BLUE COUP D’ETAT

(NOTE****THESE ARE WORDS AND IMAGES FROM NEARLY FIVE YEARS AGO)

I just found out Stanley Kubrik died, Derek left me a message. He sounded sad.

My dad told me he is getting in touch with his body. He is sitting in a chair in his hospital room with tubes in his nose, an IV in his arm, and a cathader in his penis. He has a button in his hand for “pain management” or morphine drip. Somehow he is wearing a pleasant look on his face. He keeps nodding, I think he’s doing his own personal form of meditation. I told him the prayer of St. Francis but I don’t think he really listened. He has to do it his own way. He has a gash in his stomach about the length of a hand which is held together by four staples. It is intentionally not sealed all the way so that the infection in his stomach cannot fester and abscess. The half closed wound reminds me that we are all meat just like at the grocery or the butcher shop. Our bodies can blow up on themselves, they can fail us and there is little we can do about it but we can be tough. Toughness is in the mind, the body follows the lead of the mind. Even though you don’t talk, you inspire me. They tell me his bowels aren’t working right now and I can see the waste that the machines are pulling out of his body. His urine is the color of used cooking oil, slightly red, scary color. The solids come out through a tube in his nose and resemble a measureing cup full of diarreha. The road to recovery is tough. “He says he’ll walk in a little while,” the nurse said. “He didn’t put out that much urine. The resident said the color looked terrible.”

The Room: 2 TVs, list of channels, attending physician Stiegmann, a menu, bouquet of bird of paradise flowers, a bulldog puppy get-well card with their paw prints, gauze and saline solution, a blower to help him take deep breaths, a Douer urine bag, oxygen from the wall. A stack of Medline powder free latex examination gloves small, medium, and large.

My Dad just gripped my finger–he’s strong. The two nurses are trying to figure out the machinery hooked up to my Dad. He rolls his eyes and I smile. I just saw the wound again–the edges of the openings look like ground beef and there are actually six staples and six openings in his stomach.

AFTERWARD–my Dad is alive and well this day Thanksgiving 2004 and I want to give thanks for that, amen.