Dec

13

The rat had no morals, no scruples, no consideration and left half-inch scat throughout my trailer for weeks. Peanut butter in a Havahart trap failed so I upscaled to the Victor rat trap, world leader since 1898 with the snap of an alligator. I heard it about midnight. Peeking over the attic drop ceiling was a rat the size of a chihuahua and it must have thought my Kilroy head was the largest mammal it had ever seen. It’s nose was locked in the trap, legs flailing with a 9” tail. I raised a 1-pound ball-peen hammer to dispatch it, the ladder slipped, and I fell into the darkness. Nobody here but me lying conscious and paralyzed on the floor with the rat thrashing and bleeding six-feet above. The stealthy, secret fellow had built a better rat trap.

The crash onto three 70-pound Marine batteries left me in underwear on the dirty, 40-degree floor for 1.5 days. No water, no food, unable to crawl. Finally, I inched like an inchworm for 15’ to a cellphone and called my desert neighbor a mile away.

The Brawley, CA Pioneer Hospital ER accepted me gleefully on a slow night and the attention was professional. A CT scan and Xray exposed four broken ribs (8-11), Lumbar-1 compression fracture, a 30% hemothorax (blood in the thoracic cavity), slight pneumothorax (air in the thoracic cavity), and pleural hemorrhage (gurgling blood in the lungs). I could have died that gray night from labored breathing.

‘The injuries,’ urged the doctor, are just shy of surgery but transport to a Level 1 trauma center is mandatory to monitor the hemothorax.’ He offered me morphine, fentanyl, and I finally accepted an opiate Norco (Hydrocodone) for the ambulance ride. Suddenly I was streaking on the dark desert highway 111 for two hours to Palm Springs Trauma Center.

The ER was professional and fast. A fascinating fracture case brought the six-man team to my blood-drained face under a chocolate brown cowboy hat like The Good, Bad, and Ugly, as the lead physician whistled the theme song and the lung specialist shook his head. ‘You’ll get better in a private room on the 4th floor.’

Instead, they wheeled the bed down the block long emergency hall to an elevator and I watched the aide press Floor 3. The door opened to a raised dungeon of mops, cobwebs, and people who couldn’t speak English. Tortured screams echoed along myriad halls. They stuck me in a room with a sheet separating my ears from a man moaning in agony for 30-minutes until I called as loud as my lungs could allow, ‘Help!’ A nurse creeped into the room and instructed me to take a blood thinner. ‘That’s contraindicated with hemothorax; are you trying to kill me?’ ‘Then take this anxiety pill first.’ ‘Get me the head nurse!’ She came. ‘Move me to Floor 4 or I’ll crawl to the Palm Springs Newspaper office.’

That’s how I commandeered a 3:00am penthouse in the finest, largest hospital in southern California. It was a private room with two full-time, around-the-clock nurses who fed me 5-star meals and told war stories until I was glutted with tenderness and said I wanted to go home. The requirements were to inhale 1500ml of air on an incentive spirometer (I passed with 3000ml akin to a healthy, 20-year old male); lower my pulse from 90 to 85 beats in a heartbeat, roll out of bed, and walk 50 yards. ‘We’ll call you an Uber,’ praised a nurse.

I was released to my Slab City car mechanic and walked up a wash to my camp. It’s been a month now of daily walking and light yard work. I took one Norco every four nights to fall asleep and shunted my blood to the healing areas, and when it hit my brain added columns of numbers to link the opiate to math instead of getting high.

Life is good again. It’s 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it.


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