No Angel Read Free

tube into a hole he’d scalpeled through my rib cage to prevent me from drowning in my own blood. The tube would also be used to clear blood clots before I went into the operating room. I’d never felt such pain and discomfort. Having an inch-wide tube inserted into a raw hole of flesh was like, well, it was just like that. I was not anesthetized—there hadn’t been time. I was dying. I looked at the tube, which was attached to a pump. Stewed tomatoes—aka my blood and guts—pulsed through it. When he was done with that, the resident directed me to a video screen. He said proudly that they’d put a shunt in my femoral artery that helped guide a medical camera through my torso. He said they were looking for heart and arterial damage caused by bullet frag. I thought, Far out.
    I passed back out.
    I woke back up naked and freezing. A nurse leaned over my midsection, holding a thin tube, giggling. I asked her what was so funny? I knew she was laughing at a shriveled dick whose size would have embarrassed a twelve-year-old boy. I gathered all my strength and said, “You could have a little respect for a guy who should be dead, and what exactly is your name?” She straightened up and stuck the catheter in. She covered me up and put her hand on my forehead. I passed back out.
    I woke back up. I was in a bed. The bed was in a recovery room. There were all the usual machines going beep-beep. There were IV bags and fresh flowers and foil balloons. There was an oversized teddy bear. My feet were elevated. And there was the tube, inserted cleanly into my chest, surrounded by white gauze and tape. A beep-beep went off, unlike the beep-beeps monitoring my heart and respiratory rates. A sound like a small servo followed. Not ten seconds later I was as high and happy as I could be. I passed back out.
    I woke up, I passed out, I woke up. Nurses changed my bedpan and sponged me down. I recovered some strength, I got up and walked around, dragging my setup—the IV, the morphine drip, the chest tube detached from its pump—around with me. After a few days I could walk up and down the hall once. After a week I could walk around the recovery unit. Being so weakened was a new experience and a definite low point. It’s truly humbling to be reminded that ultimately we’re just a body. The mind gets a lot of attention, but it is housed, for better or worse, in such a fragile thing. The body goes and, well, who knows? This is why I believe in God.
    I prayed. I’ve always been an imperfect Christian. I prayed for my family and for myself. I prayed I’d get to go back to the streets, to go back to work.
    As I improved, I began to spend equal amounts of time awake and asleep. I befriended Dr. Richard Carmona, the surgeon who’d operated on me. He was a high-school dropout who’d enlisted in the Army, joined the Special Forces, became a decorated Vietnam vet, and then returned to civilian life, where he took up a career in medicine. He was the head of trauma services in Tucson and moonlighted as a SWAT operator with the Pima County sheriff ’s office. Not ten days after I came in, he was shot himself while executing a warrant. He made a full recovery and eventually went on to become the seventeenth U.S. surgeon general. Gaining Dr. Carmona as a friend was one of the best things that came from my getting shot.
    People visited, they stayed too long, my mother cried. My dad, shocked and pale, said he was proud of me, even though I pointed out that I’d been a fool. We agreed that I’d been lucky. Other people came: college buddies, cops, my first wife, whom I’d married out of college. The pump attached to my chest tube ran nonstop. It cleared my wound of clots and errant blood, emptying the stuff into an otherwise white bucket by my bedside. When people stayed too long, I wiggled until the suction caught something, expelling it into the bucket like a tiny abortion. That usually sent them packing.
    I got deathly bored. You can watch only