Hi Jon,

Joseph Heller (Catch-22) wrote about his bout with Guillain-Barre.

Your friend suffered a lot more than Heller, and a lot more than I will with my mere limb fractures.

The opiates took care of my first two weeks after surgery.

After that, I didn't need those pain-killers.

So my enforced vacation hasn't been painful unless I move wrong--then my left leg or right elbow protest, and I stop.

My range-of-motion exercises are tedious, but don't hurt.

Even the dynamic splint that stretches and flexes my right arm is just uncomfortable, not painful.

After the first session, I forgot to take my precautionary tylenol, which shows how little I fear the splint.

Hell, I spent one session today chatting with my sister on my cell phone.

The same is true of rocking my right foot to make the needle on the scale bounce from 80 to 90 pounds while I perch on the edge of my bed for 6 minutes--it's tiresome and boring, but not painful.

In fact, I feel like a fraud when kindly friends and relatives praise what they mistakenly think is my hard work and suffering.

And this feeling gets worse when I roll past the neurological patients where I am.

I'm mostly sitting around and waiting for the screwed-together bones to grow solid again.

If this is a job, as you put it, it's featherbedding--I loll in bed, they hoist me into the electric wheelchair, I play on the internet, do some exercises, and put the dynamic splint on. When they ask about my pain level, I have to tell them zero.

***

In contrast, the Australian author Robert G. Barrett turned out the essay linked below about his awful medical struggles.

Christ, how he suffered!

Barrett wrote decidedly not-safe-for-work novels that ripped right along, mostly about Les Norton, a bouncer for an illegal Sydney casino. Barrett didn't worry much about plot or plausibility (I remember two nuclear bombs and more than a few supernatural deus ex machinas), but he had a cheerful vulgarity that made his books sell well in Australia.

The first five long paragraphs of his memoir below, "Bowling for Bukowski," taxi along gently as he explains that he's going to try to write like Bukowski, and then things take off with the opening line of his own not-safe-for-work story:

"The [censored] hit the fan for me in late 2008."

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SkXD2AfSZ_MK6DxYWxcNlBVYIS1Y0bBq/view?usp=sharing

(Google drive displays it as a text file in notepad, goofing up the apostrophes and quotation marks. As Barrett would say, I can't be arsed to fix them, since you can change to wordpad, which dsiplays the punctuation normally.)

(And no, I don't think that asparagus juice will cure anything--Barrettt was just understandably desperate.)

Anyway, re-reading Barrett's oddly hearty account of his misery reminded me just how lucky I am.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel