4.19.06: Love Me When I’m Gone (Or Maybe I’m Just Blind)

Accident, n.: A condition in which presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better.
The Devil’s Dictionary (Ambrose Bierce)

Love Me When I’m Gone (Or Maybe I’m Just Blind)

April 19, 2006

Even with my infamously irregular updating habits, a month and a half is a long time to go without a journal entry. You, my faithful reader, are probably a bit annoyed with me for my absence. I feel your pain, and honestly, I would have updated more, except that I got a call a few weeks ago from some folks over at National Geographic who wanted me to translate some old Biblical document for them, which turned out to be that Jesus/Judas dialogue that everyone’s so het up about right now. (For the record, the dialogue was a Coptic version of the “who’s on first” skit. Who knew the Messiah was such a cut-up?) After I finished translating it, of course, I had to go around doing interviews about it, and it was just too tiresome; I nearly fell asleep while talking to Diane Sawyer, and the Pope was so worried for my health that he called me up and—

No. I can’t do it. I can’t lie to you. I wasn’t translating an ancient Egyptian document whose contents may shatter the faith of millions. I can’t use that as an excuse. And now you’re mad at me for lying, and you still haven’t gotten an explanation for this long absence. Did my computer stop working? Did I go suddenly and mysteriously blind? Did I get hit by a truck, or what?

In order: Yes. Yes. And no, but my husband did.

Really. I’m not lying this time.

We’ll start with the truck thing, because that’s the most important event—although, in a way, it’s a rather pointless story, because obviously everything turned out all right. If it hadn’t worked out, you wouldn’t be reading this; instead, you’d be reading about the Mad Widow of St. Paul, who wanders the city streets at all hours, weeping and shrieking at semi trailers. As it is, however, I’m still the Mad Wife, and my husband is still the Very Much Alive Husband (he’s not crazy, he’s just... different). So. On with the story.

It all started on a Sunday night a few weeks ago, when my husband called me from the side of the highway to tell me he’d been hit by a truck. A big truck. A truck big enough to total his car. I, of course, didn’t give a shit about the car at that point; I wanted to make sure my husband was okay. But the phone he was using wasn’t working right, and he couldn’t hear me asking (then yelling, then screaming) if he was okay. And a few minutes after he hung up, a stranger called to tell me that my husband was fine, really, but he was having chest pains and was being taken by ambulance to the hospital.

This, of course, put me as close to hysterical as I ever want to get. Fortunately, I only hyperventilated for a few seconds before I pulled myself together (sort of) and started making calls: my mother, Tony’s parents, the hospital. Of course, it would have been stupid to go rushing straight to the nearest hospital; if the first emergency room the ambulance went to was full, they would just go to a different hospital, and I could be zipping around the city in cabs all night, just trying to find the hospital they’d taken him to. The emergency room receptionist took my name and number, and said they would let me know when his ambulance arrived. So I waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

And then I called back, and the receptionist informed me that the hospital wasn’t allowed to tell me, his wife, if or when he arrived, or even if he was a patient there, because of this great little piece of American ingenuity called the Patient Privacy Act—which I should totally have remembered, because I used to work in a pharmacy, and I know that whole goddamned piece of moronic legislation forwards and back. But I was having a hard time thinking straight, and I was also having a hard time not biting this woman’s head off, so I gave her my name and number again and told her to have him call me when he got in. (This, of course, assumed he was conscious when he got in; I’m not sure what happens with patients who arrive unconscious, but I’m betting that their relatives are in for a long and frantic search until their loved one wakes up and is capable of dialing a phone. What happens to patients in long-term comas, I don’t even want to think.)

By this time, my mother had come over to wait for news, as had Tony’s parents. After another half-hour of anxious, tooth-clenched waiting, Tony’s father called again, and—wait for it—ended up giving the receptionist his name and number. And then we all went back to waiting, until, some twenty minutes later, the phone finally rang, and I picked it up and finally—finally!—heard that beloved, irritated voice. Unbeknownst to us, Tony had indeed arrived at the hospital, and was already undergoing chest X-rays when I was making my second call. He, not unreasonably, thought that the hospital was making the necessary phone calls, and that we were already on our way over. Then a nurse came in to tell him that the front desk was being “besieged” with phone calls and would he please call his relatives already? He did—thinking, of course, that we’d already been notified, and were on our way over, and was therefore quite pissed off to find we were all just sitting around waiting. So we all raced over to the hospital, took possession of a very pale Tony, and went on home to assess the damage.

Miraculously—and believe me, I do not use that word lightly—he was all in one piece. The only visible effects of the accident were several bad bruises and some chest pain from the airbag’s impact, and some pretty sore muscles for a week or so afterwards. He’d lost his glasses, but had still managed to get free of the wrecked car on his own power and walk away. Pretty damn lucky—as we all realized when we saw the car.

The front driver’s side was the worst damaged; the window shattered all over him, and the tires of the semi rolled right over the hood. Walking around the car, I saw that it was dented all over; the truck obviously hit him several times, from all sides. Driving down the highway where the accident occurred, his parents and I saw bits and pieces of his bright yellow car strewn for an incredible length along the road—his car must have been dragged quite a ways. His bumper, whole and unmarked, sat perched on the side of the road for a couple of days before it finally disappeared.

Tony took a week off from work to get over his injuries and handle the insurance stuff. The car was totaled, so we had to say goodbye to the sleek golden Ford we’d had for over three years, the car we’d driven to our marriage ceremony in. In its place, we bought a second-hand Chrysler, a blue PT Cruiser that purrs like a kitten and drives like a dream. We call it Mandisa... and if you can’t guess why we call it that, I’m not going to tell you. (Hint: it’s named after a former contestant on this year’s American Idol. And yes, we know we are nasty, nasty people.) Of course, having a classy car won’t change our attitudes... much. We just think of everyone else as peons now.

So that was the Great Truck Run-In (and Run-Over) of 2006. Tony’s pretty philosophical about it, and so am I—if you’re going to get in a tangle with a semi, this is definitely the way to do it: wreck your car, not your body. Obviously, my husband has built up some very good karma, and this surely helped him get out of this alive. (His truckma, however, must not be so great.)

In other health news: my eyes are evil. Well, actually, Alias is evil. A few weeks back, my husband and I got hooked on that damn show—you know, the one where Jennifer Garner changes her clothes all the time, and Victor Garber gets beaten up a lot. I have to say, I love seeing Victor Garber get beat up—and I’m not sure why, because I think he’s a great actor and all, but I just... like seeing him get smacked around a little. It makes me feel the way I used to when I thought of Clay Aiken crying—maternal with a side of awww. Izzum cryin’, Clay? Izzum hurtin’, Garb? Let momma kiss it better, sweetie. Of course, feeling that soft and gooey inside can’t be good for me, and afterwards I have to go kick a puppy to restore my normal viciousness. I need to learn to control these nurturing urges before I have kids—don’t want the little bastards letting their guards down around me.

But I digress. As I was saying, Tony and I got totally hooked on the show, and ended up splurging on the first season DVD set. (Mmmm—now I can screencap every blossoming bruise on Victor’s face. Yum.) And, of course, we had to watch a big chunk right away—six whole episodes right in a row, which translates to something like five straight hours of television. Which, apparently, is a bit too much even for my screen-calloused eyes. I went to bed that night with a raging headache, feeling like a large invisible bear had my head in its jaws and had only paused in its skull-crushing to decide whether or not to save me for a midnight snack. The next day, the headache was still there. And the next day. And the next. But then there were trucks and hospitals and insurance papers and in-laws, and so I just popped Advils like candy and ignored the pain for a couple of weeks, figuring it was divine retribution for a) atheism, b) masturbation, or c) wanting to see Victor Garber get smacked.

But a couple of weeks later it was still there, only now the pain was so bad that I couldn’t watch TV. Okay, that’s fine; I don’t need to see American Idol to appreciate the horror. Then I couldn’t use the computer either—a bit more annoying, since I had half a dozen projects that needed to be finished, but I could take a week off if I had to. And then... then I couldn’t read anymore. Which... is fine, really, I can handle it, because I’ve spent years memorizing poems for situations where I have nothing available to read, and... and obviously someone wiped the hard drive in my head, because I can’t find those damn poems anywhere. It hurt to wear my glasses, it hurt to have them off. The Advil wasn’t helping much anymore. At one point, I made the mistake of trying to suck up the pain and make a quick trip to Ikea—and believe me, a brightly-lit Swedish store with lots of shin-level furniture is not the place to be when your eyes are on the fritz. When it got to the point where I was spending all day curled up whimpering on the couch, my iPod earbuds steadily destroying my hearing and a silk scarf wrapped over my eyes, even doctor-weary I decided it was time to get the peepers professionally peeped at. Turns out that a mere five hours of eyestrain can trigger a sinusitis flareup, which means it’s time for—say it with me, now—antibiotics. And not just regular ol’ antibiotics, either: bacteriocidal antibiotics, which—here, I’ll give you an analogy: the pills are the Campbells, and the bacteria are the MacDonalds, and it is Glencoe in my head right now. And there are no germs over seventy in my whole system. Harsh.

In the middle of the massacre, I finally reached the point where I felt up to using the computer again—which was when I discovered that my laptop wasn’t recognizing its built-in DVD/CD-RW drive and neither computer could connect to the internet, thanks to the NSA’s over-enthusiastic wiretapping static on the phone line. Fortunately, the laptop somehow magically fixed itself in a few days, and the phone line was also fixed—and then a big storm came and blasted the line again, and now we’re back to static and solitude. Whoever said that no man is an island obviously had never lived without reliable internet access, because I’m feeling pretty cut off from the mainland of society right now. All I can do to entertain myself is ruin my ears with my iPod and wreck my newly-fixed eyes watching Jeeves and Wooster videos—and believe me, too much Wodehouse is not good for the mind. I’m starting to use words like “toddle” and “spondulick” and I wake up screaming “EULALIE!” It’s only a matter of time until I’m reading Shakespeare to rabbits.

So that, in a rather large and unwieldy nutshell, is why I haven’t been able to update this site very much of late. Fortunately, it’s all mostly in the past by now, and I’ve got my act together pretty well. Except for that thing ten minutes ago, where I went to take my Campbell pill and took an Advil by mistake, thus forcing me to wait another hour before I can take the Campbell pill. I am a moron. But I was a moron long before this all happened.