Carmen slept in the bed last night, head nestled against my ribs. That’s okay, I wanted to tell her. I missed her last night, too, even though she maintained contact with my legs or feet the entire night. But the concept of her being in a separate bed–no matter that it was connected to mine–well, it reminded me she’s not always going to be around to sing moo songs at bedtime.

She is sleeping right now with a book about native plants. She’s lost interest in her remote control, and is only moderately interested in her telephone. She has little to no interest in her dolls. But my books, she is happy to sleep with. In the past week she’s slept with a book on brain injuries, a Frontier Wholesale co-op catalog, and now the native plants book, a few hundred pages thick. Carmen flipped through it, but prefered to snuggle with it. The other books, being few pages, she preferred to sleep on directly.

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I’ve slept with a book before, but normally because I was reading it.

I recently found out that we need to add Larry Dierker to the list of people who have dealt with an AVM. His was discovered after he had a seizure in the dugout. I have good company with this AVM adventure.

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I’ve replayed in my mind, over and over, what I remember of my days in the ICU. I especially have tried to remember waking up after the surgery; the lights, suturing the incision from the shunt, removing the intubation. The memory is foggy, like half a dream, and I’m not sure how much to trust it.

I am certain that when I opened my eyes, I heard the resident, my former classmate and now my doctor, talking softly and cheerfully. I felt the hard plastic endotracheal tube in my mouth. Somebody started talking again, and I was aware of Matt in the room. I think he was saying something. I looked down and could see the tube rise out of my mouth. Somewhere, sometime I felt like I had to say something to Matt. With clumsy fingers, I spelled out “SHUT UP.”

“Shut up”?

For a little while I wasn’t sure if I really said that. But the other day, Matt ensured me that my memory was accurate.

Some romantic I am.

I think I was trying to say something like, “I’m sorry, I have this plastic bit down my throat and I’ve a bit of a headache, but hey, I’m fine, thanks, I’ll talk to you in a bit.” But grasping for words, floating in an anesthesia fog, and on the verge of gagging, “shut up” was all I could manage.

I don’t think movies have scenes like that.

I feel a little bad about it. Matt says it doesn’t bother him that I didn’t say something kinder or more loving or sentimentally inspired. That’s probably the right thing to do. In fact, I think I remember he laughed at it. Still, I feel a little bit bad.