Head with a hole

Ow.  There's a giant dressing piled up on my forehead that I can't take off until 11 a.m. tomorrow, and underneath it is a line of dissolvable stitches covering absolute carnage. There were the same sharp burning smells that I remember from my vasectomy - electric cautery in action.  Three sets of sizzles: the first slice, the second slice, and when I went in before the stitches.  They had me well-numbed, but during the stitching it felt as if they were pulling my whole forehead around like a rubber sheet.

It hurts, and when I got home I had some ibuprofen (very rare for me), I thought as instructed, but now I see in the after-care instructions that I'm not supposed to have ibuprofen and really it was supposed to be Tylenol.  This might add up to a little extra bruising under there.  More of a show for when I take the bandage off tomorrow.  (Low comedy: And now Mom keeps suggesting that I should take some of my own pain pills - which is awkward, because I deliberately misled Catherine so that she wouldn't know I retained any tempting pain pills.  I told Mom this at the time, but Mom has forgotten.  This is right in front of Catherine. So far I have answered with little head-shakes and muttered "no"s, which Mom, baffled, has twice told me is just dumb.  So far I don't think Catherine has picked up on it.)   

During the second slice, with me lying there with a cloth over my eyes against the light, the subject of Christmas music and Christmas movies came up and I ended up recommending the Finnish movie Rare Exports, with its skinny monstrous Santas and then the great big one.

One thing was funny that an old guy in the waiting room thought was funny too: They had a little bookshelf in the waiting room - and in the bookshelf was a Robin Cook novel!  There are hospital murderers in every Robin Cook novel!  Some med-center waiting room food!  But when I mentioned it to the nurses and doctors they just blinked and smiled in a way that suggested they didn't get the joke.

So, I'd been told to expect about six hours, but it turned out to be a little over three.  Two slices, with long spells in the waiting room after each, and then the stitch-up.

Afterward I stepped out into the gray city - it was an extension south of downtown, at the base of the sky-tram that goes up the hill to the OHSU campus proper... and it was weird... I have sometimes been not all that fond of life going on, but I've never had suicidal thoughts that I can remember - but for the first time I had an intense rush of suicidal ideation.  Apropos of nothing, but absolutely full-formed and pressing.  Just, the gray light hit me as I came out, and as I'm going over to the streetcar station by the building there's this obsessive crazy self-talk in my head going why not, what's the use of not, if you wait and then you do it anyway it's only going to be all the more pathetic that you waited...

A totally dismal, hopeless vision. S.A.D. combined with several different things and longtime demoralizations, all in a rush. For just a little while I was halfway into suicide-note composition.  What the hell?  I don't know.  I hadn't had breakfast before getting out the door to rush to the clinic.  And I hadn't been able to locate my boots either soon enough, so I was there in flip-flops in the rain.  That seemed to feed it.  Which sounds ridiculous, but it did.

My head, my enemy.  I'll try not to make a habit of it.  (There's no danger; I can't get around to anything, let alone that.)   (... Which in fact is taking me down a little again.)  

As soon as the hole in my forehead heals I'll be able to take in the note and sell my plasma again and I'll be able to pick what I do a little.  So there's that. 

Writing made the forehead pain go away.  I get too far into my head to notice my head. 

I spoke too soon.