntan nylons are more effective than bad breath, body odor, or picking your nose.

Tights, my friend Beverly told me today, are what have been keeping half of humanity from talking with me. For 15 years or more, I’ve been asking my friends why men avoid me, even though I’m a tall, good-looking, slender blonde with a happy disposition. Finally, finally, finally, after years of begging my male and female friends to let me in on the secret, Beverly revealed the truth. Men avoid me because of my tights. They are intimidated by them. Men don’t want other men looking at their woman if it’s not for the right reason—she’s hot. If she’s just creative or, god forbid, doing her own thing, that makes men feel insecure and uncomfortable.

I have always loved my tights—pink, yellow, red, gray, maroon, blue, green, black and patterned. I thought of them as an outward expression of the pixie within. Besides, they have a nice “pull” to them—tights are tight. So it’s not just that I’m decorating the world with my legs, I’m giving myself a teeny pleasure with every step I take.

I always thought that the man who is matched to me would love my tights, be attracted to me because I was going my own way. He wouldn’t want just another Nordstrom cardboard cutout, but a woman who was different, special, unique, me.

The man who is matched to me would have an instant sense of knowing that this lady with the long vermillion legs before him would be as “interesting” in bed as she was out and about in the world. For the right man, my tights and my scarves would be secret signs, messages meant for him alone. My guy would think, “Ah, I can just see how she would use those scarves and those tights. I’m so glad my house has rafters and my bed has posts.”

To be told that just the opposite is true, that men are scared of a woman who is unique, is quite disturbing. They don’t want a challenge, they don’t want to get hooked up with a dreamer. That kind of man is only found in the movies.

Men are terribly insecure and their egos are extremely fragile, Beverly says. You can’t let them know you’re someone special from the get-go. That would send them running. (And these are the people we’ve allowed to rule the world for the past several millennia! Girls, let’s rethink the game plan.)

Of course, her theory doesn’t account for the fact that it’s been too hot to wear tights for the past six months. Yet in all that time, no man who has seen my bare, unadorned legs has asked me out. So to hell with Bev’s theory! Let me put on the pumpkin ones. I feel the weather changing.

A Move Made, A Move Delayed

Moves are difficult. Not just for the hours of packing and unpacking or the strain of lifting boxes. They’re difficult for the tiny private sadnesses of finding things I had not thought of for years, items that, though stored away for a long time, are still there, substantial and solid and powerful, as potent as ever to disturb my peace, transport me back to a hope now given up as hopeless, a dream now exposed to the full harsh light of waking life.

Over the past couple weeks of slowly settling into my new apartment, I have found such things and have felt a transitory darkness descend upon my heart, a place I have trained over the last decade to rejoice in the small beauties of existence—the sunlight on an empty wall, a blooming weed in a garbage-strewn alley, the stirring of the earth beneath my bare feet. I have learned to rejoice in these wonders that are present at every turn so that my mind does not wander to the overarching realities of serious health challenges, frustrated career moves and the ache of spending every night alone.

Only I know the power of these inanimate objects. Last week it was two books that disrupted my mood. One on urogenital massage, the other on sacred sexuality, purchased years ago with the firm intention that some day I would have a lover who would put these books into practice with me. Seeing them again made me weep. Get rid of them, I admonished myself. Why keep something that mocks my solitary existence? Give it up! And so I gave the urogenital-massage book to Beverly, who, at 74, has a 50-year-old lover, and the sacred-sexuality book to Goodwill. May they be put to good use.

This evening, just prior to tossing it in the Goodwill box, I held a gold-sequined, gold-satin purse from the ‘20s and realized there was something inside—a blue drawstring pouch that contained the love of my life's black hair mixed with my blonde, their tight curls flattened by time. This past April, this man had drowned while surfing, and his ashes were spread in the cold Northern California ocean, yet I still hold his DNA. And I know that somewhere in my boxes is a hand-painted Egyptian bottle with a miniature stopper. Inside is more of our DNA--my blood and his seed mingled late one frenzied night in a trailer in the deep dark stillness of the Point Arena woods.

He was a troubled soul, and there was much that was not right with him. But in this one way, this very important way, he and I were matched, paired in a strange, otherworldly dance. Sure, I have had sex since I was last with him, but only about seven times in seven years. I suppose it has been better than none at all, but perhaps not. Like living in a dilapitated shack after having resided in a splendid villa on the sea is perhaps better than sleeping outside, without shelter, but then again, perhaps not.

I wish he would return, if just for one night. I have asked him to do so, but as yet, there has been no response. How fitting if he would return from the beyond to make love to me, since so often when I was with him, I traversed the boundary between this reality and some other more intense, vastly lighter and freer plane of existence. I remember very clearly how twice I had floated outside my body, carried by angels, but more often, had remained in my body and felt the world shift.

And so, as talismans, in the way that the urogenital-massage and sacred-sexuality books were meant as talismans to draw my mystical lover to me, I will keep the Egyptian bottle and its contents, and the blue pouch in the gold-beaded purse . By some magic he may pass between the delicate seam between the worlds of living and no-longer-here. I will be ready when he does.

Yes, moves are difficult. Though I no longer think of him every day, and though I am ever-ready to meet someone new, I am not yet ready to toss his DNA. I am not yet ready to make that move.