I'm Not Dead... Yet! (27 page)

“Hello, Mr. Benson. How do you feel?”

‘How do you think?’ I thought. “Thirsty…” I managed to say.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Benson, you cannot drink anything.”

‘Then why did you ask me?’ I thought.

“Okay,” I said.

“Soon we’ll be able to give you some ice chips to suck on, but until then, no liquids. We don’t want to throw up and choke on our own vomit, do we?”

It was ‘our’ vomit? I actually said “No.” Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I could.

“The pain…” I managed to say.

“Yes. It hurts, doesn’t it? That’s perfectly normal. We’ll give you some pain medication.”

“No!” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t want any.”

Given her reaction, this was a new concept. I foolishly thought pain medication would destroy my ability to stop this explosion of hurt that lived in my chest. I could and would tough it out.

“You’re going to need pain medication in order to heal, Mr. Benson.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” the nurse volleyed. “Your body must relax to heal, and the only way your body can relax is with pain medication. The human body is a remarkable machine, Mr. Benson, and we have to give it every chance we can to help it mend itself. But you must listen to me and
do everything I say!
”

I was hurting like a victim in Peckinpah’s
Straw Dogs
, or for today’s audience,
Saw V
.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t believe in pain medication. I can make it through this without any chemicals.”

I opined that taking pain medication would turn me into a fun-house tabloid story, mimicking so many other young actors who ended up addicted to drugs, and
idiotically,
I was convinced that taking pain medication for open-heart surgery would send me down the path of pop-culture self-destruction. I can’t blame the anesthesia for that insane clunker attitude. I really was
ignorant
and scared out of my mind that drugs were like the flu. You could
catch
it. I had to do anything and everything I could—not to catch ‘the drugs.’

Soon they had Karla by my bed. I could see better and I could smell her approaching. She had the most distinct smell. I can only quantify it with a non sequitur: she smelled
perfect
.

“Robby, darling, you must take pain medication. There is no reason for you to feel this much pain.”

“I can’t.”

“Sweetheart, you’re not a bad person for taking pain medication after open-heart surgery.”

“I am.”

“You’re not!”

“To me, I am.”

“To me, you’re not.” She could be strong for such a gracefully compassionate soul mate. “Do this for me, if you won’t do it for yourself.”

I almost started to cry. “I’ll be a drug addict.”

“You’re not a drug addict for taking pain medicine after open-heart surgery, honey.”

“To me, I am.

“To me, you’re not!”

I was really upsetting her. And the whole point of
“Trick or Treat!”
and
not taking pain medication
, and everything else I was going to do, was to
prove
‘I was okay.’ More than okay; I wanted to sit up and start walking before anyone—in the entire history of open-heart surgery on the planet we call Earth!

“Do it for me, Robby,” Karla whispered in my ear.

Oh, this was a set-up.

She may be blurry, but I can visualize ‘other things’ too…

She was my Goddess. I lived life for her and her alone! Nothing on the planet mattered more—and then the nurse held up a chart that was so fuzzy, it could’ve been the original Magna Carta.

Instead it wa
s a chart with
faces
, smiling and frowning. And next to the faces were num
bers: 1-10. The number ‘1’ meant I had no pain; ‘10’ meant I hurt worse than castration.

“What number are you?”

“I’m not a number,” I said. “I’m Robby. Robby the guy who doesn’t take drugs!”

“He can’t see the chart,” Karla explained patiently to the nurse. “He’s legally blind without his contacts.”

“Oh, why didn’t I know that?”

The nurse then continued in a tone that Nursery School teachers use on 4 year-olds. “If on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain in the universe, and one being the way you feel when you go to the beach, what number describes the pain you’re feeling now?”

“I hate the beach.”

“Robby,” Karla said, a bit stronger than usual. “Please tell her, darling.”

“I’m not going to tell her or else she’ll turn me into a ‘shrum’ addict.”

“A what?” the nurse asked.

“Shrum! Shrum! Or Heroin!”

Okay—I said some pretty stupid things when I was coming down from anesthesia. As stupid as this sounded, and as much as everyone thought it was triggered by the surgical ‘circumstances,’ it unfortunately was the way I honestly felt. I was misinformed to such an extent that fear had burrowed deep into my knee-jerk reflexology.

“Shrum!”

Every time I was around drugs in show business (a lot), the only way for me to avoid being party to the parties was to brainwash myself. I believed—unmetaphorically, with graphic pithiness—I’d be a drug addict if I even looked at drugs, let alone allowed them into my system, my surroundings, vicinity, environment, background, foreground... Do not cross the border of my circumscription! (I vowed to live in my own urban legend.)

“Sweetheart,” Karla whispered, “I’ve never asked you to do anything I knew was against your beliefs. I want you to take the pain medication. For me. For you. Do you understand?”

This was the biggest decision of my life. And because Karla asked me, the answer was easy.

“No.”

“What?”

“I’m kidding. Okay. Gimme the dope.”

I could barely make out the nurse shooting the ample hypodermic needle full of Lenny Bruce into the meat of my shoulder (remember, this was 1984; there wasn’t a little button to press for morphine yet.) They didn’t even give me the pain medication through the I.V. It went into the muscle like liquid lead. I began to wonder if I needed pain medication for the administration of pain medication.

Then it happened: