On the seventh day, he protested

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

NEW YEAR’S DAY and Y’Boy there by he one, watching out over the cane fields. Y’Boy wish he could be there in the cane, sweating up he favourite hill.

But Y’Boy could barely make it from the bed to the bathroom sometimes. Y’Boy whole life now come down to the TV and what he could find on it to distance himself from the roughest part of he life, ever. In the last three-four weeks, Y’Boy come to understand that major surgery might be life-saving in the long run but it is far from life-enhancing in the short. Y’Boy chuckling to heself, understanding that the parts of his body that aching him so hard with pain is exactly the parts that woulda kill him if they wasn’t removed.

Y’Boy chest and torso looking like a road map. All kinda lines, major road and minor road, little dotted cart road right down he belly, where the surgeons went een. Y’Boy can’t see he back excepting in the mirror and in pictures taken for the surgeons but the pain in he shoulder blade would pinpoint the cut in his back where they went in for the tumour in his oesophagus. And the pain in he side more accurate than a Google Maps location to show where they went een to deflate Y’Boy right lung.

Since Christmas Eve, Y’Boy ent gone for a walk. He who was pushing heself to add 500 steps to the walk everyday now setting a timer on his watch to stand up for five minutes at a time. This major surgery thing ent easy.

And Y’Boy footy well know that he have things relatively easy. The surgery that giving him the best chance of good recovery so advanced from the barber surgeon days, is hard to comprehend in even layman’s terms. What surgeons can do now is so much more than nailing a flattened shilling to a skull wound.

When Y’Boy did wake up in the ICU, he get the shock of his life. He look down at heself, there, in a bed, with 14 plastic tubes running into or out of him, and he pin down in the centre of the bed by the catheter, like a frog splay out on a O’Level biology lab counter, tacked down with brass pins, which Y’Boy-self did dissect in CIC in 1974.

Y’Boy know, too, that his pain levels is joke, compared to what a couple of he own pardners going through. One pardner get seven weeks intense treatment, 42 days straight, five days radiation, one day chemo, one day off to pass out and catch heself for the next week. Y’Boy own cancer ward cubicle mate, the Great Dane, three times get run back from the ward becaw he platelets and them wasn’t sufficient.

Y’Boy feel he ent have no right, in these circumstances, to complain.

But is only manners having him biting he tongue.

Hear nuh, if, tomorrow morning, somebody give you a choice of major surgery or a year in prison, ask about the prison conditions. If is one of them European setup, where you have your own TV in an en suite cell and it have billiards room and gym, take the jail, yes. You go be out faster and you would have less pain, even if you catch a beating inside.

And Y’Boy mind run back to waking up in the ICU, so helpless, everything hurting, nothing feeling good or right. Two days in there, nothing to drink becaw what left of his stomach join up to what left of his gullet and they can’t put no strain on the link, should in case it break and all fall down.

A week in a hospital bed, unable to move, so many thing tied to him, Y’Boy just drifting out of sleep into stupor. Y’Boy nearly went mental.

And, in that bed, Y’Boy shudder to think what it must be like to be in a Trinidad jail, 13 men in a space for one, a bucket in a corner, most brutal animal in the pen, top dog.

A deep breath send Y’Boy coughing, which does scare him, becaw it could mean vomiting the last food he eat.

But, with them Trinidad jail thoughts, Y’Boy have a better understanding of his plight.

And his incredible good luck.

BC Pires is on the slow road to Destination Recovery. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com