The Luna Park Gazette

I was walking home on Christmas night when I saw a young woman carrying her little daughter into a house near 71st Street. I’d never seen her before in my life, but as soon as the mother and I made eye contact, I smiled and wished her a merry Christmas. “Merry Christmas,” she replied. And, as I was walking by them, this adorable little girl called out after me. “Merry Christmas!” It was a perfect ending to a fabulous day. A little snow and we would have had a Hallmark movie moment. And then the sun came up. I was one of the few people in New York apparently who had to work on Friday and I managed to have a spectacularly awful day at the office. Every single thing I put my hand on went straight to hell, I made all sorts of bonehead mistakes, and after a while I was afraid to come out of my cubicle. It was a miracle the soda machine didn’t blow up when I dropped in my change. What’s really frustrating is that I hadn’t planned on being in the office on Friday. I was goi...

This was no way to spend Christmas Eve. Usually on the night before Christmas I like to go out on the town. Check out the holiday displays in Manhattan, take in the crowds of tourist that flood the city, and then hit a few bars to spread the good cheer…better known as getting plastered. This year, however, I sat in a crowed waiting room at Lutheran Medical Center hoping to get an audience with the surgeon who has been monitoring my condition since my trip to the hospital last month. I hated hanging around here on the day before the big holiday, but it was such a struggle to get this appointment that I couldn’t give it up. So I grabbed an empty chair and hoped someone would call my name sometime before midnight. The place was cramped and stuffy, and since this was a hospital, I fretted about all the horrible germs that were just itching to pounce on me. There were a number of people with kids and one couple wheeled around a frail elderly woman in a wheelchair who just had a few...

“ The Lord, before whom I have walked faithfully, will send his angel with you and make your journey a success. ”-- Genesis 24:40 What is it about this woman that makes me cry every time every time I speak with her? Nurse Jennifer called me again this week. She’s the nurse from my insurance company who has been checking up on me ever since I got out of the hospital last month. She made the first call the day after I had been discharged from Lutheran Medical Center. I was in such a fragile emotional state at the time that I started blubbering uncontrollably as she gave me all this great advice about making my apartment safe should I decide to have surgery. Later I thought Jennifer was calling solely as a company employee, making sure that I wasn’t needlessly racking up medical bills. However, I have since come to believe that this lovely woman has genuine goodness in her heart that has nothing to do with profit or loss. Each of our chats starts off the same way. Jennifer re...

I may not be feeling the holiday spirit at the moment, but I still managed to see my two favorite Christmas trees in the last two days. The trees at Rockefeller Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are the two big ones for me and I thought I wouldn’t see either one this year due to my ongoing medical misery. My viewing of the Rockefeller Center tree was a fluke, as I just happened to be riding the express bus down Fifth Avenue on Friday night when I looked to the right and there it was, climbing straight up into the sky. Traffic was moving so slowly that I got a pretty decent view of the tree and of Fifth Avenue, which was ablaze with lights and decorations. The air was so cold and the sidewalks were so clogged with humanity, that I was very glad to be sitting inside a warm bus. The only reason I was this far uptown on Friday was because I was seeing a specialist for a second opinion about my internal plumbing problems, which have cracked my personal Kris Kringle into a...

I heard a voice coming from somewhere behind me as the fog around my brain started to fade. “This guy’s got a long colon.” I suppose I should’ve thanked him, whoever he was, but I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not. I could feel all sorts of weird activity in and around my caboose, so I was either being probed by aliens or getting a colonoscopy. As things become clearer, I realized I was in Lutheran Medical Center and not having a much-too-close encounter. And the speaker over my shoulder was my gastroenterologist. This has been a week for doctors. In addition to seeing my internal medicine man, I also had to go to a pulmonologist for a breathing test to make sure I could handle being sedated for the colonoscopy. For the breathing test I had to wrap my mouth around a large tube—wow, this story is getting pretty twisted, ain’t it?—while a very nice young woman gave me commands like “big breath in!” and “breathe out quickly!” Once I passed that little ordeal I began the pr...