If you ever have to go to the emergency room, don’t forget to bring a book. It will distract you from Larry King in the waiting room and all the people he has on to yell at each other about Sarah Palin. It will give you something to do besides worry as you wait in the examination room and feel the blood flow out of you. It will keep you company as you stay awake all through the night waiting for someone who can fix you.

Dressed, you walk back down the hall, dazed a little with the impersonal, helpful violence that’s just been done to you. You remember now that someone online suggested taking ibuprofen before the appointment and wish you’d remembered earlier.

I also go outside because of the unusual landscaping at our building. It is a strange blend of carefully manicured lawn and garden mixed with unmown native prairie grass. The building and the landscaping include large parking lots mixed in with natural drainage and what otherwise would be considered weeds in an urban landscape. In this case, it was designed to slow the flow of water towards the river.

I responded, “At one time my pride would have directed me to beg off and say, ‘Thank you for the offer, but I can’t accept charity.’ In this case, I am in a position that doesn’t give me the opportunity to stand on pride.” And I can’t, honestly. If it were just me, and if no one else depended on me, then I would be in a position to refuse. If not for those who depend on me to provide health insurance, etc., I could have declined a generous offer.

When we express some of our pain from past experiences, intermixed with excitement, look for the brush strokes that each of us uses to express ourselves in our separate posts. When Greg or Stephanie edit my posts, they don’t remove my brush strokes. In those brush strokes, I often reveal either unwittingly or purposely what I am dealing with and it is often my only way of getting certain things out, if only obliquely, because I don’t have someone close that I trust these days.