What Day Is It?

When I went into the hospital for my first round of chemotherapy, the nurse would ask me a few questions in the morning to test my cognitive faculties. Simple questions, like "What's your birthday?" or "What year is it?" or "What do you want to accomplish today?" or "What date is it?" All were fairly innocuous, but the last two of these troubled me.

The first, "What do you want to accomplish today?," bothered me--actually, almost totally so--due to my mother's intrusion. I took the question literally, and answered with something like, "Take a shower." She, however, extended its import to an obnoxious extent. "No--come on. You want to write. You have lots of things that you want to do." Thanks, Kreskin. You forgot "world peace" as a vapid aspiration. We were not in a beauty pageant. We were in the hospital, and I think the nurse's question applied mainly to the immediate future--as in, the next 24 hours, after which she'd ask me the same question again. I don't think I'll be able to win the Nobel Prize by then.

When the nurse asked me the date, I took a beat. Then I took another. I was actually perplexed. This was not like when I took the plastic peg test with the main nurse during the initial tests to ascertain whether or not I would be eligible, and became fixated on the sphygmomanometer and its humorously long name. This was not like that. I really didn't know the date. I could say that it was Tuesday, mainly because the duration of the stay was only overnight, and I remembered that the first day was a Monday. And I knew it was August, because that is the month of my grandmother's birthday and it hadn't come yet.

(Btw, she's 81 and just had open heart surgery for aortic stenosis and a few bypasses, and is more spry than most people I know. She also quit smoking, too, after approximately 50 years. Her verve both inspires me and pisses me off. At exactly three times my age, she makes me look like an enervated slug.)

The actual date was not something I'd had to consider for a long time. Even now, if I have to fill out a form, I normally wait for my mother to grab the board out of my hands. Not having to know the date is a fairly small reward I get for this, because in reality I have an incredibly difficult time writing anything manually (which sounds redundant, but isn't. I'm typing this, relatively easily, but cannot pick up a pen and start scribbling.).

It's strange to consider, but recently I had to fill out a form by myself and was on the verge of sweating. I could imagine a late Marlon Brando doing this, but not me. The blood drained from my face when I got to the line that asked for the date. Luckily, I could see a calendar from where I was sitting.

Part of this ignorance comes from preoccupations and stress, but a lot of it comes from not working. I'm like a less eccentric DaVinci, in the sense that I can understand his choppy, incremental sleep schedule. Not with regard to his output. I might be able to think up tons of shit, but there's no way in hell I'm going to make a diagram. Plus, I can't draw. I've never been able to, really, so this is not MS-related. Sometimes I look at Picasso's paintings in his African Period, and think, "Yeah, I can do that." But I'm quick to add, "That's about it." And, finally, "Am I kidding? Not a chance in hell."

Another problem is that I don't wear a watch. I never really have. This has become less of an issue in recent years, because I always have a cell phone with the time. Incidentally, now, though, Ryan, Anthony, and my mother left to get new phones, and they took mine to get a new one as well. Luckily, we have clocks and such, but I disturbingly feel like a drug addict on the verge of withdrawal. I keep haplessly reaching for my phone, like an amputee with phantom limb pain.

For now, I do know that today is a Monday, because it's Labor Day, which now means absolutely nothing to me. Seriously, it is like Urdu. I know it exists, and millions of others use it, but I can only muster a half-hearted shrug of utter ignorance when I consider its existence. And maybe a nap.

R