Picture Me In a Hospital...

I was a sickly kid.  Not always ill, but somehow always maladied-and maybe that's not even a word. But I kept strep throat until my tonsils were removed as an adut. (Twice actually. Don't ask.) My chicken pox scarred, I picked up lice at school, I managed to impale myself on a George Nelson clock, I spent a good portion of third grade in a holster contraption when I broke my collar bone and dislocated my shoulder. Klutzy and sick. So it went. And with every small tragedy I was tasked with living through, there was my grandmother pouring camphorated oil all over it.
I spent a lot of time with her growing up.  For most people maybe that would mean I did a lot of lap sitting and eating chocolate chip cookies, but she wasn't much for blue rinses and aprons. She was a groupie-threw card parties every Friday night full of musicians and industry types.  The only stuff that ever came out of her kitchen was fudge (?) and Gatorade coolers full of vodka and OJ. She was tall and thin and never greyed until the cancer came. She smoked filterless cigarettes with a cigarette holder. She had eight last names by the time she died. She was my everything, but she was not a very good caretaker.
There I laid on her sofa every time I was sick or injured, under the same blanket, listening to her read to me.  Not children's books or fairy tales, but stories from the newspaper about killer bees. (I remember distinctly that article said they'd be upon us by 2012. I was terrified. I tried to calculate how old I'd be and wondered if I'd still be alive by then.) I watched wildly inappropriate daytime TV with her and sometimes even HBO.  I would lay there and close my eyes tight and try to remember what it felt like when I wasn't sick. How it felt when I was "normal" and listening to my records or playing outside. I would tell her that and how I felt like the sickness was just crawling all over me and soaking into my blanket, and she would roll her eyes at my seven year old melodramas.
There was a particular time I had some sort of stomach bug.  I guess I was whining a bit too much for her liking, so she gave me a gigantic dill pickle and told me to eat it all-it would settle my stomach and make me feel better. So I tried.  And before I finished it I'd lost every bit of fluid in my body. From both ends.
I'm not sure if she knew that would happen and I'd feel a little better, or if she knew that would happen and I'd learn a lesson about wallowing and maintaining some dignity. Either way I've grown to love her brand of evil. And over the years she really did teach me a thing or two about being a lady that I stand by to this day.
Sometimes you just need to eat the fuck out of a dill pickle.