With my calm head and reduced pain, everything seemed lit in the light of the possible. I called about an open mic poetry reading, then decided to go to the reading, even though there was no open mic, just because other poets would be there and it had been so long since I'd gone among my kind (so to speak.) Poets are much less solitary than fiction writers. They know they need each other to make things happen.
I've started PT for the scoped hip. I thought I was going to be a superstar, but wow it was painful! I hid my face after and said, "I'm so out of shape." PT said I wasn't though, he said I was actually strong and healing fast, considering I was down to just one crutch out of the house and could manage my house full of stairs with no crutches at all.
The next day, however, I was still in pain. My surgeon said to call him if I needed more pain medicine, but my experiences have been so awful, I'm actually frightened to. I just recently wrote a letter of complaint to my migraine neuro about the way she treated me at out appointment (see this entry) and to my surprise got something of an apology. It was on my voicemail, but I could tell by the way she spoke that she remembered what she had said. Words are like pictures in a gallery to me. If they are written, excellent. If they are spoken, it's a good as the person being in front of me. I could hear how harried she was in her voice. Fear? Had I gotten her in trouble? There was not direct mailing address so I just addressed it to the hospital address care of. It had passed, maybe, through many hands. What had aggrieved a patient so she felt the need to write a letter?
She said I'm sorry at the beginning and I apologize at the end. In the middle she missed all three of my major points entirely: 1. You accused me of wanting "high dose opiates." 2. You tried to foist chronic pain rehab on me even though I told you I wasn't interested. 3. Neither of the above were pertinent to my appointment once I stated that I was unwilling to take a lesser dose of tramadol.
I'll accept it. She's not a bad person. She made a bad judgment call. I just hope she thinks of this and remembers not to make the same mistake twice. I could have gone off on my own tangent, like how the Clinic thinks that for every patient in pain the same family dynamic evolves, where the family revolves around the patient in pain, when nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not going to pay thousands of dollars for them to teach me what my parents taught me from the time I was a child. This is my life, I am responsible for myself. I have great personal resources that I can tap when I am in pain and discomfort in order to live my life as normally as possible.
Hell, they should hire me.
In other poetry related news. I want to be a poetry whore.
Excuse my language. But in the interest of bringing poetry thousands of years back to its roots of being performed in a public forum, comes the Chicago Poetry Bordello. With its mix of 21 century century general raunchiness and an air of the Steampunk. Plus I would get to dress up. Poetry, fashion, music and a grand game of 'let's pretend.'
My thought: We have to have this in Cleveland.
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