Morpheus is Overrated

 March 9th is my grandmother‘s birthday. It is also my sister-in-law‘s birthday.

And now, and forever more, for me, it will also be the day I got sick.

As I mentioned the last time I posted (and it’s been a few weeks), I wound up in the hospital for nearly a month. Long story short, I had an infection (as I mentioned before, it was cellulitis in my right leg below the knee), and it got into my bloodstream and then my kidneys shut down.

The pain in my leg was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and something I hope never to feel again. And as I mentioned previously, my saviors at the hospital treated my pain by doping me to the gills. Mostly with oxycodone.

Oxy. The stuff of dreams. And not just during my sleep-which is saying something, because those first couple of weeks I slept about eighteen to twenty hours a day-thanks to all of the oxy I was getting pumped into my veins, I experienced all manner of waking dreams, as well.

During this time I couldn’t help but recall the descriptions of drug-induced “trips” in all manner of literature, from classic to crime, and the analytical, always there author in me began to compare notes between what I was experiencing and what I had read.

I gotta say, if my oxy-fueled hallucinations are any indication, I must possess the id of an accountant. My hallucinations were, well, you be the judge:

1. I saw flaming writing scrolling across the ceiling tiles in my hospital room. If you’ve ever seen that scene in Cecil B. deMille’s The Ten Commandments where God carves out his commandments for Moses using heavenly fire, it sort of looked like that.

But the writing was too small for me to read. So, kinda lame.

2. Across from my bed was a wash basin with a mirror above it. Looking into it from my bed gave me an excellent view the drawn blinds on the window over my head. Oxy made this reflected set of blinds seem like the kind of big rolling door you see on loading docks. And my could even make out the blonde guy standing right to the side of the “door” and working the controls that caused it to rise and fall.

3. There were a number of nights where it seemed to me that my hospital room had morphed into the back room at a tattoo parlor, and the nurses and support staff were all tattooists who came in to check on me every half-hour or so.

Oh, and of course the mirror showed me the guy across the street, running that loading dock door up and down then, too.

So my oxy dreams were just kind of…weird and pointless.

And as soon as I could stop taking the oxy, I did.

And I don’t regret it. I don’t miss it, or the banal, beige dreams it brought me, waking or sleeping.

And I’m positive this experience will influence my fiction, going forward.

But I’ll be damned if I know how!

And that’s it for me this time! See you in two weeks!