By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — When I say I walked along an urban Phoenix sidewalk in my pajamas in broad daylight in December, I hasten to add that I was in medical confinement for physical, not mental, reasons, and I did my stroll with the encouragement of my physical therapists for fresh air and exercise.
Also, from a little distance the dark pajamas looked like a respectable jump suit, and it can be agreeably warm in the desert here in December.
The sidewalk wasn’t right next to the city street, but went around the perimeter of the three-story physical-therapy center’s building, maybe 30 feet away from that street. When you’re driving around town at 35 mph, I bet you don’t have time to scan how many buttons or zippers are on the wardrobes of pedestrians either.
Thus begins my explanation for my sudden complete absence from these familiar pages for a few weeks after having written unto readers regularly — with one exception — for years.
It’s also a reminder of how uncertain anyone’s life can be, and why it’s always best to keep your relationship with God before your eyes because you won’t know when He may come skimming down the street to meet you.
Life can be changed, or even taken away, in a moment. Although people may have led unrepented sinful lives, death isn’t a punishment just for the evildoer, but the eventual earthly conclusion for us all.
Not that I ever was in a life-threatening situation this time, but ’twas a painful one.
When I arose on November 15 my left hip and legs already had begun hurting seriously, which wasn’t inexplicable but still surprising. I had a pregnancy-center men’s program to cover that evening for
The Wanderer, plus a biblical conference to write up the following day.
I’d been going to a chiropractor twice a week for about two months and had been getting better, but by the afternoon of November 15, my left hip was so painful I barely could stand up.
I phoned a friend to drive me to the emergency room.
Little did I imagine when I limped out my door with his help that I wouldn’t return for a month. Thanksgiving on November 28 still was nearly two full weeks in the future; it was unimaginable that I wouldn’t be back under my roof well before then.
Back in August I’d hurt my right leg and hip a bit after lifting and carrying boxes when downsizing from my three-bedroom home to move to a condo about four miles away. I was so busy that I actually had no time to write anything for The Wanderer of September 5 — the other exception I noted above about not making a contribution to these pages. (See September 12, 2019, hardcopy issue of The Wanderer, p. 3A, “Lifting Boxes To
Release Souls — The Burden of Possessions Includes Filling the Moving Van.”)
When the pain spread and worsened, I started visiting the chiropractor in September. For a guy used to walking five to six miles every week, the reduction in activity made me eager to begin stretching my legs again, and I started walking around my new residential campus in October on most evenings, watching the moon wax and wane as the nights passed.
The afternoon of November 13, going out to lunch at a Greek restaurant, I noticed my left side started to feel just a little tender, and it was downhill from there. I received a CAT scan and MRI after admission to the hospital, where I spent six nights. A doctor told me, in effect, that I had stretched myself too far. I was told I had to be transferred to a physical-therapy center, which consumed 22 more nights.
I wasn’t having trouble with vital signs or breathing or appetite or any other everyday aspect of life. But if you barely can walk, you’re about as disabled as someone who has lost use of their hands for the moment.
I came back home on December 13 and am up and about, although still with some pain.
There may be more medical treatment down the path. When I attended my first weekend Mass in a month at my parish, on Gaudete Sunday, December 15, I wondered where Advent already had half-disappeared to.
If you had time to just start talking to people passing by on the streets, you’d find many interesting stories, but there’s no time, or even apparent reason, to stop to chat. When you’re in medical confinement, it’s different.\
In the room just opposite mine was Leo, a traditionalist artist and father of a restaurant entrepreneur. In the common dining area was Daniel, counting the days, like me, until he could go home. I had asked the Lord to have someone talk with me one afternoon, but the Lord had a better idea, and showed that Leo wanted to have someone talk with him. Which meant me.
I haven’t had a working television for ages, but always have been able to watch events on my computer monitor at home if needed. At the therapy center I could watch TV for hours, on and off, as my schedule allowed, between therapies and pills and rosaries. Fox News isn’t the ogres’ network that the leftists have claimed.
With nurses or aides bringing me meals as the TV jabbered, I thought back to Mom bringing my little sister and me “TV dinners” so we could watch our early-days color television — a 21-inch screen! — in our living room in Indianapolis.
At the therapy center I even dreamed a dream about how nice it would be to be served meals in bed all the time, but the dream itself concluded with a lesson, as dreams in their tutorial way do, that a person can’t live life this way.
For the first time I definitely noticed how many people work in the health-care industry. I was in just one hospital and one therapy center, but they both were buzzing with personnel working their 12-hour shifts in an ongoing stream. Extrapolate this out to entire cities or states to imagine how many families live off health-care employment.
As dedicated and thoughtful as the health personnel are, you’re one patient on their busy roster. “Don’t touch my hamburger, I want it for later” on the bedside tray may mean you’ll never see the burger again unless you handcuff yourself to it. “I’ll do it for you in a minute” may mean the nurse will have to be reminded later.
The hardcopy daily newspaper from the lobby was a fillip. Back at home, I most often read articles online, but here was a free daily paper. I was surprised on December 8 to read that an organized-crime reporter I’d seen in the newsroom at The Arizona Republic in the 1970s had been the topic of an internal editorial debate over whether he had connections to the mob.
This was part of a series about organized crime in the Grand Canyon State and the bomb assassination of another Republic reporter, Don Bolles, in 1976. The bomb had exploded in a hotel parking lot a few minutes’ drive from where my physical-therapy center is now, and the mortally injured Bolles died later at St. Joseph’s Hospital, also a short drive from the center.
Another surprise for me, although a welcome one, occurred shortly after my release, back at my parish church on December 20, when I saw “Molly” again.
Molly is my pseudonym for an older woman I wrote about in that September 12 Wanderer article mentioned above concerning my residential move. She’s a non-Catholic who carries a rosary, gets around in a banged-up pickup truck, isn’t burdened with possessions, and drops in and out of my life like a breeze at church.
She had approached me from out of the blue after Mass a few years ago for the first time, wanting to have a spiritual chat.
It had been well over a year since I last saw her in the parking lot there, and I had become concerned about her welfare. She drives off to Florida or Texas as it strikes her, and now she has plans, I learned, to move to Indiana.
This time Molly gave me four photocopied faces of our Lord on one sheet of paper, an elongated red heart shape with words about canceling out negative thoughts and judgments, and a sheet of stationery with a hand-colored drawing of a butterfly, its wings covered with trust and praise to God, concluding: “Even my dreams are coming true. Life is a glorious dream in you. So Be It!!”
So be it.
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