HBO Therapy

I got the good news today that they found an opening on the hyperbaric oxygen therapy list, and I'll be starting the treatment this Thursday. Whoopie! I may be putting too much faith in what the treatment will do for me, but I'm so very sick of this half a year with wounds that just refuse to heal. In fact, to my eye, I can't see any improvement whatsoever in these dastardly holes in my leg. So, yes, I'm enthused about starting with the oxygen. Come on, bring it on. Freddie, the one I spoke with on the phone, will be my attending nurse. She went through a whole barrage of questions about my health, about the possible things that could go wrong. For example, I must not drink any carbonated soda before taking the dive; the bubbles would cause me huge gastric pain. Okay, I can relate to that. If there's an emergency and they have to speed my decompression, I could suffer a collapsed lung. I asked her what sort of emergency might prompt that—a fire, she said, or my having a heart attack or an anxiety attack. Okay, the likelihood of one of those is pretty slim and I'll take my chances. My mental image of a collapsed lung is silly: I envision my chest as caved in, both pecks sort of inversed. Nothing she said to me frightens me or makes me anxious. I just want to get started. Who knows, maybe it’ll make me feel like a kid again, maybe turn my hair brown again, cause me to lose these thirty pounds of blubber around my middle. Maybe I'll win a million bucks in the lottery. Oh, that's right, you have to buy a lottery ticket to win anything. I guess I'll settle for instant youth.