The True Story of Steve’s Gropey Recovery

“Mr. Libbey, we know you wouldn’t use this downstairs,” said the freshly bottle-blond nurse scoldingly, brandishing a translucent plastic urinal. (”Brandish” may not seem to agree with “translucent plastic urinal,” but in this case it is the most appropriate word possible.) Steve waved it away. It sounded like there had been a long-standing battle about peeing in the tube thing. As she tucked the offending object in the bathroom, she warned, “You’re going to have to urinate in there before we’ll let you go. I’m telling you now.”

Steve grunted and then suddenly recognized me. He had been moved from stretcher to bed, displaying a shocking lack of modesty along the way, all the while smiling at me as if I were a pleasing piece of hospital furniture. I stood at his bedside, nurses still in the room, and he turned up the corners of his lips into a broad, crooked, slightly frightening smile.

“C’mere!” he slurred, affectionately and put a very dry, medicine-tasting tongue in my mouth while planting a clumsy palm on my chest (landing partly on my breast) and squeezing.

He remembers none of this, so I am writing here, at his request, to preserve his indignity for posterity.

(contributed, with capital letters, by heather reddy.)