Cutting Time plus six days

“Time has come today.
The rules have changed today,
I have no place to stay, I’m thinking about the subway.
The love has flown away; my tears have come and gone…
Oh, my Lord, I have to roam…

Now the time has come, there’s no place to run.
I might get burned up by the sun, but I’ll have my fun.
I have been loved and put aside,
I have been crushed by tumbling time…”

-Joseph and Willie Chambers

'Ghetto defendent. It is heroin pity, not tear gas nor baton charge is tough to take in the city...Kick Junk. What else can a poor worker do?

-The Clash




Cutting Time plus six days. I have to begin somewhere; this is as good a night to start afresh as any. Big love to my Sis for her entry, her words preserved the goal of this journal, kept it alive while I made some stab at recovery.
My mind is slowly thawing. I walked today though still dizzy and ataxic, with nausea still grasping at me …it’s the second time actually, but we’ll roll back through the recent days—days of blackness and morphine laced, Jell-O puke, days of my family’s fierce and glowing love, days of rollercoasting faith in my ability to heal and deal—soon enough Dear Reader and all will be revealed.
Dr. Green has performed a miracle and for the life of me I can’t understand how he does this, how anyone working in a hospital does it day in and day out. With a compassionate hand the Doctors, Staff and Nurses have wielded scalpel and whip; they have harnessed me, yoked me, to my own will to be free from Chiari.
And I love them for it. All of the staff here, with my amazing family, refused to let me lie in bed and give up, as I very nearly did, after waking up. [like Shelly for instance, who worked for hours today, though she had ten-thousand pressing things to do, getting approval from Empire blue cross for the Rehab unit that I move to on Monday] It is to these people, and those heroes at home who have my back, that I dedicate these pages.

Six post-op days of mind-shattering pain and too much fear gnawing at my nerves have nearly ghosted me.
But I live. Oh, hell yes, I live.
Hammered into mewling putty on a Dark God’s anvil, yes…wrung out yes and even spooned-out, like a gourd from spine to skull…scorched, broken and remade…crushed by tumbling time as the Chambers Brothers wrote, I am still piecing the last days together.

Ah, but I am alive! And with so much to be grateful for…I beg you, bear with me as I continue this untethering of days

Today was also a day of comings and goings: Mom gone to Minnesota, Lindsay down from Gainesville…but this is too painful to detail now, later…maybe.
I've lost count of the meds I am on...stuck in this room, sometimes I feel like a lab experiment running amok.
Were it not for the patient love of my family and the tender whip-hand of Jackson Memorial's Angels I might slowly go mad; well, crazier than I am now, for certain.

It is late and Pain goblin is sulking in a corner of my room, crooning that we will always be friends.
I drown him out with John Lennon, who speaks to me about the wheels. I finally understand.
I just have to let it go.

-End Transmission-
Dawn McKenzie