RECOVERING GRADY ADDICT

Many of you know that I have recently relocated to a new city. One of the facility contracts we have is a hospital, on the local Army base. Yesterday I was dispatched out to transfer a patient to the other VA Hospital, which from my understanding, is primarily a inpatient psychiatric facility with a few primary care offices. I arrived on the floor to get report from the nurse to find out that our patient was a 24 year old male, who was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. He returned from the Middle East with both his legs amputated, one just above the knee the other nearly to his hip. He "survived" an explosion, I assumed a buried bomb, landmine, or direct heavy fire. I didn't want to ask. The blast not only took his legs, but shattered his pelvis, which took months of surgeries and physical therapy to "recover" from. This last November he was discharged under disability. Since then he has been unable to cope with all the fallout of not only his injuries, his ne...

Just after 3am my phone awoke with back to back phone calls. Unusual for my phone to ring at odd hours of the night these days. It was a phone call I feared I would one day get. The person calling has been of significant importance in my life for almost a decade, and we have seen each other through some seriously rough times. When I saw who was calling, I first thought she and her girlfriend had probably had THE fight. But this, sadly, was not the case. She and I had, together and individually, bailed her little sister out time after time. She had been in and out of psychotic and abusive relationships, battled addiction since she was a young teenager, and had three precious children before she was 21. My friend and I both feared that one day we would get a call from some police department that little sister had died of an overdose, had been beaten to death by a boyfriend, or whatever. It was an unpleasant and heartbreaking thought, but we were realistic. We prayed that day would never ...

I had a late arrival home last night. 11:30 give or take a few minutes. As usual, I backed my crappy Kia into the space designated to my townhouse with a faded #13 painted on the asphalt. My eyesore of a car, currently missing the left rear door window (temporarily patched by an industrial sized black garbage bag), shared a single space with Lucy. Lord knows I have had enough pissy ass neighbors bitching about my household owning three vehicles and where we park them. Lucy was all snug in her parking place last night when I arrived home. Who is Lucy? Lucy was my 2005 Honda Shadow Aero 750 motorcycle. She was practically the one remaining material thing from my 4+ year relationship with Candice. A nice stretched frammed classic styled fat fendered cruiser, painted brugundy, with a suprisingly appealing factory chrome package. Lucy saw me through a nasty divorce, an even more ugly rebound, and all the follies associated with Jordan. She has carried me on the 2005 Trail of Tears ride, and...