My hospital stay in London is as good a place as any for a rapidly-edited montage. No words necessary (saving the cost of paying actors and actresses for speaking lines in what, ultimately, will be a cameo appearance). The previous scene focuses on the hands. Maybe the camera blurs, or maybe it's a slow fade to black. We could probably kick the soundtrack in again at this point, another song inexorably linked to my months in Lancaster, This Corrosion by The Sisters of Mercy.
We may have to work on a special, shortened re-mix, because the whole point of the montage in the first place is that while there is activity in that London hospital -- doctors doctoring, nurses nursing, mothers mothering -- it is neither a beginning nor an end, a simple two day transition between where I was and where I needed to be. We've stopped moving. For the first time in about a week, there is nothing to do except wait until Saturday, when the next flight -- Pan Am this time -- will send us across the Atlantic.
Stop-motion photography, almost, meant to compare and contrast the sudden lack of inertia with the ongoing hustle and bustle both inside and outside my body. There is a camera on a boom where the ceiling would be in this tiny room. I will be motionless, for the most part, tossing and turning occassionally in the bed. Time passes. People enter and exit. Strips of sunlight crawl up the far wall, then disappear, overpowered by flourescents. Food is brought to me, consumed, discarded. You can catch the backbeat, the steady bass, and it almost feels like a dance. The camera has been moving steadily closer to my chest. The lighting appears to change again, daylight, maybe, grey and muted. The camera is close enough, now, that everything happening around me is nameless, faceless, a blur of hands with thermometers and blood pressure cuffs and tiny paper cups filled with medicine, needles and vials, blankets and pillows. The slowy, steady drip of clear liquid from a bag above my head, down a plastic tube, winding into my arm. The camera follows the tube, loses focus, then shoots into my body.
Here we take a cinematic tour of my bloodstream. I don't know that we need to show good blood versus bad blood, or what that would even look like. What the budget would look like for the necessary special effects. But we've got music, and a steady beat, and we already know that we've lost enough time to unexpected delays. We can let the camera linger somewhat. It is quiet here. Blood is pumping. Things are working, even if they're not.
The chorus repeats itself in the background: hey, now, hey now now, sing this corrosion to me. Over and over, like a hymn.
And once, maybe twice, as both music and images fade, four words that resonate above the others, a reflection of the optimism that still managed to prevail as we prepared ourselves to fly west over the Atlantic, the beginning of our journey, really, although in many ways it would feel like the end:
Like a healing hand.
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