Old, Not Wise, Just Worried

I’ve never liked taking naps.  Not even when I was little.  Mostly all they do is disorient me, and I get enough of that feeling in my everyday life.

But sometimes you have no choice.

Yesterday I reduced my quotient of wisdom by the sum of one tooth.  This meant heading over to the oral surgeon’s office where I sat in the waiting room with Kim for a good half an hour before being taken to the back room.  They like to make you think about it, apparently.  Maybe the pain isn’t that bad?  You can just go home, buy ibuprofen by the case, live on soft foods – it won’t be that bad, will it?

Yes, you decide, it probably will.  So there you sit.  Waiting.

Eventually they called me back and – as agreed – gave me enough medical care that I have no memory of the following hour or so.  I remember asking the tech if she was going to start pumping the meds in through the IV she’d inserted (my second IV ever – I’m getting to be a pro at these things) and her saying that yes, she was, and then I was in a different chair listening to Kim and another tech discussing all of the things I could not be allowed to do for the rest of the day.

It was a long list, none of which made any impression on me at the time.

I made it to the car, and then made it upstairs to my bed when we got home, and there I stayed for the next two hours.  Eventually I woke up, but I was not really supposed to do anything.  So I found an EPL match being broadcast on one of the channels way up in the stratospheric numbers and watched the entire game.  I think the red team won.

I was supposed to stay in bed all day and not do anything active, but I figured sitting in bed watching TV wasn’t much different from sitting in my chair plinking around on the computer, so I did that for a while too. I even got some work done on my US2 class, moving forward into the 1970s.  It’s strange to get to the stuff I remember personally.  It’s even stranger to get to that stuff when you’re still not entirely sure whether those are real memories or just anesthesia-induced hallucinations.  I’m hoping they were real memories. It would be a shame if so many of my hallucinations were centered around Richard Nixon when there are so many other public figures who would be much more entertaining that way.

Naturally, getting to sleep last night was a chore.  Two hour naps will do that.  Oh well.

So I’m eating soft foods, not driving until this afternoon, and generally consuming more pills than I would have dreamed possible only a semester ago.  This is my life these days.

The title of this comes from an old song by The Trash-Can Sinatras.  I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever heard the song or not, but it was a much beloved tag line of a friend I had when I lived in Pittsburgh, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it.

It seemed appropriate here.