Betrayal

Betrayal
at the worst of time
when time was almost
almost mine,
then gone my foundations,
my support
the very pegs I stand on,
and all thereafter
belongs to others.

The one who once taught concepts of science
now struggles to convince
of the ability to void unassisted
and to claw back accustomed decencies
one-by-one.

My day is now satisfactory
in sitting up for lunch
and working morning sudoku
before sleep closes in.

MMG

Accomodations

I have watched over the years as my physical condition has deteriorated from "baseline" to that not far removed from a chunk of firewood. But the worse my condition got, the more I compensated for it, both physically, with the addition of more appliances, and emotionally, by selling myself on the fact that a sedentary lifestyle was an acceptable one, and more canes, wheelchairs, and model airplanes would be virtually unnoticed.

I even saw it as a badge of honor to hobble down the hall at work on two canes; at least I was at work, and not sitting back in an old RV, living on meager disability payments while forced into a life of minimal activity certain to insure, if not outright cause, my own early demise.

Then suddenly, as if turning a key, I could not make my legs work anymore. Almost as if dragged into a tornado, before I could recognize what was happening to me I was whisked off to a hospital, then transported in the middle of the night to a big university hospital in Gainesville, three hours away to sit stripped of both accommodations and defenses in the glare of the brightest medical lights in the area.

Peeking into my back, probing my body, outlining individual nerve paths, these lights came together, glared down upon me, and found:

nothing.

At least nothing that can be remedied with a surgeon's blade. So I am back to where I began, 22 years ago, a soul with a degenerating spine, one that I know one day would let me down. We didn't know how long it would take, or how severe the impact; now maybe we know...