prologue

Here's the first chapter of my book. It's long, I know. The rest of the book is funny. This chapter is just meant to explain why I started doing physically challenging activities (e.g. doing the swim from alcatraz to san fran, even though I didn't know how to swim).

Comments are welcome, even if they are negative. I need some motivation to start writing again...


It was 4 a.m. I hadn’t slept for three days. The only noise was the sound of the waves sliding into the rocks at the base of the cliff below my apartment, and the strange robotic purr of the CPM (continuous passive movement) machine to which my right leg was strapped.

I was sure that I was going to die.

*****

Eight years earlier, I had been in a motorcycle accident on my way to take an exam during my senior year in college. I broke my right arm, three ribs, and had a serious concussion. After the accident I waited for 2 weeks to go to the clinic on campus, when the pain in my arm had become almost intolerable. The doctor informed me that I had broken it, and that he would need x-rays to see how bad the damage was. He was going to re-break my arm and possibly would have to do a more serious surgery, depending on how bad the fracture was.

I had no medical insurance. As soon as the doctor left the examination room, I did too. Except for a slight deformity in shape my right arm got better and went back to normal. My head and ribs were fine a few weeks after the accident, and 6 weeks later I was running again, though my arm was still painful for a few months.

I graduated from college and began working a stressful job. I deal with stress by exercising, and so was logging many miles before and after work. I would go through a cycle of knee pain, visits to a doctor, and various diagnoses. The pain was hard to describe to the doctors, and the best analogy I could give them was that it felt like there was a broken bottle somewhere inside my knee.

The doctors weren’t sure what that meant, but they all provided similar diagnoses. The most popular was over training. The second was tendon problems common in women runners. I would ease up on training, take aspirin, and things would get better. For a while.

Then in 1999 I decided to run a marathon. Though I’d run longer distances, I had never done an official race. I jumped into an ambitious training schedule and that’s when things went really wrong.

This time, the pain in my knee didn’t go away when I eased up on running. Then my leg started to collapse, the most memorable time at work, while I was walking by a table full of my peers with a lunch tray full of food that went flying.

I went to see a doctor who told me I was too old to run competitively. I later found out his specialty was in knee injuries caused by golf. I’m not sure how you can injure your knee playing golf, unless you get drunk and fall off the cart. He told me to stop running, and that things would improve.

They didn’t. My leg was collapsing more frequently. My partner went from being amused every time I fell over, to being annoyed. My personal trainer suggested I see a friend of his, a physical therapist named Chris Kuhn. Chris said he could help me, but wanted an x-ray of my knee first.

I went back to my doctor, and asked for an x-ray. He refused my request, saying the problem was in my tendons and that an x-ray would not provide any useful information. Chris was astounded when I told him this. He wrote a note to my doctor stating that he couldn’t treat me without the x-ray.

Grumbling under his breath, my doctor sent me over to the x-ray department, where they took shots of both my knees at all kinds of angles. A half hour later, I was escorted into an examination room, and my doctor turned on the white light board on the wall to display the x-rays. He pulled the films out of the envelope and began slapping them on the board.

“You see?” he would say, giving me only a second to look before he pulled each film off the board and tossed it carelessly on the counter. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

Then he got to the x-ray that showed both my knees from the front. I’m not an expert in reading films, but even I knew something was not right with the lateral side of my right femur. The bottom part of the distinctive knuckle at the end of the femur was…missing.

The doctor paused for a minute, staring intently at the film. He said “Excuse me,” and walked out of the office. I never saw him again.

A new doctor came in a few minutes later. He rubbed his chin and stared at the film. “We need to operate as soon as possible on this,” he said, pointing at the x-ray of my right leg before pulling a calendar out of the pocket of his white coat.

“Well, what’s wrong with it?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I was an idiot. “Your leg is broken!” He paused, perhaps taking in my surprise at this announcement. “How long ago did this happen?”

I thought for a few minutes. “I don’t know,” I finally said.
“How could you BREAK YOUR LEG and not KNOW?”

“I fell on some steps two years ago, maybe it happened then?” I asked. The stair incident occurred in Athens after I had attended a wedding ceremony with endless toasts of ouzo. I had slipped on a marble staircase while stumbling into my apartment building at 5 in the morning, in the dark. In my inebriated state I had been unable to find the light switch for the hallway.

“This could NOT have been caused by a fall on steps. This is a MAJOR injury. You had to have had a traumatic accident. Surely you can remember breaking your leg!”

“Hm.” Another minute went by. The doctor stared at me in exasperation, while I tried to think of something. Then a picture flashed in my head of the side of my right leg covered in a disgusting purple bruise that took weeks to go away.

“Well, I was in a motorcycle accident.” I started to show him my twisted arm, but he was intent on writing the first useful piece of information I had provided in my patient file.

“Okay, how long ago was that?”
“Eight years ago.”

The doctor stopped writing, carefully placed his pen on my file, and turned to look at me.

“Did you say…eight years?”
“Um, yeah.”
“So. You have had a broken leg for…eight years?”
“I guess. Uh. I did go see a doctor. I’ve seen a few doctors over the years when I’ve had pain from running. But they all said my knee was fine.”
“Running? You’ve been running?” He asked, in the same tone he might have used if I had told him I had been eating small children as an afternoon snack.
“Well. The doctors said I could run.”

He rubbed his forehead and took up his pen. “How much do you run?”
“Not that much.” He gave me a skeptical look. “Um, maybe six miles.”
“A week?”
“A day.” I decided not to mention that I went for much longer runs on the weekend.

He rubbed his hand across his face. He looked like a man whose brand new Mercedes has just been rear ended by an uninsured motorist. He quickly scoured the counter that held my patient file, and, once located, ripped open his calendar as if it were a candy bar.

“Look. We need to get you into surgery immediately! I have an opening on Thursday. Hopefully your insurance company will be able to authorize the operation in 48 hours. I’ll tell them it’s an emergency.”

While I was adjusting to the idea of having knee surgery in three days, on pizza Thursday, when I would walk down to Pizza My Heart after work and eat slices of pizza until I was about to explode, the doctor stood at the white board talking about shaving bone off of my knee cap, making a plug to fill in the missing bone, and cleaning up any bone spurs. It all sounded so easy. I figured I would be back in the gym in a week, cycling until my knee had healed enough to go back to running. I figured I might even make pizza Thursday if I scheduled the surgery early in the morning.
*****
But as I was slowly coming to consciousness in the recovery room after surgery, my doctor’s face loomed over me. The news was not good.

“It was a mess,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. Your meniscus was detached. Your ACL, PCL, and LCL are shot. I did the best that I could. You need to go see a specialist.” Before I could ask what he meant by “specialist”, since I assumed HE was a specialist, he was gone.

I arrived for my post op appointment a week later, hoping for some good news. Instead, my doctor told me that he had spoken to some knee specialists about my case and they all said it was futile. The size of the bone plug that I needed to replace my missing femur tip was one problem. My removed meniscus could not be replaced. My tibia was also damaged due to my broken femur smashing into it after my meniscus, the coward, rolled itself up and out of the way.

“Alright, so what am I going to do?” I asked, interrupting his jargon laced tirade. There was no point in him continuing as I had no idea what he was saying to me. Because I had had to go into surgery so quickly, and had been busy at work after missing a day for surgery, I had not even had a chance to find out what a meniscus was. And, at the time, it didn’t sound that important.

“Your only option is a rod.”
“Rod?” I asked. All I could picture was a skinny piece of metal with a star at one end like a magic wand. I imagined waving it over my knee, fixing the mess.

“The rod is inserted between your tibia and your femur. It will provide protection for your bones until you can get a mechanical knee.”
“Well, when will that be?” I had always been under the impression that a knee replacement was easy. They just pop the mechanism in and you resume life as if you didn’t have a bionic joint.
“We don’t put them in people under 45.”
“Forty five?” I thought for a second, trying to remember how old I was. “That’s fifteen years from now!”
“People who are active will wear a mechanical knee out in 18 months. Every time you replace the knee, you lose more bone, so your right leg will get shorter and shorter. We will not do a knee replacement in someone your age.”
“What’s active?” I asked, thinking maybe I would curtail my running, avoid the rod, and go straight for the fake knee.
“People who walk more than 2 miles a day are considered active.” I thought about my office complex, and how I routinely walked that distance in a day going to meetings. That would leave no leftover mileage for walking on the beach, or even to Pizza My Heart, a mere 87 steps down the cliff from my apartment. My heart sank.

Denial seemed like a possible recourse. “What if I do nothing?”
“If we don’t put the rod in now you won’t have enough bone left to get a mechanical knee when you’re 45. Your leg will deteriorate until it can’t support your weight anymore. You won’t be able to walk.”

“So, how much will I be able to bend my knee with the rod in?” I asked, picturing now a kind of flexible, slinky like contraption slid over the ends of my bones, like a spring. I wondered if it would make a noise when I walked. I imagined a sound like a didgeridoo every time I took a step, and smiled. The software engineers I worked with would be so jealous.

The doctor didn’t say anything for a minute. He picked up my chart, carefully flipping the previous pages over the page he had been writing on, and closed the folder. He stood up.

“You won’t have a knee. We take it out. The rod will prevent you from being able to bend your leg at all.” He told me to schedule another appointment to see him, and then disappeared with my chart.

I sat on the exam table until the nurse came in to clean the room for the next patient. She seemed surprised that I was still there. I was running the pads of my fingers over the edge of the white paper pulled across the table. It hurt my fingers, but I couldn’t stop.
*****
The next few months signaled the end of my relatively easy and happy existence. The insurance company mailed me a brochure that was titled “A Change of Life”, written for people who have to adjust to physical handicaps. I tore it into little pieces, threw the pieces on my kitchen table, and then hammered them with my fist until they all fell on the floor.

The constant sharp pain in my knee failed to improve even as the surgery scars healed. Because I have an allergy to most pain medication, the only thing I could do was ice my knee and down aspirin, one week consuming 200 of them. This caused me to vomit blood any time I ate spicy food or didn’t eat for a few hours. I was moved off of my project at work, and was forced into a program management role that didn’t require any physical exertion beyond typing.

My partner tried to be supportive, but as time went on, the situation became harder for him to deal with. He was traveling a lot for business and often unable to help. Since I was not able to drive, I would end up stranded at home, missing work and doctor appointments. The only mechanism I had to deal with stress was running, and I didn’t know what to do instead. My hair started falling out.

The next communiqué from my insurance company informed me that my doctor had made a mistake taking my meniscus out. They wanted to know if I was going to sue him for malpractice. Lawyers from my insurance company began calling day and night. After a number of conference calls, I convinced them that I didn’t want lawsuit money, I wanted my knee fixed, and that they had to help me find a doctor who could do that.

I was lucky to be living in San Francisco, where there is a high concentration of very talented and famous orthopedic surgeons. I spent three months going from surgeon to surgeon. Most of them agreed to see me because they were forced by my insurance company. I would go through a series of range of motion exercises with these doctors, they would look at my surgery report and x-rays, and then they would say they couldn’t help me.

One doctor prepared for my visit by stripping the flesh off of a sheep’s leg. When I got to his office he showed me exactly how the knee worked. I watched the tendons flexing as he bent the sheep’s knee, following his technical explanation of what was going on because by then I had done hours of research on knees. After seeing his demonstration I had a much better understanding of why my problem was so difficult to solve. I felt a glimmer of hope as the doctor told me about the experimental surgeries he had been doing on sheep (they have a similar knee to humans). But the meeting ended with the same phrase I heard from all the doctors before.

“I can’t help you,” he said. I nodded and smiled, trying not to cry as I collected my x-rays, surgery report and patient file.

Suddenly he said, “It’s a long shot, and your insurance probably won’t cover a visit, but I know a doctor who has done some meniscal replacements. There are only two doctors in the US that are doing them. One is in Atlanta. But the other one is here.”

And that is how I ended up in Dr. Douglas Blatz’s office.
*****
My first meeting with Dr. Blatz went really well, until the end, when he said “The surgery is considered experimental. Your insurance company won’t cover it. It’s expensive. And very risky. You’re older than other patients I’ve done the replacement for. There’s a high rate of rejection of the meniscus, it’s 60%, and if you reject, you have to get the rod put in so the surgery will have been for nothing. I’m also concerned about your inability to take pain medication. You’re going to need something to manage the pain, and you will have chronic pain for the rest of your life, and may have to walk with a cane and wear a brace on your leg.” He stared at my patient file, I suspected because he didn’t want to look at me. “I really don’t think I can help you.” As he said that, he seemed to be physically bracing himself for an onslaught.

“Well, can you cut my leg off?” I blurted, having spent the past month trying to come up with a solution that didn’t involve my leg bones being fused together with a titanium rod. Amputation was the only solution I had been able to come up with that would still allow me to do sports and walk somewhat normally.

He stared at me, incredulous. “I am not going to cut off your leg.”
“Fine.” I spoke to him dismissively, in a “thanks for wasting my time” tone, as all the doctors before had done to me. “Can you recommend a doctor that will?” I put the tip of my pen on the notepad I carried with me to every appointment, ready to write down yet another name.

“There is no doctor in the US that would cut off a healthy limb.” He looked at me, perturbed.

This final rejection, after months of trying to not lose hope that something could be done, caused me to snap. “I’ll go to Mexico then.” I said, and then I started crying, and couldn’t stop. Joe, Dr. Blatz’s assistant, handed me a fistful of Kleenex, most of which fell on the floor. I put on my shoes, embarrassed that I was behaving like a two year old throwing a tantrum. Dr. Blatz stared at me.

“Would you really go to Mexico?”
“Yes!” I bawled, trying to wipe the snot off my face because I thought it was making me look less angry and serious.

He said “I believe you.”
Then he said “Okay. I’ll do the surgery.”
****
It seemed that everything would fall into place after the decision was made to do the surgery, but the complications were just beginning. Like a car with a broken transmission, I needed replacement parts. Dr. Blatz had to find a cadaver meniscus, tendons, and bone plug that matched my physical profile. That meant I had to wait around for someone to die.

I was sent to have an x ray where a metal disk was placed on my knee. By comparing it against my knee they determined how big the replacement meniscus needed to be so they could put in an order at the organ donation bank. As an engineer I was surprised there wasn’t a more scientific way to do the measurement, but was starting to realize how brute force orthopedic medicine is.

Though it’s common today, in 2000, when I had this surgery, putting a cadaver meniscus into someone’s knee was a big deal. The tissue has no blood flow, and putting dead tissue that came from one body into another body is risky. Even if you make it past the first 6 months without being one of the unlucky 60% who reject the dead tissue, there is still a risk for the rest of your life that the tissue will go bad. Any infection in the rest of your body, strep is a common culprit, can spread to this dead tissue, because it’s vulnerable. Once it’s contaminated, it has to be taken out because it can kill you in a very short period of time.

These things weighed heavy on my mind as the months continued. I carried a pager around with me at all times because once the donation meniscus came in, Dr. Blatz would have insert it within 24 hours. Not knowing when I might get called in I quit drinking completely and tried to eat only small meals in case I had to get to surgery.

At work my manager was giving me jobs that were way beneath my skill set because he was worried I would have to leave for surgery in the middle of a big software release. Work was as important to me as running, and I was failing there too.

Things were falling apart in my relationship as well. My partner had never had a serious illness, and the worst medical experience he had was when the US Army removed his four wisdom teeth. Instead of cutting me some slack, he made me feel worse, commenting that it was my fault my knee was destroyed so I should stop sulking about it.

One afternoon I got the call. They had found a meniscus and a bone plug. I later found out from a doctor who attended my surgery that the bone plug had come from a guy shot in New York City. The meniscus was from a 17 year old girl who was killed in a car accident in Miami.

That night my partner and I went to a restaurant in San Francisco called Top of the Mark. It was one of our favorite places to go, and we knew the members of the jazz band that played there. I requested a few happy Sarah Vaughn songs and picked at my dinner. When the plates had been cleared, my partner took my hand. I was hoping for some words of encouragement and support. Instead he said “Look, I didn’t sign up for this program.”

I don’t fault him for this as he had personal goals different from mine and those differences were magnified by my medical disaster. He was working sometimes 20 hours a day trying to prepare his start up company for an initial public offering. Having yet one more thing to deal with on top of the pressure at work was hard for him. Further, he just didn’t understand physically what I was going through.

I made the situation worse. Instead of trying to talk about my pain and anxiety, I pretended I was fine. I didn’t give him a chance to help. I shut him out and decided I would handle things without him.

The bright spot in my life was my personal trainer, Tom Mendell, and my physical therapist, Chris Kuhn. Both of them created a plan to help me train for my surgery. It’s surprising to me that most doctors don’t recommend physical therapy before surgery. I recuperated much faster than my doctor expected because I went into surgery in great physical shape.

Tom trained me for free, as my medical bills were piling up and I didn’t have a lot of spare cash. He also acted as my shrink, and friend. He would leave notes of encouragement on my desk at work (the gym where he worked was owned by my company) and would do little things like bring me goldfish crackers when I was having a bad day. Chris Kuhn also did many, many hours of free physical therapy for me, and I always left his clinic feeling more confident that I could face the challenges that were ahead. Though Chris worked really long hours, he would always take the time to answer my emails and phone calls, no matter how trivial.

Throughout my training I was motivated by the thought that, in a few months after the surgery, I would be able to run again. Dr. Blatz was gently tried to disabuse me of that notion, and mentioned frequently that I would have to wear a brace for the rest of my life to protect my knee any time I did any kind of physical activity. He recommended I take up swimming as soon as I was able to be active again, but swimming seemed boring and I continued to visualize myself running. I was certain that with Chris and Tom’s help I would be back to normal a short time after the surgery.

I invited both Chris and Tom to my surgery, but the hospital wouldn’t let Tom attend since he didn’t have a medical degree. Chris was present, and said he would never again watch a surgery performed on someone he knew. At one point Dr. Blatz was inserting titanium screws into my femur to hold the bone plug in place. He was up on the operating table, cranking on a screw, when it snapped. Based on Chris’ explanation, I had a picture in my mind of trying to put together some piece of furniture from IKEA. It sounded funny to me, but Chris said it was horrifying.

The surgery, scheduled for 3 hours, had taken 6 and a half. I had asked Joe and Dr. Blatz to not say anything negative to me in the recovery room while I was not quite conscious, because that had a detrimental impact after the first surgery. I woke up with Dr. Blatz’s assistant Joe standing over me. He looked exhausted. I was afraid.

Then Joe smiled at me. He said “I think you’re going to be okay kid.”
****
I got up to my room, where I was supposed to stay for the next three days. Dr. Blatz had decided to insert a local of morphine in my knee, even though I’m allergic, because he was afraid that the pain would be too overwhelming. And after bugging them for 4 hours, I got the nurses to bring me two Tylenol, for which the hospital charged me $8.

My partner came to see me that evening. I was uncomfortable, and vomiting from the morphine. He put his head down on my bed, exhausted from work. Finally he said “If you aren’t going to talk to me, I’m going home.” He left.

That night was one of the worst of my life. The nurses had failed to fill the ice machine for my knee. About 5 hours after the surgery I was in excruciating pain. I had to share a room with 3 other women, and one of them cried the whole night because she had just had a mastectomy.

The next morning, at 7 am, I told the nurse I wanted to be discharged because the hospital was just adding to my misery. Joe had just been in to see me, and was furious that the nurses had failed to keep my knee iced. It had swollen up to the size of a cantaloupe. I was strapped into the CPM machine because I had gotten tendon replacements, and you have to keep bending your knee, otherwise the tendons don’t stay supple and you lose range of motion. That was another major complication of the surgery. With a bone plug, you aren’t supposed to weight the bone or move it, but if I wasn’t in the CPM the tendons would lose flexibility. Dr. Blatz had cautioned me that it was going to hurt, but I could not have imagined what that meant until I experienced it.

I went home the day after surgery, even though my partner had already made plans to leave for a business trip. He was feeling bad because I was in pain and there was nothing he could do.

My knee was a bloody, disgusting mess. Pus leaked out of the surgery scar and it looked like someone had dumped a bottle of baby shampoo down my leg. My upper thigh had a huge hematoma where my leg had been clamped down to the operating table. If that wasn’t bad enough, I held Tupperware bowl full of vomit at all times because I had no control over when my stomach would suddenly decide it needed to egress.

I had a soft cast that went from my ankle to my hip, and was unable to get up the narrow stairs in the apartment that went to the bedroom on the second floor. So my partner brought a bed downstairs for me, and set it up next to the back wall of the apartment, which was all glass, with a view of Monterey Bay. I could see the local otter playing with the surfers in the ocean outside the window in an area called “the punch bowl” as I lay in bed, strapped into the CPM.

The downstairs bathroom had no shower, so I couldn’t take a bath when I got home from the hospital, and I couldn’t close the door all the way because my straightened leg was too long to fit in the bathroom.

In some ways it was a relief that he was leaving, as I didn’t think there was anything else I could do to make myself less attractive.

*****
The days after my partner left were a blur of sleeplessness and pain. My body felt like it was turning to stone because every muscle was tensed in response to the thudding discomfort. It felt as if someone was jack hammering my knee. My femur coursed with an electrical sensation that ran through the bone into my thigh. There was a sickening crunch every time the CPM forced my knee to bend 20 degrees. A rash had spread from my scalp to my face, neck and stomach from the allergic reaction to the localized morphine. I wanted to take some benedryll but was unable to get to the upstairs bathroom medicine cabinet.

At night I would lay in the dark, because the only downstairs light had a switch on the floor that I couldn’t reach. The ice had run out in my ice machine the day after my partner left and I realized I had forgotten to ask him to buy more. As the dark descended over the room faces would seem to appear from behind the furniture, or I would hear noises from upstairs. Awash in paranoia, I constantly worried at night that someone was in the apartment with me.

I had a feral cat named Prickly Pete, and during my first day home she hid somewhere upstairs, terrified of me, the CPM, and a large balloon arrangement my team from work had sent. By the early morning hours of my second day home, she was emboldened enough to sneak down stairs and assess the situation. Sensing the balloons, which were drooping from helium loss, were sleeping, she snuck up on the kitchen counter and then dived into the middle of the arrangement, popping the balloons. I huddled under my comforter, certain someone was shooting at me.

The first two days home by myself I was focused on getting through the next hour, and that kept me going. By the third day, I couldn’t focus anymore. I was exhausted, the pain seemed to be getting worse instead of better, and the isolation was filling me with despair. I had my surgery during Thanksgiving week, so the few people that I knew in the area were away or with family. In my impaired state I was convinced there was no one I could call to help me.

****

3 a.m., day 3.

This is all your fault, I thought to myself. If you hadn’t had a motorcycle. If you had insurance. If you hadn’t been so fucking proud of yourself running through the pain. If you had pushed your doctors instead of accepting their diagnoses because that’s what you wanted to hear.

Now everything is gone. Your career is going to go to shit and you’ll never be able to pay your medical bills. You won’t be able to leave your job because you’ll never get insurance again. Your partner is going to leave you. The only thing you’ve always succeeded in, running? Well, that’s gone too. You’ll never walk like a normal person. You’re going to reject the meniscus, and this will have all been for nothing. The pain is never going to go away.

It will never be morning.

*****

In military strategy it is advisable to attack your adversary in the early hours of the morning because that’s when people are the most vulnerable. This strategy is borne out by scientific studies that show as the night gets darker, before the sun rises, people are slower to respond to the world around them, and their decision making abilities deteriorate.

At 3 a.m. on day 3 I decided I was going to kill myself. The thought of enduring even 10 more minutes of the pain was unbearable, and I knew I had lost or fucked up everything that mattered to me. The only way to stop the pain was to stop everything.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around the room. How was I going to do it? I glanced over at the ocean, 40 feet below the cliff where my apartment building sat. At the bottom of the cliff were many large rocks.

In the short time I had lived in that apartment at least one tourist had died on the cliff, walking too close to the edge. The grass appeared solid but, underneath, was unstable. I’ll jump off the cliff, I decided, and began the slow process of un-strapping my leg from the CPM.

I got myself to the side of the bed, reached for my crutches, and then realized something. I couldn’t get to the cliff. My apartment was on the second story of the apartment building, and I couldn’t negotiate the steps down to the cliff with the soft cast. There was a service elevator, which I had taken up after my surgery, but it required a key that was kept in the manager’s office. On the first floor.

Cursing, I looked around the room again. In the dark I could see the balloon arrangement, now decimated by Prickley. The thin ribbons tied to the balloons would not be strong enough to strangle myself with, I determined. I had 20 Tylenol, but given the amount of them I was taking a day, I knew that would do nothing. I thought about the kitchen. I didn’t have any sharp knives or small electrical appliances to electrocute myself with because neither my partner nor I knew how to cook. I thought for a moment that I could electrocute myself with the CPM, but it was too big to carry and too big to fit into the kitchen sink, the only receptacle I could get to that could be filled with water. I didn’t have poison, razors, or even a lighter.

I had nothing.

I started to cry. Through my tears I could see the waves picking up in the ocean. It was now 4 am. In another hour the surfers would be showing up at the punch bowl. I was filled with hatred for them, walking leisurely down the beach with their boards, floating out in the water, and then having breakfast on the boardwalk at Zelda’s before carrying on with their lives. They would be driving cars, working, going to the gym, eating pizza at Pizza My Heart, hanging out in the evening with their partners, talking and laughing. I would be sitting alone, doing nothing, unable to leave the confines of the bottom floor of my apartment.

Then I noticed something. Just a few feet off shore, a school of dolphins was swimming in the surf. There were at least 30 of them, maybe more, fins bobbing in and out of the water as they played in the rolling waves. At that moment the sun appeared, a faint yellow line on the edge of the ocean, gradually rising and making the dolphin fins glow.

That’s what I’ll do, I thought to myself.

I’ll swim.