It’s been a week since I’ve been back from Midwestuary, a conference in the suburbs of Chicago with Elizabeth Oldfield and Rod Dreher (I hear they have nice posts about it), and I sound ridiculous.

I had already cancelled a blossom of Midwestuary, a recording with John Heers for his Heavy Things Lightly - who’s most popular video oddly is not Tucker Carlson’s demon attack. I told him I didn’t want to record blowing snot bubbles. And then, yesterday morning, I apparently coughed hard enough to blow out something in my throat. When you do that, air apparently goes into the cells in your throat causing them to swell. It hurts to swallow, but in a way that feels like someone is choking you.

I took a nap after making the announcement video, and woke to a message from a friend that suggested I might have the lung-collapse. He had been through a few, and the sound of my voice suggested to him I might be having the same. He encouraged me to go to the ER.

As someone without insurance, you sort of just operate knowing if something bad happens you’ll just have to die and just keep rolling forward. Unfortunately, just because something medical happens doesn’t mean you’re going to die. A lot of times it just means you’ll suffer and maybe get maimed.

I ended up going to the Urgent Care first. ER bills are notoriously ridiculous, and the Urgent Care will at least get you x-rayed. Here, that’s $175. The x-ray didn’t show any pneumothorax (lung collapse and friends) but 3 hours deep the 'Nurse Practitioner’ told me to go to the ER for a throat CT. They don’t have the big fancy CT machines at Urgent Care.

The way the fancy machines work is that the hospital buys them for hundreds of thousands of dollars, then hopes to run enough tests at thousands of dollars to pay for the machine and start making money. After about 90 minutes in the waiting room they take me for the throat CT and inject me with some ‘contrast’. About 90 minutes later the ER doc comes in and talks about it with me.

He says they see the air in my throat, which could mean a small tear in or around my larynx, or something down below the throat. The chest x-ray didn’t show it enough, so let’s do a chest CT - cause the if the hole is down in the esophagus or something, sepsis and you die, basically. He assured me, however, that he gets paid by the hour and wasn’t earning a commission bonus.

Ninety minutes later he gives me the good news that the chest CT just showed a little pneumonia down in the bottom of my lungs and no sign of a tear that would have had him air-flighting me to OKC for a surgery. He pushed some IV medications to go along with the $900 bag of salt-water they already put in my veins.

In between the Urgent Care and the ER, I stopped by the house and fed the cats and put the dog outside. While I was there in the ER, two rooms down from where Gramma was before they did her the favor of giving her a room upstairs to die in (instead of back to the nursing home), I thought a lot about how alone I am. I thought about how screwed the animals would be if I didn’t make it back to the house.

There’s a high school friend that moved back to town earlier this year, and a guy I played D&D with a few years back I might be able to get ahold of through Facebook, but despite the fact my mom and I have been in this town for around 35 years, I don’t have any active relationships here (not even with my offspring).

This is Authenticity? I don’t want to be here. If I form relationships with people here, it would betray that truth interiorly… that would be trying to stay. So I rot here, alone, in a chair behind a desk on Sycamore, fantasizing of a sudden influx of money that will allow me to escape with these animals - but shit, Buddy’s been an outside and eventually outside/inside cat here his whole life. Sylvia and Penny too. So, some magic place where they can still go outside?

Ideally, honestly, someone would just step in and take over. “Hey, I can get you a really good deal on a house, but you have to take care of the cats that come with it.” Then maybe I can drive Kayfabe further north and find him a family to live with. Then what?

Probably Florida, to be there for my mom as she ages out - as she’s out there doing it mostly alone as I rot away here. After that, I’d like to spend the days I have left waking up somewhere there are trees.