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Were still here

Children of London after an attack by German Bombers in 1940.

1978. That was the year I experienced the possibility of my death for the first time.

I was 17.

The week it happened started innocently enough. The big task for the week was to help my father, who was an upholsterer, move a very heavy cast iron framed hideabed down a three-story apartment building stairwell. I told him just how much I didn’t want to do it in my whiny pimple faced adolescent way and he responded in exactly the way that fathers of teenage smartasses often respond.

He smacked me open handed in the back of my head and reminded me with his other hand – his pointy finger lined up an inch from my nose - that what I wanted to do and not do at any given time wasn’t all that important to him. I would be there on Saturday to help with the damn hideabed, “come hell or high water”.

And that was that.

I whined about it all week long. He just smiled and said “ bitch about it all you want kiddo, the works still gonna be there when you are done”.

Friday night came and I was out of the house like a shot to be with my friends. Shakeys Pizza on Auburn Blvd was the place to be and we were there. They don’t make places like Shakeys anymore. Large wooden picnic tables for “family” seating. Dark cavern like lighting. Shakeys didn’t offer fancy “vegetarian pizzas”, but lots of meat, lots of cheese pizzas cooked on slabs of stone.

I got home about 11:30 and went promptly to bed. About an hour later I woke up with what I thought was a stomach ache. It got worse. I started vomiting and unlike most times when I threw up I didn’t feel better afterwards. Then the pain started. I felt like I had a red hot railroad spike being hammered into my side.

I, being a 17 year old dork assumed that this was just “food poisoning”. Not wanting to incur the wrath of my parents, I stayed in my room and tried to sleep it off.

It didn’t work. I didn’t get any sleep and the pain got steadily worse. Then I began to sweat. In fact, I started to sweat like a lawn sprinkler.

Then at 7:00 am on the nose, my father knocked on the door and shouted “ TIME TO GO KIDDO”.

With all the activity overnight I had forgotten about the hideabed, but he hadn’t. I stood up from the bed and discovered something else; I couldn’t stand up straight. The pain had me hunched over and even that angle hurt like hell. I walked across the room, reached for the doorknob and opened the door to see the old man standing cross armed in the hallway. I started to tell him how I was feelling and he stopped me before the first word came out of my mouth.

“Don’t even think for one second you are going to play some horseshit “I’m sick” crap on me!, now you get you ass together and get out in the truck NOW!” The old man wasn’t having any of it.

I was completely flustered. I had no idea what to do, here I was in genuine pain, crumpled over and sweating like I was in a sauna and I couldn’t get a word out of my mouth in self defense. And yet with all of this, I just figured that it would go away, that it was gas, indigestion, food poisoning or something like that. Something simple, everybody goes through this sort of thing, right?

I got into the truck and closed the door and the old man started in on a lecture about the “value of work” only I didn’t hear it, not because I had tuned him out but because my ears had started to ring, only the ringing was so loud I couldn’t hear anything. I was also dizzy and started to wonder if I was going to pass out. I now developed a new symptom. I started shaking, like I was freezing, only I was anything but freezing.

As we were driving down the street, as my dad was banging on the steering wheel to make a point in his lecture from the pulpit of the truck cab, I looked over at him and he looked back at me and in mid sentence, mid word he just stopped talking. He just looked at me and then sort of squinted his eyes, half believing what he saw on the other side of the cab.

“Didn’t you just put that shirt on?”

I just shook my head “Yeah”. It was all I could do.

“Why are you sweating like that?”

I responded “Yahshmdhhahhnnyaaa”

I was trying to say “ I don’t know”, but the shaking had started to effect my ability to talk. I just shook my head in a circle instead.

We pulled into the shop, and he opened the doors and I got out of the truck walked in my crumpled over state. He asked me to lay down on the cutting table. I did, but I could not uncurl my legs as they had gone and drawn up into my chest, fetal like. He lifted my shirt and looked the area that I indicated was causing the problem. He touched my side and the closer he got to the beltline the more I screamed, then he noticed something I couldn’t see but changed his whole demeanor.

He picked me up and loaded me in the truck. I was no longer capable of walking or talking.

“Hold on kid, we’ll get you taken care of”

I don’t remember the drive to the hospital. I do remember getting laid out on a gurney and getting pushed into the emergency room and getting an immediate reaction from the attending nurse that told me that whatever this was, it wasn’t food poisoning.

I remember the doors getting banged open by the gurney as they pushed me through the hospital and thinking I was going to get in trouble for the damage I was doing to the paint on the doors. You think weird things like that when you’re in a lot of pain.

Then I left the world for a little while.

It wasn’t food poisoning. It wasn’t gas or indigestion.

My appendix had burst during the night, and I was now bleeding internally.
It was a very bad break that was causing all sorts of other problems.

So I was gone for a little while. Two days later, I awoke in a hospital room to find half a dozen tubes in my arms, up my nose and inserted into my urethra. I didn’t care because I no longer felt like I had a hot railroad spike being hammered into my abdomen like I did before I passed out.

My nurse stopped by when she noted that my eyes were open and said something I never forgot. “Hey, look at that, you’re still here!” and she just smiled. I wondered where it was that I went. I still had no idea what had happened to me.

My parents came in and explained the whole thing. The appendix, a little tiny thing really had at first become inflamed, had expanded and had burst like a little toy balloon, and when it went finally blew, it caused all sorts of other problems. I had lost some blood, I had to stay in the hospital while they watched me, but I would probably be fine.

I told my dad that I was sorry I couldn’t move the hideabed and he just started to cry.

After a couple more lost days, I started to sit up and feel better, then I wanted to get out of the hospital. I had to start walking, but that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The surgery had taken its toll on my abdomen muscles and to my surprise they have a big impact on your ability to walk.

At first, it was a big deal just to stand up. Then it was a big deal to walk across the room. After another week of observing me for fever or changes that would indicate some sort of infection, they decided to let me go home. I was glad they did; hospitals are noisy confusing places that are not really suited for just laying around convalescing which I think was actually their original purpose.

So, I went home and sat around instead. My folks went to work so I had the house to myself. I spent most of my time just learning to walk again. Step by step I gained more endurance until at last, I could walk down the street to school. I hated school but I loved my friends. I hated school, but hated being home even more.

My doctor called me about a month later just to see how things were going and I answered off the cuff with a phrase I would start to use more often in my life, something the nurse had taught me:

“Well, I’m still here!”

I nearly died. It wasn’t the first time or the last time. I managed to survive and to go on to tell the tale and that was all that mattered. I survived to see my high school graduation. I survived to see college, my first jobs in a line of many in a career lifetime. I survived to go on to get married and have kids, climb mountains, fly aircraft. Not everyone did make it, before I graduated high school; five kids from my class had died while we were in high school. Drowning, car accidents, disease; they had all taken their toll on the class of 1979. Every yearbook had at least one kid who didn’t make it.

Five years later, my younger sister would become one of those kids, a victim of a car accident, an event that still haunts the soul of my mother and bothered my father with undeserved guilt until the day he died.

But I was and still am “here” and I am grateful for every moment of my life since.

Five years ago, I awoke and saw something I thought I would never see. My country and the world itself were brought face to face with real evil. The stench of the Islamic revolution which started while I was in High School had now reached out and killed people in Manhattan. The first year of the war was the worst. None of us had any idea what was going to happen next. We had no idea if the envelopes that came in the mail were trying to kill us or to what lengths the monsters would go to try to kill us the next day. Would they get the bomb, did they have the bomb, were they already here with the bomb?

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I awoke and said

“Well, were still here!”

In the days right after 9/11/2001, I wasn’t sure we would be. The real fighting war we spent the entire cold war successfully avoiding was now here, brought right to us. We didn’t have to go out and find it; it found us.

We are still here. In the past five years, we’ve endured real threats and real attacks and we’ve survived. We held an election in New York City that very year. We held congressional elections the next year, and two years after that, we held a presidential election. In the days after 9/11/2001, we all assumed that we might not be able to do that anymore.

We are still here, and our President is still criticized by citizens around the world. Last I checked, most of the Presidents critics don’t spend their nights worried that the FBI will carry them away in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Such is life in “fascist Amerikkka” I guess. In the days right after 9./11 people weren’t entirely sure that they would have that right anymore.

We are still here, yet there are no concentration camps, no lynching of Arabs living in America, no American “Krystalnacht” of Islamic Mosques. Of course, every newspaper brings out the template every week that says “Arab community fears backlash” but as of this year, there is no backlash, probably never will be.

We are still here, having football, baseball, basketball and Hockey games and whole Olympic events with thousands of fans sitting in the stands. Week after week in stadiums across America, terror targets of large civilian populations are presented to the enemy with no effect. No Islamic blubberhead is going to keep us from the OSU-Texas game.

We are still here. We are still building skyscrapers. We are still living in cities. The Sears Tower and the Empire State building still have people going to work every day. Airlines still fly people from place to place. We are still building hospitals, schools, factories, libraries, cafeterias all around the world, including lands that were formerly under the control of the Taliban.

We are still here. Our currency is still worth something. Our economy is at its best. Our unemployment is at such a low level, that almost no one today remembers what unemployment rates look like in real recession. Yet, we are at war. There is no Draft and the ranks are still filled with volunteers.

We are still here. We are still going into space, building space stations and carrying international crews and furthering the world of science by our works. Our citizens are so industrious that they are now making their own spacecraft. Five years ago that was still considered fantasy, but five years later it is reality.

We are still here, but the dream of a new caliphate is surely dying. Five years later, Osama and is gang of murdering thugs have lost every attempt to stop the cause of freedom. Elections have been held throughout the middle east and at each election, Al queda has failed, let me repeat that – FAILED to do anything to stop the expression of citizenship by free people. Even those people who that hate us, like elections.

We are still here, and while Osama still is as well, he has done nothing in five years to help his fellow Muslim in a time of need. While Osama sat on his haunches in a cave, our Navy fed, clothed and housed thousands of Muslims who were victims of the Tsunami. To his eternal shame, the Muslims of Banda Aceh were grateful for our help.

We are still here, but now Saddam awaits his fate in jail being forced to watch American movies of his character engaging in sodomy with the devil himself, who is portrayed somewhat sympathetically to his own. His sons are now rotting in the hell they most certainly deserve thanks to the 101st Airborne. Five years ago, Saddam was padding the payroll of the UN and his sons were driving the streets of Baghdad pointing out to their driver which of the women on the street were to be their plaything for the evening, to be discarded in the gutter later the next day (if they were lucky). Prisons around Iraq filled with innocents, while its neighboring countries wondered what the crazy clan of maniacs would do next. Five years ago, the graves of the Kurds gassed by his cousin “Chemical Ali” cried out for justice. Five years later, justice is doing its work in a Baghdad court.

When my appendix burst, I was taught the lesson that there are no guarantees in life. You might be here one day and gone the next. Be grateful for the time you have and don’t waste it or whine about what you may or may not have. You are still here, and that’s enough.

You’re still here! Recognize that for what it is, nothing less than a miracle.

And never forget that there are 3,000 people who aren’t because of what happened that day.

Posted @ September 11, 2006 02:19 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: rocketsbrain at September 11, 2006 06:27 PM