Somewhere, Over the Verrazano...

I was positively giddy in the ambulance. Imagine: five weeks before I was lying in a coma with some of the best doctors on the planet unwilling to predict whether or not I would survive. I went through hell and now here I was...discharged! I was euphoric. It felt like nothing less than emancipation. It must have been around 10:00 when we pulled up in front of Silver Lake Specialized Care Center in Staten Island. Wow. Doesn't that sound classy? This facility would be my home for a week or two (yeah, right), just a way station between the hospital and Flatbush. My brother Vrumi and his wife Raizel were there when I got there. It was nice to see familiar faces. I was taken to my room and introduced to my roommate, Joe Manzini. More about Joe later. The room was drab, stuffy, utilitarian. Depressing grey walls. My euphoria started to fade. Then the nurses came in to change Joe's diaper. Joe was 79. I think at that point the last vestiges of my euphoria took a powder and the reality of the situation hit me hard: I was now a resident of a nursing home! "Specialized Care Center" sounds better, doesn't it? Suddenly there were four nurses surrounding me. Two of them, Donna and Maria, would soon become more than nurses, they turned into trusted friends. But I didn't know that now. They were there to do a body check. A what?, I said. It's just what it sounds like. They check your body. Your entire body. Then they document any rashes or scratches or bumps or bruises or garden-variety boo-boos. Now as you know, I had been seen in various stages of undress by scores of women, men and others in the ICU. This newest invasion of privacy shouldn't have fazed me one bit. Somehow, it did; somehow, it was different. In Columbia Presbyterian the nakedness was just a bi-product of one procedure or another, or a necessary evil in order to keep me reasonably clean. No one was paying attention to my body. Here, the whole point was to pay attention to my body. I was absolutely mortified. So I dealt with it the way I usually do when I'm naked in front of four women: with humor. I cracked jokes about my adonis-like physique in a classic defensive move (I'll make fun of myself before they get a chance to). It loosened up the atmosphere in the room. I'm sure a lot of the people the nurses do this to are either comatose or simply unaware of their surroundings. I got the feeling they liked having someone who was alert and maybe even funny for a change. Before I knew it they were kidding around, too. Some of the humor got a bit bawdy, but somehow that seemed appropriate under the circumstances. At that point I was glad I was 59, not 29.