A PAIN STORY (part 1)

Posted on June 30, 2010 by benjamin90

85 miles from Fairfax Avenue through West Hollywood, unremarkable Westwood, charging San Vicenete and the Brentwood proper. Once on the Pacific Coast Highway navigating cyclists and joggers, trucks and cars, the shoulder, the hills to Malibu and a stop for a swordfish sandwich by the shining Pacific. Up again and on to county line where we begin the long trip home.

This is the kind of Saturday our courtship enjoyed. Miles of open road, the wind at our backs and no thought to the future. Those days are gone never to be recaptured: the pain is too much and the depression overwhelming.

THIS PAIN STORY begins with gardening, an exercise in fixing up the bachelor pad on a steep lot near Dodger Stadium. She was Westside and I was east, so she went to work and improved my lot.

The back is many splendoured, and it lies quietly performing life’s motion.

But wake the lion and it will excruciatingly raw. Hard to tame and may never come back

Being Westside, Liz’s brain surgeon, Cooper gets the call. He is cerebral, cold, and and has an Eastern Euro nurse. Pain pills are dispatched: enough for dependence, not enough for the pain.

A laminectomy, microdiscectomy,  a cut in the back of me is performed.

I open the door slowly, quietly. I see a small girl with inflatable bags on her legs. A child. Is she paralyzed and they just didn’t tell me? Well in a metaphor, that came later. But it worked for  while.

Life events are transforming in a multi-directional way, up, down, high-low, side to side. Are we going anywhere, really?

And so the pain returns in wheelchair form. Epidural, nerve block, cortisone injections, bulghar sacks, facet block- to the spine and all points in between.

How many could you take, reader?

I hear screams from behind the curtains in the evening at an empty surgery center in Santa Monica. Later we go to dinner.

Posted in A Pain Story | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A PAIN STORY (part 2)

Posted on June 30, 2010 by benjamin90

Next step: discogram.

Discogram: A procedure during which a needle is inserted into a patient’s lumbar disc, the disc pressurized, and the patient is awoken to confirm the source of the pain.

Dr. Graff admonishes my wife out loud in the waiting room for having diarrhea from too many painkillers and too much wine the night before.

As she recovers, I man the tabloids in the waiting room. I overhear Dr. Graff and Dr. Fuller in a moment of levity. They chuckle that my wife will be “shoveling down the vicodins.”

Thanks, boys, I won’t forget it, I have not. I never will.

“You need a fusion, but I won’t do it Dr. Theodore tells my wife. His associate instructs me to leave the room during a later examination.

The search begins and it ends at the lumberyard where a man recognizes my wife’s pain and exclaims: “ Dr Bray saved my life!”

I look at the scars and the braces on his body.

More tests, scans, EMG’s, and opinions.

“Periformis is a possibility, but that guy says everyone has periformis syndrome. It’s his specialty.”

I am at the medical supply store perusing the wheelchair rentals. I buy orthopedic pillows, ice packs, and heating pads. I am preparing for our visit to the wizard. He is in the same building as the Cedar’s Pain Clinic only he’s on the top floor enjoying the view.

The Cedar’s Pain Clinic sports the likes of Dr. Ferdik and Dr. Zambriskie.

Dr. Ferdik is Eastern Bloc specializing in epidurals while fronting the mad doctor apparatus on his head (lights and mirrors) and a mask over his face.

Dr. Zambriskie, or “Dr. Z.” as he is known specializes in dispensing “compounds” of pain medication to pain patients. He will not tell the patient what or how much he is administering. He had some balls to stand in the same elevator as us.

Wheelchair action onto the curb, up the ramp, and into the elevator. The 12th floor opens and we wheel into the waiting room. It’s busy with crippled patients and flatscreen televisions. Down the hall I push the wheelchair, my wife is pensive. My mother has come along for support and strength in numbers.

Posted in A Pain Story | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A PAIN STORY (part 3)

Posted on July 4, 2010 by benjamin90

I stand by the window and look down below on the houses with concrete backyards and swimming pools. The pool is thing, why all the concrete?

Where’s the landscape? The Hollywood hills are distant through the heavy Los Angeles air. It seems like the good life is falling through our fingers not unlike grasping water.

I think of the Saturday morning my wife was released from the hospital after her first operation 2 years before. I was astounded to find that the behemoth hospital goes into hibernation on weekends, a skeleton crew on the watch.

Wheelchairing out, I clutch my wife’s prescription for pain. The hallways are dark, empty, and quiet. I see an empty bed in a nearby room. Yesterday, he was surrounded by family members, I wonder what happened…did he make it out alive? I have a dead feeling.

First stop, the pharmacy for medication. Fresh from the hospital, three days after the operation, my wife limps; we wait, walk the isles; we find a chair for her to sit in by the blood pressure machine. My pressure goes up when we are told Cooper did not fill out a triplicate and we need to call his office. After we reach the answering service we wait and hour and a half before this is sorted out. The pain medication from the hospital has worn off and my wife is in tears. I walk the pharmacy isles.

The steep lot near Dodger stadium was no place to recover from spinal surgery, so we set up a stay at hotel in Pasadena. Wheelchair requested for our arrival and nowhere to be found when we arrive. Our room isn’t ready. We should have gone  back to the steep lot. I spend the first night looking for a 24 hour pharmacy.

Posted in A Pain Story | Leave a comment

The Type Shop: Part One

Posted on August 29, 2010 by benjamin90
wooden letter forms as a coffee table

Communication begins with letters.

My first job after 2 weeks of college was at Characters Typographic Services on 36th and Fifth in NYC. My aunt was an art director for Avon at the time; she often used the shop in her work and had a good relationship with Mike DeCrescente, who co-owned and managed the place. I had worked as a messenger for Mike when I was 14 on my school breaks; it was how I’d by new vinyl albums at the record store around the corner. Back then a new album was $4.99.

Characters Typographic services was very aptly named. The crew was an assembly of truly unique New York personalities spanning the entire payscale from the owners of the business all the way down to the bike messengers.
More on that in part 2…
With the advent of desktop publishing, typography as a trade has disappeared. I started off after the industry made the transition from actual lead letters to film output and photographic reproduction. It was the last incarnation of the graphic industry before one could output a “paste-up” or “mechanical” on a Mac.
I began as a “proof boy” (my more experienced mentors called me “pissboy”) working on the 1am to 8am night shift. Yes that’s when a workday was 7 hours with an hour for lunch. My job was to transfer the completed film assemblies to reprographic paper proofs that were used in the art departments of advertising agencies around town to prepare for publication.
The type shop consisted of several departments: the “typesetters” who typed in the body copy on computer terminals specifying typeface, typesize, and spacing, the linotype operator who changed the film fonts in the machine and checked the film output, the proofreading department where copy was checked for “typos.”and the typositor and camera department where headline type was photographically created because the linotype’s resolution was limited to 24 point. The hub of the shop’s workflow, however was the “film stripping” department. This was where all the elements of a job were put together and the shop supervisor checked off the jobs. Film strippers worked on a light table with a transparent grid sized in points and picas, the units of measurement in typography. It was here that the body copy, logos, headlines, and halftone elements of a design job were put together using a scalpel, acetone for stickiness, and scotch tape. As a proof boy outputting hundreds of proofs consisting of “repros,” “blues,” and “glassines” a night with a deaf mute partner, I set my sights on becoming a “stripper.” I wanted to be at the center of the action, be one of the guys and work with the journeymen…guys who had worked with buckets of molten lead and the original linotype typesetting system.
Posted in The Type Shop | Leave a comment