Life After My Near-Death Experience

This weekend I sat down to clip my fingernails and have a shave. It’s been a month since I bothered. My first evening back from medical care, when I had six weeks of growth to get rid of, I sat down and got to it. Sorting out nails and stubble had seemed like a big deal when I was in my hospital bed and counting the days to freedom. But now, with my apartment around me and my life back in hand, I find I don’t care. Today I finally took action because of circumstances. One circumstance: I thought I might go to a coffee shop and hang out, my nails possibly in view of the staff and fellow customers. The other: the shag on my throat had grown thick and brambly enough to be a nuisance. So I shaved and clipped, first thing out of bed while I looked at Twitter and Bluesky. I hope I’ll stay on top of the situation, but let’s not be overoptimistic. I never did get to the coffee shop, nor did I clean my bathroom (that had been my secondary project).

The remarkable thing is that two months ago I almost died and now I’m more blasé than ever. I’m not even depressed; that would be too much trouble. I do my exercises and then figure that’s it for effort and accomplishment. Admittedly the exercises take a few hours. Stretches, qi gong, lunges, other leg work, TheraBand pulls—on Friday a hinge came off my bathroom door in mid-pull. Physically I’m rebuilding and now I can manage stairs and run errands, even walk for an hour now and then. But before the pneumonia got me, before the weeks of lying there with anesthesia in my system and tubes down my throat, I also did my exercises and I occasionally managed some other sort of work. Now… no. I read very early Wodehouse, things he did when Taft was president and Bertie and Jeeves hadn’t come along, and I watch Family Guy clips on YouTube.

I had a follow-up appointment at the hospital last week. It’s a gleaming ocean liner of an institution, a giant place that manages to be agreeable and invigorating instead of overwhelming. Busy feet taking people here and there, trim young medical residents asking me questions about my health—I knew I’d miss it. Of course, I knew the same thing about the physical rehab center, a much scrappier place, where I spent 10 days after the big hospital was done with me. My life at home is dull and always has been. Sit in your apartment and exercise and read and occasionally write, and you’ll start missing any source of incident and company. That’s so even if the company is the rehab place’s elderly patients and overworked staff, and the incidents frequently involve your roommates’ bowel crises.

Now my life is even duller than usual. My longstanding makework projects (notes for an endless novel, rewriting a lousy story by Honoré de Balzac, finishing an essay on Jay Leno versus Conan O’Brien) have to sit while I read little books about funny Edwardian doings. Lying unconscious and struggling not to die did nothing to make me square up and embrace life. Instead I live out the same tradeoff I’ve experienced since I was eight. Left to myself I hide and vegetate; thrown into the world I have a lot more to experience, but it goes against my nature and I want to get away. Because even though I knew I’d miss my days at the hospital and the rehab center, I also knew I didn’t want to stay. Such is the set-up of my personality. There’s a cure for pneumonia, if you’re lucky, but there’s no cure for who I am. I’m just glad my beard’s gone, and maybe tomorrow I’ll go to the coffeeshop.