Sharp Dressed Man

This was a good week. I learned something and not necessarily what you think I did. I learned, well after the fact (technically in the ride back home from the hospital on Thursday) the attempt at angioplasty didn't work-the balloon didn't go up so to speak and that's when the medical team put the stent in. I thought the object of the exercise along had been to do that, but that was actually Plan B-and when they needed to pull it out and run it, they did and it worked.

But that wasn't what I learned. And while I had stir fry and liked it. learning that I liked stir-fry was also not what I learned. After the stir-fry I thought I deserved a treat for having completely failed to notice anything happening in the Operating Room after speaking with Darcy, the nurse, about bamboo as an invasive plant how asparagus made your pee smell (she's a nurse and knows these things) and with Mike, the X-ray technician, who'd been to the Mystic Seaport and sort of knew where I lived.

My after-dinner reward, I decided, was to be chocolate pudding but then guilt kicked in and so I ordered the sugar-free one. Bleech! Oh Lord, it was awful. I only took a  second spoonful because my brain refused to believe my mouth when it reported the hand with the spoon was trying poison me. Yeah, sugar-free chocolate pudding-not a good idea but also not what I learned.

It came to me very early on Thursday morning when I realized I was 'through the night' and all still where I had been placed the afternoon before so I knew I would be going home. I realized I would be moving gingerly because of the various visible and less than visible holes that had been punched in me so it would take me about five hours to get dressed. But that's not what I learned either.

What I learned was that I felt like a human being again right after I put my underpants on. I had spent thirty-six hours (indulge me, okay?) or so in a shapeless sheet with a flimsy (and in my case broken) tie back with a slit down the middle of the gown so that I was a walking peep show. I realize the people who work in the hospital are used to seeing the human body (in all of its variations) but I didn't find it funny that a guy in an orange jacket waving a flag walked in front of me when I came down the hallway.

But the second I slipped on my underwear, The Kid was back! It was like my super power had been returned as my self-confidence was off the scale. And no one said anything about the My Little Pony figures on the fly and on the butt. Clothes make the man so if you want to prolong the Arab Spring, drop some Dockers on Yemen-flat cut, not the pleated ones.    
-bill kenny