Freedom

 I took the train into the city on two consecutive days last week for follow-up visits. On Tuesday I saw the first doctor who cut out a large chunk of my right pelvis six weeks ago. He assured me that the continuing pain was to be expected. On Wednesday I saw the doctor who closed the incision, which is over two feet long. He checked the raw open sore I have on a part of the incision where skin didn't get an adequate blood supply for a few days and died.

The best part of that visit was having the tube that went into the operation site removed. The tube went to a silicon bulb you squeeze and then close with a little plug on the top so there's constant suction drawing out a reddish liquid that smells so bad that I'll tell you now if you ever have one of these don't smell it. Those bulbs are a nuisance and they make you feel like more of an invalid than you are. I don't see how people with colostomy bags can stand it. If you know anyone who has those, be kind to them.

I knew the amount of the fluid I'd been measuring over the past three weeks had dropped enough that the bulb could be removed. The doctor snipped the stitch that had held the tube to my body (see previous post) and said he was ready to pull, was I? I paraphrased a line from a Seinfeld episode: "Pull that tube like you're starting a lawn mower." (That line didn't seem that funny to me at first but over time it's become funnier. In the show, Elaine says it about a hypothetical cord leading to machines keeping Kramer alive but in a permanent vegetative state: "Yank it like you're starting a mower.")

A week ago, September 21, would have been my father's one hundredth birthday. He died in 2011, age ninety-one. I'd pictured that my two brothers and I would get together to commemorate the day, share a good meal and fond memories, raise a glass in his honor, that sort of thing. A solemn celebration held by three men in their sixties. It didn't happen because of the pandemic, but I doubt it would have happened anyway. We get along decently, but we're not the type. Instead, I found some old photos of my father—his name was Jack—that none of us had seen, scanned them and emailed them to my brothers. My father grew up fairly poor in West Philadelphia. He had relatives who farmed about two hours from the city and he would sometimes spend weekends there when he was a child. This picture is of him during one of those visits.