October 21, 2014

The night before last, I hit the sack early perhaps in response to being home from a weekend in Northern Michigan which had been simultaneously glorious and dreadful. The glory of the weekend had lay in being in the presence of my best friend, Patrick, brother, Michael, their wives Linda and Susi, as well as old pal Johnny Boy and his wife Karen. The dread, on the other hand, found its source in the expectation that one and all would recognize my diminished abilities.

And so it was: the telltale signs of sympathy from brother Mike as he found me waiting in the bathroom at evening's close, not quite sure if I could make it up the staircase where I'd broken my leg in three places a year ago in August; the borderline alarm at my late-night garbled speech from Johnny Boy who I'm not quite sure knew the score going in; the sheer fucking love from my BFF, Pat, whose tinnitus had led him to start cupping his ear Eh-Sonny? style around the same time I started my quiet-talking days. You just can't script irony darker than that as a couple of old boomers enter their next phase together in which extrovert struggles to speak loudly enough to be heard by introvert.

Finally, though, this self-abasement is the source of the glory, because you know what? At the end of the day, our struggles are much more apparent to us than they are to others, except perhaps to the extent they cause us to feel needlessly ashamed of ourselves. Which is to say, unless I'm missing something, in the nature of my friendships the darkness of such moments doesn't enter the picture except as moments to love each other more from the other end.

So to bed Sunday night, 9-ish, sober as a rookie middle school principal on the first day of classes, yet I slept medium-to-fitfully, even for me, waking at 12:30, turning over (always a bit of a chore with the C-PAP nasal pillows and chin strap but sometimes a benefit), waking again at 1:30 to realize that this night side-sleeping wasn't much help, before finally out for another hour when fuck it, might as well get up and take a piss. Long reach to turn off C-PAP, extract those damn nasal pillows, pull the Velcro at back of chin strap, hang the whole she-bang over the bed post.

The Fall itself was a rather simple affair. I sat up on the side of the bed, put feet on the hardwood, stood and almost simultaneously felt my right calf experience a severe cramp at the same time that I told my feet to begin their customary shuffle toward bathroom. Except that my feet froze in place, and I mean froze, as in, would not move. At which point my forward momentum combined with the extreme weakness in that right calf to send my whole body careening to the floor.

I'll spare ya the rest, except to say that I married the best woman in the world, who woke immediately, turned on the light, got me on my feet, made sure nothing was broken, then after I emptied my bladder, took me in her arms, and held me until at least one of us (that would be the one who had to work the next morning) could get a semblance of sleep for the remaining hours until daybreak. As for me, if you read the opening and closing lines of the first of these entries, you know what I spent the next couple of hours thinking.

Do you remember how it felt to fall when you were five years old? To give yourself, body and soul, propelled by gravity, to the ground with such force that you literally had the wind knocked out of you? Well, this kind of fall leaves you blessedly with some literal wind, but worse in its way, it steals your figurative wind. And not for one day. More than 48 hours later, I'm still somewhat shaky, even as I know just as the literal wind returned, so will the other -- until the next time because, as the point was driven finally and crucially home the night before last, I've got fucking Parkinson's Disease.