Ate It Anyway by Ed Allen

Author:Ed Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4481-2
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

a lover’s guide to hospitals

In my oldest fantasy, everything is perfect after the giant bicycle accident. My friends and I clench our teeth as if imitating sharks, all our appendixes ruptured, such a crowd of us that they have had to call a second ambulance. The pain weighs us down on our stretchers as cleanly as a bag of sand. We are all injured, a good strong word from The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, as we drift in white vehicles toward the great white floodlit face of the hospital.

I suppose that now, supported by my barely sufficient graduate student insurance, I’m the closest I’ll ever come to that fantasy. But unlike the structures I used to dream about, grand hospitals with their square and dignified faces looking out over districts of residential greenery, this is just a community hospital, set like a pumping station against the riverbank, windows sealed against this valley’s moist heat. The pain I feel is something awkward, off balance, tilting toward nausea, something I can’t quite get the rest of my body around. Its drug-dulled, destabilized ache is almost lost beneath the continuing swoon of relief that came with what I was told this afternoon—that I still have two testicles and have been delivered of merely a benign cyst.

In the old dream that I loved so much, we waved back and forth between ambulances. I would like to do something like that now, but there’s nobody to wave to, and I don’t feel well enough. When you love hospitals as much as I do, it’s easy to forget that the reason we go into them usually spoils the luxurious emptiness of the time we spend there. Even the shapes of the nurses seem harsh in their bleached white. It has been said that youth is wasted on the young; I guess you could say hospitals are wasted on the sick.

But I have had a second piece of good news: I actually know one of the nurses here. We worked together in the Buckeye Lounge when she was still a medical student. Still— that’s the important word, for in a town like ours, the law requires that even a strongly ambitious woman dramatically lower her career goals, so as to keep them more in line with those of whatever local carpenter or tinsmith such a woman invariably marries. I like to put things in terms of laws and theories, because in a valley full of those people whose cars and trucks surround this sealed capsule of a hospital, I can talk to myself knowing that if they heard me they would never understand a word.

So Leslie dropped out of medical school (you could say it “came to pass”) because she was in love with a gentle, generic, cigarette-smoking fashioner of gentle porcelain objects and so became a nurse instead, for which I have no right to criticize her, which brought her here, to the only hospital in town.

* * *

And as long as I have all

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