by Tim Sommers
This is true. Or as true as I could manage. It is a continuation, as you might guess, of Day One. It follows the aftermath of a near-fatal car accident that led me back to philosophy. Hannibal Buress supplies this epigraph:
“When people go through something rough in life, they say, ‘I’m taking it one day at a time.’ Yes, so is everybody. Because that’s how time works.” – Hannibal Buress
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So, there’s this glass thing, I don’t know what to call it, “vessel,” I guess, next to my bed and a tube coming out of it that snakes over to me, into my nose, down my throat, and into my stomach where it pumps the blood out of me that is still leaking from various places inside. You can see the blood swirling around there. It seems too dark. There’s got to be a pump too, but I don’t see one.
I am dying to sleep.
Literally, dying. Every time I go to sleep, I stop breathing, and a clamor of people in white come to wake me up. I let myself sleep anyway until they wake me up again.
I am not dying to eat. I am just really, really hungry. But I am not allowed to eat. It’s the internal bleeding.
My Mom comes in, and she’s got a bag of circus peanuts in one hand and something more reasonable to eat in the other. Circus peanuts are these old-timey candies that are neon orange and shaped vaguely like large peanuts, but soft and squishy, the consistency of a stale marshmallow. They are made of gelatin, sugar, and disappointment. I like them.
A nurse is trying to get between my Mom and the candy and me, but while she’s distracted, I reach over and grab the circus peanuts out of Mom’s hand, then manage to hold my butt just far enough off the bed to shove the package under my mattress. Then I play the waiting game.
The ICU is bright, overcrowded, and bustling. I need just the right moment. Eventually, I managed to surreptitiously retrieve the bag, get it open with my one good hand, and I started eating the circus peanuts. After a couple of swallows, I noticed something. Dancing through the tube sticking out of my nose towards the vessel, there’s a line of little orange stars, bits of circus peanuts.
I keep eating anyway until the vessel of blood is swirling hundreds of orange stars around inside it. An RN walking by stops and frowns at it. She leaves and comes back with a doctor. He takes off his glasses and leans in for a better look. “Remarkable,” he says. He doesn’t speak to me. “We are going to have to get this to the lab right away,” he says to the nurse.
The nurse says, “He doesn’t have insurance.” The doctor puts on his glasses and walks away. I will never see him again.
This is only day two. I have 297 more days in the hospital.
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This is my last column for 3 Quarks Daily. I have written 98, mostly on philosophy, since 2018. During that time, I went from being a first-year graduate student at the University of Iowa to a professor at William & Mary.
I hope some of you enjoyed some of the columns I wrote. I enjoyed writing them. Thanks if you read even one of them.
Special thanks to S. Abbas Raza for choosing me to write for the site and for his unfailing, unwavering support of me. As it did before me, his magical cabinet of curiosities and wonders will continue on without me, but I am glad to have been a part of it for a while. آپ کا سفر محفوظ رہے ,
Maybe I’ll see you all in the comment threads.