Pain can be so intense it supersedes visual metaphor. White hot bursts; spiky gold flashes like lightning; steady red thumps, these familiar descriptions fail to compare to the screaming that your body makes as it starts to realize how much of itself is missing or has been replaced by metal. Pain doesn’t need to breathe. Its screaming is incessant. On an exceptionally bad night I could hear stitches stretching, or the sound of my bones pushing their way through torn muscle to rejoin fractured ends; the screws in my body squeaked as they turned in the wood of my bones. On quieter nights the sound of blood being pumped through recently torn sutures would lull me to sleep like ocean waves. If not there was always more morphine. I left DGH on July …show more content…
I did what I wanted, when I wanted, just as I had since making the decision to do so back in high school. Being an adult just gave carte blanche to behave as juvenile as I desired. I was paying the consequences for being in a hurry to get from one good time to the next. It would take a couple more parties for me to figure that out. In my last hours at Denver General, the irascible Dr. Ferrari brought a group of interns to the foot of my bed and told them “We’ve done all we can do for this one. He’s either going to get it, or we’ll see him again.” I could barely sit up in bed. It hurt me to breathe the words “You won’t see me like this again. I get it.” I didn’t know it at the time but I was lying to Dr. Ferrari. It would be quite some time before I figured out what it was. It’s been nearly ten years since I ran that stop sign. Even after learning to throw a baseball left-handed and earning my Master of Fine Arts degree, I’m still not sure if I know what Dr. Ferrari meant on that day. I do know, however, that if it were not for the selfless efforts of countless people that I will neither never meet nor have ever personally thanked, I would not be here still trying to figure out what it