The Hospital Diaries - Verse 2

News From the Home Front

How about this for exciting? You’re sharing your intensive care with a drug runner. Imagine, if you will, you are not lying in state, an eighty-year-old man who elected to have a nasty aneurysm repaired, but a twenty-five-year old man, shot in the back while fleeing border patrol agents on an ATV. Now, I know you have walked the straight and narrow. But, drug running is lucrative. Meet a guy in a parked car, a gin joint, maybe on a park bench. Hold the newspaper in front of your face while slipping into your pocket the directions to the abandoned barn where the drugs are bound and packed for shipping. You won’t be walking into the bar guns slinging. You won’t be sitting in a beige surgeon’s office discussing renal failure, nursing homes, living wills, survival rates. You’ll be free-wheeling across farmer’s fields, three hockey duffle bags strapped to the back of your machine, counting up in your head the ways you’ll spend your booty. Pirate. Mule. Bandito. Beats counting sheep. Counting the days, how many is it now? Where am I? Untie my hands. There’s one thing you have in common. You and the fleeing drug suspect. Caught by surgeon’s hands. Wrists bound in soft white wraps. Hey! How about this for exciting? The nurse just untied your restraints. John Wayne, can you hear me?