So It's Come To This

And too sorry for myself for tea

Last Friday at about 5:30 am I was loading the car to drive to the Cape. I was readying for dad’s visit the following day. He hasn’t been there in quite some time, and getting him to our house on the bay is important to do.

Everything’s expensive on Cape Cod, so I’d made Costco run for toilet paper, paper towels and other staples for the heroic construction guys resurrecting the Provincetown house. They’re living in our Wellfleet place while they do that, away from their families Monday through Friday, and I figure the least I can do is keep them supplied with paper goods and groceries while they sacrifice their time and home lives for me. There are some things one can never really repay.

I loaded the paper goods, food, dog, the stuff I’d taken from my fridge to feed me for the duration and my computer bag. I went back inside for one more once, just to grab my iced coffee and make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Sure enough, there was a paper grocery bag holding a few dog treats and some mail I’d meant to get to the day before, but would open when I got to the Cape.

I felt the muscle tear as I reached, a circular slash from scapula to breast bone, boomeranging back around to my neck.

“Well that’s not good,” I thought.

I tried to breathe in, but it hurt too much to do that fully.

“That’s worse,” I thought.

Still, I had the bag in my hand, all eighteen ounces of it. I locked up the house, put the bag in the car and drove south. During the drive I learned I could not cough, nor reach for the iced coffee I’d gone back in for. By the time I got to Wellfleet I could barely move.

I took Advil. I took Tylenol. I took the muscle relaxants they give me for migraines. Then I had a sour stomach, I was sleepy, and I could barely move.

So naturally the puppy started acting up, and continued to for, well, she hasn’t stopped yet. She chewed the couch slipcovers, the blankets and sheets on the bed, my shoes, which she’d pulled down from on top of a box while eating the cardboard of the box. She reached a dishrag on the counter “just out of reach” and ate part of that. She ate everything, in fact, except the multiple bully sticks, bones, toys, and antlers available for her amusement.

Then she started howling, something she doesn’t usually do, and at nothing I could ascertain.

Then she started scratching at the doors. All of them. My bedroom door. The bathroom door. Especially the door to go outside, which, if you recall, is something I’d normally encourage as her housetraining is precarious at best. But once outside she’d toilet only after a minimum half-mile walk. That may not sound too bad, but a half-mile walk with a beagle is at least twenty minutes long, and each step, each sudden stop, each out-of-nowhere bound or pull toward some chasm of doom off the side of the road sent searing, shooting pain through my torso.

I only started to cry when I realized I was too pathetically incapacitated to kill my own dog.

My neighbors lent me a heating pad. That helped some.

I texted my doctor.

“I think you need to euthanize me.”

“Again?” she wrote back.

“Yes, but this time I mean it.” I explained what had happened, and I saw the three dots on the text doing their little dance longer than they should have.

“Picking up a bag?” finally came through. “This type of injury often occurs after a hard hit. I don't suppose you were playing football just before you picked up the bag?”

I like my doctor, but I like her less now.

“This type of injury” is an intercostal muscle strain, and as someone who’s suffered broken ribs before, it’s amazingly close to that for being “not broken ribs.” It hurts to breathe, to cough, to sneeze, to move, and to sleep. Don’t worry about that, though - you won’t do much of it.

You will cough a lot, however.

“It hurts to cough, but that’s all I want to do. Can I get some cough medicine?”

“You need to take slow, deep breaths,” she wrote. You’re coughing because your breathing is too shallow ‘cause of the pain and the injury. You don’t want this to turn into pneumonia. Deep breaths.”

Deep breaths hurt, Doctor. Who gave you your medical license?

I’m also supposed to not lift things - like the crate I had to move six times a day for the psychotic dog, or the dog herself, who still can’t or won’t get into and out of a car, but weighs around thirty pounds.

“So how long does this last?” I asked, finally, after whining about her terrible advice.

Those damned dots again…

“Often only a few weeks. If it’s longer, come see me. It can take a few months, but there's treatment then.”

Only a few weeks?

A bag.

A fucking bag.

There’ll be no tea this week. It hurts to lift the kettle.

If you want me I’ll be over here reading the Medicare enrollment mail I obviously should have opened before I left.