Back Pain

 

While swimming at Dog Beach I threw my back out, wading ashore, I walk in pain.

I call 911 on my cell phone from the parking lot, when the first responders arrive I get in the back of the ambulance without assistance, laying on my back. 

When I reach Key West General Hospital the Er intern suggest I stay a night or 2. A nurse finds a vein in my left hand and inserts an IV, it's painless. Some people are freaked out by needles, but I didn’t flinch. 

My back problem was muscular, later, Don the bartender at the Hooch Bar on Duval asked me why I didn’t opt for back surgery and I say, 

Are you kidding Don? I wouldn’t let them touch my back with a scalpel. 

There are a number of types of back surgery—Foraminotomy, Discectomy, or disk replacement. Googling back surgery, I was surprised to see the operations are still commonly done today. 

As a kid in the 60s, it seemed like every man and his brother were getting their spinal cords operated on. 

Many doctors would recommend surgery whether the patient needed it or not, to make money— This a scam similar to the guy who goes house to house in the suburbs knocking on doors offering to tar driveways for a couple hundred bucks. If he gets a job he sprays on a coat of tar-colored paint in minutes, which is useless.

I requested a private room, willing to pay extra because the thought of being in a room with another patient who is shitting in a platinum bowl disgusts me. 

Once in my room laying in bed on my back, a shapely nurse comes in and I fantasize about putting my hand up her dress, but wouldn't dare.

She gives me 2 trigger point injections and 1 of morphine, the trigger point shots helped but the morphine was disappointing— I didn’t catch the train to junkville, but It relieved the pain. 

Getting shots of morphine called to mind William Burroughs's book Junky, these excerpts are priceless, 

When my wife saw I was getting the habit again, she did something she had never done before. I was cooking up a shot two days after I'd connected with Old Ike. My wife grabbed the spoon and threw the junk on the floor. I slapped her twice across the face and she threw herself on the bed, sobbing—

or,

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness—

The following day I ring the call button, the nurse walks in and  I say, 

I want the doctor to discharge me now!

I realized the stiff and thin plastic-covered mattress was spurring on my back and I needed a drink. No booze allowed in the hospital except in the doctor's lounge.

The cashier walks into my room. My bill is 2500 dollars for one night, I transfer the money via cell phone banking. 

It wasn’t worth the dough, the pharmacy gives me a bag of pills, outside on my way to the Hooch Bar on Duvall, I hand the meds to a bum sitting on the sidewalk. 

At the bar I order a boilermaker, drop a shot of whiskey into a mug of beer, and down it, ordering another. The booze relieves my back pain better than medication.

An old surfer with blond hair wearing a pair of Hawaiian shorts, who's shirtless sits 2 stools away from me and avows loudly, 

I’m Crazy Horse, the poet laureate of Florida. 

I ask him, 

have you published any books hoss? 

My work is in my head I do spontaneous recitation, 

I tell him, 

Oh yeah, that’s what I figured, 

Crazy Horse stands on his bar stool to recite a poem for the bums in the dark bar.

the moon yells to the sun, 

sun what do you see? 

i see mister moon

 firing the imaginations  

of earth dwellers to smooch

and fornicate in their chevys

on saturn nights hidden 

 on  hilltops with 

bushes and waving palms

Don the bartender tells Crazy Horse, 

shut the fuck up with the bullshit,  I’ll  buy you a drink, whataya have, 

I’ll have what that guy, pointing at Henry, is drinking, a boilermaker.

Crazy Horse downs the drink in one gulp, and Henry buys him 2 more, the poet knocks em back and staggers out of the Hooch Bar to talk to the moon.

 Crazy Horse helped me forget my back pain, he put on quite a show.