This picture looks a lot worse than things are right now, but i needed at least one pretty badass one.  All the steroids had kept me looking pretty decent until they started messing with me.  I got some new braces and my teeth all wired shut.  There are plates in my chin and I’ve got two more fractures out on each side.  I didn’t know that jaws broke like that, but typically they break in a reciprocating manor.

I got pretty hostile with my nurse last night and had to write a letter of apology.  Other than that I’ve been pretty nice to people.  They took me to my x ray and then nobody came to hook me back up to my morphine.  I called four times but of course I couldn’t talk because my teeth are wired shut so I just shook the bed.   The morphine button is a lousy pain treatment.  It requires you needing to stay awake because you can only hit the button every 6 minutes and it locks you out.  And when you get behind it really sucks.   They gave me dilaudid in Virginia and thats by far the way to go.

I feel good now.  I can swallow things.  They gave me some broth and juice.  Not to be overly disgusting, but I had to literally hold my face together just to swallow my spit ever since Friday.

They’re saying Ill be be out of here later today.  I’m wired shut for three weeks and have my plates for 8 weeks.  Since I can’t talk or do much of anything except sit here and click morphine, I though I’d type out some thoughts if that’s okay.  Mostly I’ve been keeping myself tough by remembering some of my other ER visits.  If you’ll let me, I’d like to indulge.

When I was six or seven I didn’t know that rocks thrown into the sky would fall back down.  Trip #1.

On a boyscout trip in high school, I fell while rock climbing and landed in a waterfall.  The fall broke my shin into a thousand pieces and split the bone all the way down to the growth plate at my ankle.  The scoutmaster splinted my leg with sticks and the laces of my boots and twelve boys carried me out of the woods for two miles on a cot, took out the back seats of the van and drove me 40 miles back into town.  I spent my Freshman year of high school in a wheelchair and a cast up to my hip.  I was pimpin a cane by the end.

One time I was rude, I thought in a funny way, to a late night Dairy Queen cashier and  she poisoned me.  I vomited for hours and dry heaved for the rest of the night.  The doctor said I actually separated my sternum.

I gave myself salmonella poisoning in college with my “poor man’s protein shakes” consisting of raw eggs and Strawberry Quick.

When working in a restaurant in Nashville I dropped a glass beer growler on my hand and severed three tendons.  They sewed me up in the ER and sent me home for two days until I could see a hand specialist.  It was like having loose rubber bands under my palm.  Then I had surgery and months of therapy and the scar tissue took so long to pull my fingers through that it was a year before I could fret a guitar or play a piano.  That was when we left Nashville, and all music aspirations, and I became a financial salesperson in Knoxville.

Three years later when I quit Finance and we decided to move to New York, I broke that same hand right before we left. I was climbing a skinny rope built for Ashley’s cousins to practice wrestling strength in their forearms.  I suppose I had learned to compensate and protect that finger over the years.  I was in denial about the injury and didn’t go to the ER for three days.  When I finally did, it was broken in two places.  I had one week left on the job so I still had health insurance.  Then we lost our renters and couldn’t move to New York.  We got to stay another month in Knoxville looking for new renters, unemployed and stranded, so my hand was pretty much healed by the time we left.   New York City was very sympathetic and welcomed our bravery with open arms.

That last hand injury was treated here at UT.  This time it took me 500 miles and three emergency rooms to get here, plus one dentist in Virginia Beach who first told me the bad news, and right now I’m in pretty good spirits and feeling tough.  Yes I’m getting tired of my setbacks, and the nasty injuries always seem to coincide with my biggest leaps to make music.  The whole reason I left two weeks ago was to record some music and run a Spartan Race.  You would have thought the Spartan Race would have been the thing to worry about, and maybe my brother was right in a text he just sent me.

“The Spartan Levonimus Maximus would have just wiped some dirt on his jaw and walked it off.”

I was wondering, did anyone listen to that song I posted yesterday?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.