9 Years Past My Shelf Life

(two)

I swore off the morphine drip pretty quickly. Waking dreams of being in a red metal room. Shit was freaking me out. It just wasn’t treating me well.

The guy in the next bed was an interesting one. West Virginia redneck that talked a lot. I gathered he was a total alcoholic, because he got a low-test beer with his dinner. We shared the room for a couple of days. I couldn’t really turn to see him, but I could certainly hear him.

I remember one time he was trying to get some pain meds.

“So what’s your pain level?”

“A ten! A ten!”

Give me a fucking break. You’d think he was up in traction.

I’d had a burst fracture at T-12, a cracked scapula and a fractured skull. My pain levels were hovering around a six. And I swore off the morphine drip and just took regular tylenol type stuff because I kept closing my eyes and waking up in a metallic red room. The guy was kind of amusing, though.

The thing that got under my skin the most in that room was the remote control box they had to change the channels on the television. There might have been 40 to 50 channels like you’d get on a normal run of the mill cable system. But you could only change the channel by going up one. A basic button.

A clicker.

My grandmother had one of those when I was a kid. The first remote I’d ever seen. You clicked the orange button and the channel number went up by one. She had four or five channels and you had to find them in a bank of like 57 numbers. Lots of fast clicking.

So this TV had one like that that was attached to the TV by a long wire. There’s never more than two or three decent things to watch at any given moment (even with 50 channels), so you’d often be switching between a handful of channel numbers at most. And you click really fast to get from a low numbered channel to higher one. But don’t accidentally click past your target, or else you’ll be circling all the way around in order to get there again.

A friend of mine knew that I was going to ultimately be ok when she heard news of me complaining to people about the television.