Possible Side Effects

Seventeen hours in the ER (emergency room) gives a person plenty of time to reflect on a life lived. For some, it’s a reckoning they don’t want to face. For others, it’s a confirmation that, thus far, they’ve avoided the cruelties of careless living. For me, it was an opportunity to listen carefully (with no apologies, I might add) and reflect on how others had lived their lives up until their collision with reality.

Quick backstory here; my friend had contracted shingles in her eye. Even with the Shingles shot and the booster, she was one of the unlucky four percent that caught the virus. It was incredibly painful. I was there as her caregiver, confidant, listener, sounding board and doctor translator.

Sequestered behind half curtains, her in the hospital bed, me in a chair beside her, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversations between nurse and patient all around us. This was a regional trauma center at a major hospital, so it was busy twenty-four seven. As the patients came and went out of their neighboring cubicles, their dialogue gave me pause and plenty of time for reflection.

The phrase ‘side effects’ glued itself inside my brain. It came from a sign on the wall, prominently displaying possible side effects of some medicines administered. Here came one patient after another, each asked to review their medical history to the nurse then doctor. For most of the patients, it was an open admission of poor judgment, unhealthy habits, unforeseen circumstances, and a hundred thousand other excuses for not living a healthy life.

The first was fifty-five years old skeleton of a woman. She had had most of her major external body parts replaced, removed, or switched out for titanium. Her voice sounded like she was pushing one hundred and her body wasn’t that far behind. She knew a lot of the nurses there and they shook their heads when they saw her name on the roster again.

A middle-aged man came in, about as strong and robust looking, as any other man seen in the ward. Chest pains brought him in with a history of heart attacks in the family. After a litany of questions, the nurse hit the jackpot. ‘Yes,’ he did drink a lot. Only hard liquor and every day. Might this be the cause of his heart issues. He didn’t know but he sure as hell wasn’t about to stop drinking, he announced. End of that conversation.

Another relic of better times had started smoking at ten years old, continued for the next fifty years but then went cold-turkey and turned to drinking instead. Now her kidneys were shot (or so she was told) was probably diabetic (she didn’t want to get tested), was on her third husband and didn’t know where he was anyway.

Moving my friend and I from the ER to a hospital bed took me away from evesdropping but not observing. Each day, the nurses would take their patients on walks around the front desk. Some were recovering from surgery, others from heart attacks and still others from some debilitating illness that had brought them there in the first place. Each was on the road to recovery, some on the high road, others the low road.

For some, age was the culprit but for others, it was simply life catching up with them. For me and all of them, the dye has pretty much been cast. Healthy living may extend the inevitable for a little longer while unhealthy living is most certain to curtail it one way or another.

Side effects in life are like choices made, decisions confirmed and lifestyle avenues taken or not taken. The curtain is dropping for all of us. For some, it seems to be dropping a lot faster than others.

My friend has pretty much recovered. It was a long and tedious process with plenty of Tylenol to ease her painful journey to recovery. They say that once you’ve had the Shingles, you’re more susceptible to a relapse. Hope it doesn’t happen again. But if it does, I’ll be there to help her along that journey again.

Definitely a side effect of love and affection still rock solid after all these years.

The Written Word

Mom and me as a kid

I grew up in a household without any books…or magazines…or newspapers. In fact it wasn’t until I started my paper route in Seventh grade that I even knew or understood what a newspaper was all about. I used to stop at the last house on my route and sit on their front stoop and read the headlines of the newspaper. I tried to read between the lines. There were stories in those words and I was trying to understand the truth of them. I guess that was the beginning of a lifetime of story-telling in one form or another.

I do the same daily research today…only now its perusing my ipad with a cup of coffee. I’m still filling my head with stories every morning. As I told my students in a workshop recently, story-telling is a one of the most effective ways to communicate because story-telling is really data and information wrapped up with emotion.

Truth be told, I am now a writer in my elder years. I tell stories that are often trapped inside my imagination. They may be recent incidents or relics from my past but they are all stories in need of telling. Perhaps Victor Hugo said it best:  ‘A writer is a world trapped inside a person.’

It wasn’t that long ago that I was riding out west alongside a drifter called Jeb Burns. His story came to me in 1974, was pounded out on an L.C. Smith antique typewriter only to languish for forty years before being resurrected by a high tech scanner and finally publication.

The same was true with another western born in 1975 and finally finding life not that long ago.

Back then I was riding shotgun on a stage coach out west, watching the cunning nature of a man, really a half-breed, by the name of Ree Bannon.

Another story was observing and writing down the adventures and life experiences of a young man much like myself back in the mid-sixties. A coming of age novel that explored driving ambition, class differences and youthful passion set in the turbulent 1960s.

Palm Springs is haunted by the rich and the famous and the broken. It was a concept I devoured in three books that followed the lives of a group of people living out their lives in Palm Springs.

‘Cobbler’ was born five years ago but only recently went under my editor’s surgical pen for release soon. It’s a suspense thriller that takes a couple around the world in search of an elusive icon called ‘The Cobbler.’

Story telling takes on many forms and for me, plays are a new and exciting medium in which to explore the human condition. ‘Riot at Sage Corner’ tells the story of an aging hippie trapped in a retirement community who is causing all kinds of problems.

Fifty year high school reunions are often replete with drama, boredom, assaults on self-confidence and memories unwanted and embraced. It can be a plethora of conflicting emotions. We’ll see what audiences think of my new play August 11^th and 12^th at the Steeple Center in Rosemount.

Another new play, still festering in my imagination and slowly finding release through my fingertips, is about old age and the inevitability of the end we must all face someday. It’s not a dark comedy but neither is it sad. Instead I hope it can be a celebration of all that makes us human and caring individuals…even if some of us need a nudge or two in that direction once in a while.

Link to all my blog posts

Turns out that over the years my blogs have become weekly story-telling on a wide variety of topics. My travels, my time living in Europe, time in the service, the kids growing up and past experiences that shaped my life.

The second truism often embraced about writing is that through the power of story-telling we can learn so much about ourselves and others. Stories are the fabric in our lives that keeps our world interesting. It is what stirs our imagination and keeps our kids and grandkids up late at night, pleading to hear just one more book read to them…or hiding under the covers because they can’t let go of their latest find from the library.

This is what I do. This is who I am.