Cincinnati | Elbrecht's Corpuscle

Nine Lives… part II

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Elbrecht

[Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape with the fall of Icarus”, ca. 1558]

In case you missed it: Nine Lives… part I

To recap Lives 1-4…

#1: Pneumonia-induced bubble boy survives on Atari and Jell-O

#2: Asthma and Animal Allergies combine to nearly suffocate my ascendance into teenagerhood.

#3: Tracheitis can nearly kill me, but it can’t keep me from dancing with a Debutante.

#4: Semi-Survivor… German-formulated Panzer tank (aka The Ghetto Sled) prevents death on the highway.

Life #5: Ended at age 22. After surviving four years at an alcohol-soaked university and burning through two lives, I spent the summer between undergrad and grad school living in Cincinnati. Due to my desire to avoid returning to Lexington for three months, my buddy Gib had offered a bed in his folk’s place as a way-station between earning my Bachelor’s degree and an attempt to go into even Higher Education.

After cozily sleeping til 11AM, one morning I awoke to find that I was having trouble breathing, but this was unlike anything I had experienced in my previous four lives. I quickly ran through my routine of airway-saving measures, but nothing alleviated the difficulty I was having.

Alarmed by my obvious distress, Gib and I hopped in his car and went to the nearest Urgent Treatment Center. The young doctor manning the office took one look into my mouth and his jaw hit the floor. With his pupils dilated to the size of nickels, he immediately insisted I rush to the hospital; he’d never seen such a large tonsil.

I tried to calm him down as he attempted to convince me of my imminent doom. He provided a pen-light and mirror; I could then see my left tonsil was so swollen that the back of my throat was barely visible. I continued my insistence for not wanting to rush to the hospital. He looked at me incredulously. But I was so relieved it was only a pulsating tonsil, not a swollen trachea, bronchi, or alveoli causing his (and my) concern.

He eventually relented and gave me some antibiotics and an appointment to see an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor in two days. And a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

On Monday I went to my appointment, where the nurse echoed the young doc’s assessment: I had the grand-daddy of pulsating tonsils. The ENT doctor entered the room, asked me to hold on to the arms of the chair like my life depended on it, and grabbed a needle which he plunged into the swollen mass.

He retracted it, looked puzzled, and admitted he had expected it to burst. But only a small trickle of blood had exited. Disappointed, he gave me a different antibiotic prescription, some pain medication (Codeine), insisted that I go on a liquid diet, and asked for me to return the following Monday. And also provided a stern warning that if I began feeling worse that I HAD to go to the hospital.

Gib and I stopped by the pharmacy and filled my prescriptions on the way home. The Codeine knocked me out cold. So much so that I spent the next week sleeping on the couch in the TV room. In the same clothes. Every day. I couldn’t even make it up the stairs to the bed because I was so drowsy. Our friends would come over and ask if I was dying.

Each day, Gib would run out to Mickey D’s and grab me a vanilla milk shake. It doubled as a vehicle for my antibiotics and Codeine, as well as a cooling force against the warm pulsations. After quietly sucking it down, I would roll back over, and go back to being nearly comatose.

When the following Monday finally arrived, Gib’s mom offered to take me back to the ENT. With my appointment at 11AM, I rolled off the couch at 10AM, stumbled upstairs, took a quick shower and changed my clothes. As I clumsily made my way downstairs in a Codeine-induced haze, I felt like I needed to cough.

So I reared back and tried to clear my throat as if a hair ball was waiting to be expelled.

The result was a barely audible pop accompanied with a release of pressure; I could only assume it was my tonsil exploding. Almost instantaneously, I could feel the now-former contents of my left tonsil pouring down my throat.

The feeling induced my gag reflex, so I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a little Dixie cup, and promptly filled it with the pus-blood mixture from my tonsil.

The Mum (aka Gib’s mom) still insisted she take me to the ENT to make sure I wasn’t in need of some sort of surgery and stitches from the explosion. Thankfully, I wasn’t. But the doc still poked another needle into the tonsil, hoping for a secondary explosion, which did not occur. Apparently my hack-cough had expelled everything into my stomach or the Dixie cup.

[Note: Obviously, this End of Life wasn’t as traumatic as #4… however, I did have left over Codeine from this experience, which I subsequently used one night about a year later while drinking beers with a girl I was “dating” named Jasmine. My body could not handle this volatile mixture. Medically, no one’s body should be able to handle this volatile mixture. It felt as if every orifice of my body needed to expel whatever contents were within. Based on the sounds coming from my bathroom, my roommates could have only assumed I had contracted Ebola and would need to be scraped from the tile floor in the morning… Life Lesson Learned: Never, Ever, mix alcohol and prescription pain meds… Or date women whose name will automatically make your friends think you met her at a strip club.]

[P.S. Note: Remember, say NO to drugs. And women with stripper names.]

Life #6: Ended at age 28. While in the midst of applying to medical school, my girlfriend of 3.5 years, who doubled as my best friend, decided that spending the rest of her life with me wasn’t going to make her happy any more. It was completely unexpected and obliterated the limits of my coping mechanisms. The aftermath was not pretty. I spent three months living by myself in the duplex we had shared, leaving incredibly early in the morning and returning only to sleep. The time between was filled with work, exercise, and wanderlust, leading me into random neighborhoods of Boston.

However, the break-up itself wasn’t the reason Life #6 ended… though it did represent the meta-physical end to a life I expected to lead. More so, Life #6 ended because the person who emerged out of the depths of those three months was a new “me”.

Those three months, which were book-ended by her departure and my younger brother moved in, were best characterized as “Hepatitis and He-Man.” With my life suddenly devoid of its biggest asset, I would spend Friday and Saturday nights indulging in the company provided by my friends or the Enormous Room in Cambridge. These shenanigans would be off-set by the legendary-in-my-own-mind workout sessions I found myself completing at the gym on the subsequent day.

On a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I would often slowly begin to rouse myself, eat a light meal, and pack my bag for the gym. When I got there, I was a beast. All of the carbohydrates (and pain) I’d ingested overnight were begging to be burned away. I obliged by conducting my own personal indoor triathlons (torture sessions) over the next several hours. I had never so effortlessly pushed my body to its limits. Using the elliptical machine as my run, a stationary bike, and swimming laps in the pool, I escaped from my world of heartache and hepatitis. The endorphins I felt kept my mind at ease. The fatigue I usually felt after an hour of exercise never arrived. The sore muscles were completely absent. The willingness to quit had evaporated.

Things that had previously limited me, in mind, body, and spirit were no longer present. And I felt like I could accomplish anything I put in front of myself. This belief and the limits I overcame have served me well in the subsequent years.

And from that experience, emerged Life #7… which thankfully, by my count, I’m still on. It’s been good so far, filled with medical knowledge and clinical skills, amazing adventures in the Caribbean… Miami… Boston… Chicago… nYc… Columbus, countless new friends, and a life full of opportunity.

But I must say, in the future it would be nice to avoid any future brushes with absent airway induced death. And vehicular assaults. And soul-crushing misadventures of the heart.

Especially since I only have two lives left after this one.

Let the Good Times Roll

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Elbrecht

When Wade and Lindz tied the knot three years ago, The Black Eyed Peas “I gotta feeling” ended up being the theme song and inspiration for An Ode to Cincinnati. I wrote that story in honor of my friends in attendance and how my opinion of the Queen City, always adversarial in nature, had turned 180 degrees. The idea of living in Cincinnati had never appealed to me, despite so many close friends living there, but when I witnessed their joy as group that evening, living the lives they had imagined for themselves, I couldn’t help but have a change of heart.

Two weekends ago I found myself in Boston at another wedding and the theme from three years ago, “I gotta feeling”, was the second song of the evening. I was transported back to that night at Wade & Lindz’s wedding and remembered the joy of seeing so many friends in one place. When I returned from my momentary experiment with time travel, I realized I was among the second group of friends that had been incubated because of a lone friendship.

Gib, one of my freshman year roommates, had grown up in Cincinnati, only a stone’s throw from Oxford, Ohio where we learned the joys of life. Besides being a good buffer between our third roommate, Gib provided me the opportunity to meet his already existent group of friends from Cincy who had also found themselves in Oxford. Several of them had attended high school together or knew each other from the ‘burbs, but were quick to allow outsiders like me join their Band of Brothers. Fat, Wade, J-Dawg, Hoj, Cole, Zelch, and Hern were all there that evening three years ago, and I’d found myself among them because of Gib, a lynchpin of a man among men.

On this evening, I found myself in Boston because of the other lynchpin in my life, Juice. Over the course of my four years in college, I had progressively spread my wings and made random friendships, but Gib and Juice were the two branches that had provided me the most opportunities to meet new people. Juice was like Gib, another tall, lanky Ohio kid, but he hailed from Medina, in the upper eastern recess of Ohio.

And like Gib, he had a group of close friends, who while they didn’t join him in Oxford, were likely to visit at a moment’s notice. Juice was also accepting of me into his home on multiple occasions over the years, as Gib had been, where I quickly became a part of the Medina boys’ lives.

While that evening was a celebration of Beeker’s wedding, I was reunited with this second Band of Brothers from Medina: Riegans, Slaby, BillyJ, and Riiitz [Jinx, Daryl and my brother Will had also managed to finagle their way into this troupe by way of Juice]. Two groups of friends, tied together for me by two different lynchpins that I’d somehow been fortunate enough to cross paths with.

As “I gotta feeling” faded into “Gagnam style”, the parallels between these two groups slowly came to the forefront of my mind. While I may have been the lone common link between these two nights, I can’t help but see myself as an observer, rather than as an integral part of their stories. I’ve effortlessly floated amongst these two Bands, consisting of lawyers, physicians, engineers, accountants, chemists, and businessmen.

While each of us has managed to carve out our own lives, this night was in celebration of Beeker and Beekerette’s union, as Wade and Lindz’s night had been three years before. And each wedding brought together two distinct, yet somehow alike, groups of men.

Two Bands of Brothers, each celebrating one member’s nuptials, and like the days of our youth, letting the good times roll.

An Ode to Cincinnati

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Elbrecht

I never thought I would utter the following statement: “I was in Cincinnati this weekend… and I liked it.” I came to this conclusion while on the dance floor at Wade and Lindz’s wedding listening to The Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feeling.” It may not have been the most obvious thought, but at that instant, my 11 year disdain for the Queen City had come to a screeching halt.

Most of my ill-conceived repugnance for Cincinnati stemmed from my antagonistic approach to rooting against my college friends’ sports teams, namely the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals. A large portion of my college friends hail from Cincinnati and as a consequence, my unadulterated love for St. Louis sports teams created a stable base from which could be fostered a lasting friendship. I simply rooted for the Reds to lose to any and every other Major League team and watched as my die-hard Bengals fans/friends endured over a decade of horrific mediocrity.

Their pain and anguish of watching Akili Smith interceptions, Wily Mo Pena strike outs, and Chad OchoCinco’s slowly disapating touch down dances, made me happy. My joy stemmed from the fact that they could then retort with calling me a bandwagon Boston fan and pointing out the tragic deaths of Cardinals players. [Note: referencing the tragic death of a sports team’s player is only appropriate after enduring another 3-13 Bengals season.]

As a result, I came to view Cincinnati, the birthplace and/or home of Gib, Fat, Wade, Hern, Zelch, Hoj, Jdawg, Wade, Cole and a myriad of other respectable Cincinnatians, as a desolate wasteland of losing and misery. Even after spending a few joyful holidays and the summer after college graduation in Cincinnati, I still viewed it with disdain. It didn’t matter to me that so many of my friends called it home. Some of this disdain may have subconsciously stemmed from my own hatred for my boring hometown, Wichita, KS, but despite this self-awareness, I still considered Cincy to be another boring example of Midwest America.

When I moved to Boston in the summer of 2004, I felt as if I had been jolted alive and awakened from some sort of zombie-like slumber in which I feel most of the Midwest is entrenched. My return trips to Cincinnati were for the weddings of my friends, who had returned to Cincy after graduation to start their adult lives with jobs, to find lovely women with whom they could spend the rest of their days, and to start families. This is not what I had in mind. Even when I returned to Cincy to bear witness to these blessed events, I still couldn’t help but think of Cincinnati as a boring place to live, and while I didn’t begrudge the lives of my friends, I didn’t think that an existence in Cincinnati was for me.

So when I was getting my grove on to “I Gotta Feeling” and watching my friends and their wives dance around Wade and Lindz, imbibe alcohol with reckless abandon, and generally have an unbelievalbly happy time, I had another one of those jolts.

I looked out into the Cincinnati skyline from Paul Brown stadium and had my opinion of Cincinnati completely reversed. Maybe it was the heat of the moment and seeing the smiles and joy on the faces of people whom I love and respect, but when I woke up the next morning, it was still there. My opinion had changed and it was all seemingly because of The Black Eyed Peas. Indeed, I got a feeling.

Wade and Lindz are the second to last of my Cincinnati friends to get married. First it was Zelch and MJ right after college. Then Matt and Jo two years later. And then Jeremy and Tiff two years ago. Cole and Mary Lynn weren’t far behind. Gib and K-T tied the knot last fall and were followed quickly by Hoj and Kristin. And now Wade and Lindz. [Note: Hern and Coll are getting married in 3 months, but I’ll be studying medicine on an island and won’t be able to make it back.]

As several friends made the observation that they did not know when they would see me next, a stunning reality began to percolate in my brain and culminated in my “a-ha” moment on the dance floor.

No longer can I associate Cincinnati with losing and misery. No longer can I think of it as a boring example of Midwest life. No longer can I return once a year to see another friend get married and revel in old friendships renewed, starting up again where we had left off a year earlier, and eagerly looking forward to the next awesome occasion to celebrate.

Certainly, there will be more occasions to celebrate, as families are started and expanded upon, job promotions are achieved and companies are started, and maybe there will even be a Bengals Super Bowl party.

But I most likely won’t be there for those celebrations. I’ll be busy studying for a Pathology exam, reviewing flashcards on Psychopharmacology, or working late hours into the nite during clinical rotations or as a Resident. It would have been a comfortable excuse before that moment at Wade and Lindz wedding at Paul Brown stadium.

I might still have to use those excuses for some time as I begin the next portion of my life as a medical student, but I will truly miss those experiences. At that moment, Cincinnati was no longer the home of the Reds and the Bengals or a stifling example of the Midwest. It is the home of my friends, people with whom I created relationships with over a decade ago. So I can no longer use such a myopic view to cast opinions of Cincy. It is a bit disappointing in retrospect that I held such an idiotic and sophmoric opinion for such a long time, but it is definitely true: hindsight is 20/20.

Now I don’t have to “find a reason” to visit Cincinnati. Some of my best friends in the world are there. What other reason should I need?

I don’t have the opportunity to wait until another friend gets married. There won’t be a “Save the Date: Hoj’s Big Promotion Party 2011” coming in the mail. I won’t be getting a “Gib and K-T made their 1^stMillion Dance-Party Extravaganza” or “Fat and Jo’s Triumphant Cincinnati Return House Warming”. Those aren’t the type of things my friends are going to be sending invitations for. Those events will occur, but when you have a close group of friends like mine, who have grown up together, been each others best friends for the last 11 years or longer, and see each other fairly regularly, those events won’t need much pre-planning. They will just happen. And I probably won’t be there.

No, don’t be thinking all crazy and believe that I’m seriously considering moving to Cincinnati any time soon. That thought has not entered my mind. It is simply that my high-horse finally died and I can see my friends from Cincinnati for who they really are: a group of special people who happen to be fortunate enough to grow up together, involve other random people in their lives (thanks Gib!), and now have the wonderful opportunity to continue on into adulthood and parenthood as life-long friends.

I don’t think there are too many things more special than that. Except for maybe a Bengals Super Bowl victory. But I won’t be holding my breath on that one. Instead, I’ll make it a point to visit a great group of friends in the years to come, most of whom happen to live in Cincinnati.