A Nurse from Dallas

Last week I underwent minor surgery to correct a deviated septum. As I write this, I’ve just had the hollow, conical splints that were jammed up each nostril removed; they kept my nose in shape, quite literally, for the first five days of convalescence.

After the procedure they wheeled me into the recovery room, where I gradually began to emerge from sedation. One of the nurses began chattering away at me. I got the sense she wanted to gauge my alertness; to calculate, maybe, how long before I could be discharged.

In any case, she said at one point that she was from Dallas.

“Oh yeah?” I replied, muddy-minded.

“So is another nurse on this ward.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, I used to work at Parkland Hospital.”

“No kidding,” I said through a fog.

“That’s the one where JFK died.”

“That’s true.” It also closed a few months ago, and will be demolished.

“I guess because of that, I’ve always been interested in that case. I read almost everything about it I can.”

“No kidding?” I muttered.

“No kidding!”

So I told her that it was an interest of mine, too; that in fact, I’d written a book about it. Ordinarily I would have kept this to myself, but I was still floating on anesthesia. She seemed genuinely interested. Hard to tell, because I was so out of it from the drugs.

She wanted to know the title, and said she wanted to read it. I told her and she wrote it down. She already had my name on a medical chart.

We talked some more. “There’s no way one guy could have got off all those shots in, what was it? – five or six seconds?” I agreed, then gave her my grand summary: which is the importance of distinguishing between conspiracy and culpability. Demonstrating conspiracy is the easy part, I slurred. The whodunnit is trickier.

Maybe this suggested I was mentally alert. A few minutes later I heard her calling my wife to say I was ready; she could come get me now. “We had a really interesting conversation about JFK!” she said. Le spouse has heard it all before.

As we drove home the aftereffects of the anesthesia got to me and, aggravated by motion, I puked. Caught it all in a plastic bag, on hand just in case. Got home, felt better, took some pain meds, and drifted in and out of consciousness during Thursday Night Football. The Broncos lost to Indianapolis.

Recovery continues.