I had a conversation with God above my helicopter once. I say my helicopter as if I owned a helicopter but when paramedics airlift you to county USC because car surfing and anarchy led to a blown out L3 Vertebrae, your family forever referrers to it as your helicopter…

So my helicopter was carrying me full of morphine across my beautiful smoggy city to our beautiful County facility to have my spine rebuilt. After being laid out in the street, naked and 16, in pain but with little feeling, all I could think as we sped to the hospital was my feet hurt.

Every time that paramedic reaches over and touches that switch on the helicopter wall he brushes my toe and it sends electricity up through my legs past my torso until it jolts out of my teeth and brain. I remember saying as I left my body

“Am I going to die?”

and in a stern woman’s voice, god answered.

“… only if you want to”

So I decided against it.

I ended up in the ICU awaiting surgery for just short of a week. It was in that old county building, before the renovations and second facility was erected; for those that don’t know county USC medical center is the free hospital, where you can see and smell all of LA’s suffering as well as get surgery by the worlds finest in their respective field but… you gotta wait for it. Left to heal in ICU with an old tv and three VHS tapes I saw a new part of our world.

I watched The Karate Kid; and a little boy die from a stray bullet wound. The nurse I had made friends with never told me his name, but he couldn’t have been older than 8.

There was a little girl who got severely electrocuted. I remember waking to hear screams as they wheeled her into the burn unit. My nurse told me she was going to be just fine, all be it burns and children make for very loud transfers.

I watched Back To The Future and Stand and Deliver until I forgot about what dying children sounded like and I hit that little morphine button reflectively until the time I was up for surgery.

My surgery went into OT, extra innings, a shoot out for my ability to walk. 16 hours which was twice the time expected which while never effecting me was torture for my mother in the waiting room. The last thing I remember was the gas mask and doctors laughing, I wrote about it in a poem some time later….

“Being put to sleep by men in white coats who tell jokes as they try and make your body capable of walking again; and do you know what it’s like not knowing if you’ll walk again?”

I do, and as I counted down from 100 I asked god, “Will i walk again?”

This time her voice was soft and sweet, still a women but now with an accent filled with sympathy and she answered around 93…

“Only if you want to?”

I came to with little thoughts and a lot of painful feeling. Feeling in my toes, my ankles, my calves. My head felt odd, it was like walking around a public space wearing a blindfold. You know there’s something going on around you, but you can’t quite understand any of it and don’t whether it is coming or going.

They moved me to an old room upstairs with a small TV on a desk. I remember watching Oprah and seeing a nurse there with me. I remember wondering why she wasn’t off working and was here watching TV as I heard god’s voice begging me to go to sleep. When they moved me the next morning the nurse told me there was never a night nurse or a TV. Nothing now is what it would seem, nothing in this life from here is going to be easy for me.

I was next taken to Kaiser to recover. It was a short LA drive and I was still on the morphine drip so it would seem even shorter. A morphine drip does absolute wonders for making LA traffic more enjoyable. God was quiet now, I asked a lot of things as I was beginning recovery and heard very little from her. I saw her in visitors and the gifts they’d bring, I got a Gameboy and played Tetris a lot. I read “The Bell Jar” every day for a week. I remember sitting and looking at a cookie for three hours and asking

“God… can you hear me?
Is this cookie important to anything?
Am I important to anything?
to you…
to myself?”

I remember god softly answering, and not being able to hear her.

I fell asleep to the sunrise every morning because county and its lack of windows threw off my clock. It was Daniel and the late night block on tv, and quite fortunately for my sanity it did give the nurses a lot of time to talk. Francesca was my favorite, she was big and brown and from frog town. She reminded me of Baldwin Park summer nights and my aunts pozole. One night when my roommate who was 28 and a bit crazy accidentally tried to climb into my bed Francesca sat with me all night to calm me down. We watched Pulp Fiction and during the commercial breaks she would tell me different things about herself and her family.

She sounded a lot like god when she came in told me I was going into renal failure and I needed to eat and pee immediately. I would learn later that that was actually the closest to death I would ever get and there was no soft voice telling me I could live if I wanted to. There was just dozens of catheters and a lot of Francesca apologizing.

But…

I would beat not being able to pee!

Sounds silly said out loud now but these were the things in front of me. Self discovery, Self recovery and god said to follow me but I wasn’t sure I could see where she was going.

Soon they pulled staples out of my back, all 73 of them, it never hurt and I never forgot the number. Francesca gave me a back brace fitted just for my body that I could only take off while sleeping and a new found faith and love for nursing.

Time would pass and I would heal and eventually walk; First to the edge of the bed, then the room, then the hallway. Learning to pee again taught me I was going to have to re learn to walk and potentially everything else. My mom would come visit me as I got stronger and the cookies and notes never stopped coming. I stopped trying to hear god and was back to communicating via one way prayer, hoping she got the message.

Then the day came to go home and as I hobbled into a wheelchair I felt remised that I had fixed my sleep schedule because Francesca would not be there to send me off. I was sad she would never know if I re learned to walk, but realized in the moment that little girl was probably still in the burn unit with a Francesca there to care for her, and she knows how a lot of this type of stuff turns out, including my story. Francesca knew before I did I would be changed forever, life would be Painful and strained. I had a moment in the wheelchair before they loaded me up into the car and I asked god,

“Am I going to be able to do this”

and through the silence I answered myself…

“Only if you want to”