GET ME MY PANTS!

So a few posts ago I talked about my state of mind upon awakening from my little beauty nap. I had no clue as to what had been going on around me for the prior two weeks, no idea whatsoever how close I had come to buying the farm. Kicking the bucket. Pushing up those ol' daisies. I had just turned 59, for crying out loud. Death was not something I worried about; I figured I had another twenty good years, at least. Who knows, maybe even thirty. Of course that "who knows" reveals the fallacy of that attitude. Who knows, indeed. Could be thirty years, could be tomorrow. I've learned that lesson now, the hard way of course, but before I got sick I was just cruising through life, like a lot of us tend to do, not paying attention, not stopping to smell the proverbial flowers. I'm pretty sure that was a run-on sentence, but that's okay because it's already been established that no one is reading this thing anymore. But I digress. I'll get to the G-d stuff, all the spiritual, existential issues that these last few months have given rise to in a future post. This was supposed to be about how dazed and confused I was when I came to. Sitting up in bed for the first time in two weeks, all I really knew was that I had had enough of hospitals. I wanted out! So my old obnoxious personna asserted itself and I literally said, "get me my pants, I'm going home." Only problem was, I couldn't talk because of the trach. Incredibly, I didn't even stop to ask someone, anyone, "hey, how come when I speak, no sound comes out". Not right away, anyway. So I had Chayie call every doctor I had ever known to try and pull some strings and get me discharged. She called my primary care physician, my neurologist, my urologist, even my shrink. Yeah, I know, you'd never believe that I'd go to a shrink, right? Chayie played the dutiful sister perfectly, calling everyone I asked her to, even though she knew it was an excersize in futility. I finally pulled out that old chestnut: "I wanna be discharged A.M.A. (against medical advice)". Unbeknowst to me at the time, I was literally too weak to move. Did you know that when you don't use your muscles for a week, they completely desert you? No wonder everyone was ignoring my angry, silent outbursts...they knew that there was no way I could pull it off. Finally my son-in-law Yehuda told me okay, he'd bring my pants if I could demonstrate to him that I could even move my legs. Couldn't do it. I think I shut up after that. Good thing, too, since I sounded like Marcel Marceau.