so there i was, just blog, blog, blogging along…i believe i mentioned something about wine and pills, or was it whine and pills? suddenly, out of the darkness emerged a villain not even actionfiguretrish could challenge by herself…and so our intrepid heroine goes down in torturous, multi-colored flames of delusion and pain. plans? what plans? i missed a pig roast, wasted concert tickets, fell behind at work and home…you know the drill.

ever have a kidney bleed all on its own for no apparent reason?  me either. ever have an infection bad enough to make your kidney bleed and not even know it? me either. anyhoo, enough about bleeding things. the point is, i’m at home on my beloved sofa, in my beloved writers’ living room, surrounded by Jack K. and my library of books and vinyl, on the first day back that feels something like normal…at least normal for me. ahhhh.

so, i apologize to all 11 of you who stop by to read my blog sort of regularly. i thought about writing while i was institutionalized but something about an opium haze sapped my concentration and led me instead on somnambulatory adventures to hospital room bathrooms and giant, noisy, futuristic, tubes meant to elucidate my sorrows.

i don’t have any grand lesson to share here. even the one i peddled from my soap box two fridays ago really didn’t help me out much until my body was screaming in a plaintive, dying whisper…like yelling in a dream…”Geeeeettttt Ouuuutttt (-side to the car and get your butt to the ER).” it’s like tornado warnings….sometimes you get enough warning to get all your important papers, your kids, your pets and anyone you know without a basement into party mode complete with special drinks named after the storm. other times, it’s all you can do to dive under a table and pray. maybe it was that dive under the table that bruised my kidney.

so today is really a big thank you to the friends and family who reached out, cared for my daughter, covered me at work, sent good wishes and told me to sit the heck down until i was well. this is a shout out to all the incredible staff at the INOVA hospital where i sojourned and watched the clock, whining for pain meds every few hours. and to my second roommate with the possessed hospital bed, who made the visit funnier and much more interesting than it could have been; and who made me feel sorry for the very infirm older lady who spent quite some time trying to convince her caretakers that the bed sometimes moved on its own. her wasted words reporting a ghost in the machine were lost somewhere between her startled non sequiturs upon waking every ten minutes from the realistic nods that come with strong pain meds. sometimes she yelled them in german. “sabberst du oder hast du tollwut?” sometimes in accented english, “i said, ‘no porkchops in my jello!'” she was 6’1″ and over 300 lbs. she can shout anything she wants.

i missed writing this blog, but really, my ramblings are incoherent enough without brain addling fevers and iv drugs. and though i’m still recovering, i am finally looking at my laptop again, pondering and pontificating, and lamenting the new facebook landscape that rolled into town when i was staring down the nurse call button and watching jerry springer. did you know jerry springer was still on tv? reruns i presume. or perhaps that was an opium nightmare. please forgive me, Universe, my options were so limited. i actually had to bang on the side of the tv to get reception for that show. and it’s hard to read a good book when your eyes perceive everything in triplicate.

i could write at least five columns after the people- and hospital-watching i did this last week. they’d probably be funnier to me than you, so i will try to shake off my hospital stay and move on. this actionfigure is convalescing with laundry, pets and my baby girl…my sweet 2.5 year old who brought her bee pillow to my bedside to cuddle, told me that i wasn’t sick anymore and wanted to put a bandaid on my back to fix it. (requisite, “awwwe.”)

now my oral pain meds are sinking into my soft tissue, so i must stop typing before this thing grows twice this size and half as interesting. life and its curveballs….this was not part of the plan. sigh.