Huh? What?

I ended up spending seven nights in hospital and, during that time, I managed to work my way through a lot of reading material. This is how the reading material worked. When I prepared to go to the hospital, I packed my New Yorker magazines, a book about a programme to introduce black students to Holy Cross University, back in the '60s and other reading material that involved long paragraphs and marmalade words.

I woke up from surgery to find myself connected to an IV that supplied me with an on demand stream of pain medication. The morning following my surgery, I reached for a New Yorker and found that the words would not stay still on the page and that, after staring at the page for about ten minutes, I was still on the first sentence of a story and that sentence made no sense.  It was then that I realised that the pain medication also rendered my brain rather diminished. I had lost the ability to even pretend to be deep. Lucky for me, I have friends who had foreseen my diminished state. They arrived with piles of celebrity rags - full of pictures and very few and very short words. I was able to spend my days sitting in a chair, bathed in sunlight from the massive window in my room, paging through magazine after magazine. I was asked to wonder "who wore it best" and challenged to "get that bikini bod" even though I do not have millions of dollars and trainers at my beck and call. Even with my half functioning brain, I was sure that my brain got even smaller.

During the week I was sitting around, it was two days before I was even allowed to drink a sip of water. I then spent another three days being given only clear liquids to consume. Toward the end of my stay I graduated to mashed potato and dry grilled fish (party time!). It was not so terrible as pain in my stomach kept my appetite at bay. I was also staying in a ward for people with stomach issues so there was very little food going around and none of it was appetising.

Half way through my stay I received a visitor. She sat down to chat and said, "I brought you something to read," and pulled out a magazine. I looked at the cover "FOOD & WINE". How did that happen? Was she walking around the bookstore wondering - hmmm... what do you give the person who cannot eat or drink most things? Oh, I know, the dream of food. Show her the life she cannot have. I mean, she has been paging through a bunch of magazines where people are in dresses that cost her annual salary so this is along the same lines, right? Right?