“Is It Better to Burn Out Fast Than to Fade Away?”

Linear World Orders (A Punk Band)

Hi! Welcome to a new week Word Nerds and new friends.

SURPRISE! I am probably in the hospital right now or this week having surgery, but….

I wrote a LOT ahead of time to try to make this worth your while, worth your support, worth your time….So thank you, thank you, thank you!

Even if I’m in the hospital as you read this- I wanted to keep to my Every Weekday Writing promise here, so prepped this shiz ahead of time.

I have a big surprise planned here on Substack for my recovery time thereafter (which I’ll be sharing in a video next week!), and I hope it's a positive?

So that HUGE change in writing direction (just for a couple of weeks) will start next week and… I’m so so so so so nervous.

Anyways, after which, I’ll update on recovery and life and what’s happening now with all the surly synonyms you likely didn’t need.

See you soon. Thank you. And also…

THANK YOU!

“Are you going to give up on me?”

I don’t know why I found these words written in my phone at 2-something AM in the morning, while in the hospital for my spine before this-hospital (soon, if not now) for my stomach.

I’ll update on linear world orders soon (“Linear World Orders” would make a great name for a punk band)… But for now, know that I found these sibylline syllabic scribbles in my phone and have almost no recollection of writing them.

“Are you going to give up on me?” I wrote…

“I want to give up on me often … but I also have the data.”

I continued by writing about how recovering from a surgery where they enter through your throat feels a lot like Strep throat, and how my family was likely displeased with the fact it did not impact my voice this time whatsoever.

I’ve had a LOT of strep in my life.

It’s actually one of my body’s preferred infections and bacterias to take hold (as you’ve maybe heard me say many times before, if you’re kind enough to have read my rants in the past?), and I’m lucky it hasn’t been a more dangerous bug like those that lead to lung transplants and TV-movie plot-lines that always make it seem like a full-organ transplant is as easy as waking up with an oxygen cannula and a room full of waiting friends.

They rarely show the extubation. They don’t show the chest tubes or the hallucinogenic moments. It’s depicted like a quick bronchoscopy.

“I’m lucky,” I say on repeat, like a ditty so memorized I could begin to put a Sinatra spin on it soon enough, “CF mostly impacts my digestive system and then, sort of, my bones.. My lungs are doing well. I will probably never need a lung transplant.”

Because of this, even the labyrinthine version of my writing- found on phones at half-baked times of night- finds the luck in not being listed for anything akin.

“The 3 am blood draw feels lucky somehow,” I wrote… “The nurse who writes my med schedule on the board and then sticks to it all night long, nights in a row, every 2 hours - feels like the luckiest.

I open my eyes at 1 am and think I’m somewhere else and all I feel is a hot flood of pain. ‘I’m lucky,’ I think, writing this at 4 am in an empty room with my 15-year-old cherub sleepily in an uncomfortable chair at a right angle beside.”

(I got it wrong. Apparently this was all at 4 AM?”)

“I’m going to get the collar,” she’s been teasing me, as she sweeps in to hold my head still as I lay down, since I shouldn’t move it; No one asking her to help.

I’ve written about Dear Daughters alternatingly for as long as I remember and my limits on they’re being allowed near a hospital for too long, by my own ruling. But for now, in this moment, it’s a beautiful relief to have time to hangout with someone I love so much- no interruptions or work loads to be seen.

Even so, with each surgery… another looms beyond the bend.

“Okay so there is THIS surgery,” I was saying to my partner, who clocked out mentally around the 5-min-ramble mark, “Then, I have the ovarian cyst surgery… and hopefully soon because that sh*t is out of control.

Sometime this winter or fall, we get to take the bolt out of my back (pelvis). That will be amazing. And then…