6:14 a.m. - Saturday, Apr. 05, 2003
Ms Leslie's head and coma
When I woke up, I felt like a Louisiana mud bug. One that had been pulled, bright red, from a pot of steaming crab boil, had its head pinched off, sucked clean and then screwed, stitched and taped back onto its limp and soggy body. Maybe it was just the drugs.

I also felt like one of those old corpses from a bad black and white horror movie. The ones with the rags tied around their heads to keep their jaws from falling off. Or open. Or who knows? Maybe they died from terminal gingivitis. Anyway, I felt that my head was wrapped �way too tight in one of those bandages. I could feel the blood sqinching painfully through every artery and vein in my head like water through a kinked garden hose. I couldn�t open my mouth and I wasn�t sure I even still had eyes, much less that I could open them or hope to see. Later I realized it wasn�t bandages at all. It was just my own formerly saggy skin and muscles pulled, trimmed and stapled so tight you could bounce a quarter off my cheeks.

I was aware of others in the room, talking to me too cheerfully and too loudly. I have not the slightest idea what they were saying. I only remember the sense of betrayal when I felt myself starting to vomit after all the promises that this time would be different: This time there would be more medicine and given sooner. I wondered, if I tricked myself into this position again, if they would tell me �third time�s a charm� or something equally as stupid. Then someone turned off the world again.

Don�t get me wrong. The care there is excellent. The nurses are great and, as I said before, so cute they make you wish you were a guy. But things are different in Thailand. They�re mostly just little girls, each one trained to do a specific task a specific way each time. Ms Mercury, for instance, would always be the one to lug this giant antique wood and glass barometer-looking thing into the room. The glass part being filled with a half-cup of mercury: she would use it in conjunction with a pressure cuff to measure my blood pressure. In the US, I think she might do five to seven years in a federal lock-up for even possessing that much mercury. God help the fish if she should ever drop it.

The point is, I laid on my hospital bed� made soft for me this time thank you Dr Kim�for I�m not sure how long, while the girls came and dutifully recorded my temperature and BP, adjusted my IV, and gosh� I hope�. Added pain meds to the dripping saline. In between, the quietly efficient girl from the kitchen would set a tray of food by my bed, only to return in what seemed like only a moment to retrieve it, untouched, and take it away. As I laid there with my eyes swollen shut, wondering if it was day or night and if day, which day, I slowly began to realize that I was alive and on my own. Each girl was doing her part perfectly, but none of those parts included actually checking to see if I was eating, or even breathing, come to think of it. If I wanted to live, I was going to have to capture something from that metal tray.

From the first, sleeping was never an option. Coma seemed to be fairly regular, but that�s a poor cousin to actual sleep. Anyway, I laid on my back, listening to the rushing blood and waiting for the sound of a food tray. When at long last it came, I was so relieved, I could feel myself sinking back into a kind of exhausted celebration. I fought it. I knew I had to act or the food would be gone before I could raise my hand to it.

I tried to raise my head. The first time was not a charm. Neither would be the third time. My head was a lump of concrete at the end of my neck. So I fwelt around on the tray until I found a small plate wrapped in plastic. I poked through the plastic with my finger to find underneath, a piece of dried american white bread. Good enough. I broke off a piece of that and poked it through lips I had to part with the fingers of my other hand. Victory.

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