If I Should Die Before My Shift Ends
Ever since the great erectile dysfunction hysteria of the last week of August, 2013, I’ve written very little about my health in any public forum. I always figured my next medical update would involve a double foot amputation because I can’t leave those fucking gummi bears alone. Alas, no, something far more insidious than rampantly uncontrolled blood sugar or a suddenly flaccid cock when I’m trying to make time with my favorite stripper forced me to consider the inevitability of my demise and then write a column about it.
A couple days ago, I suffered from what I can only consider to be a mock heart attack, what my wife dismisses as a mild panic attack, and what the emergency room quacks deemed to be a slight case of hyperthyroidism run amok.
I don’t think I’m ruining the story here, mentioning up front that I survived the medical episode. But last Tuesday, I wasn’t so fucking sure, you know. Before I get too far ahead of myself, I’ll lead by saying that I’ve reached a certain point in my life where I’ve mostly come to a bleak acceptance of what I’m forced to do for a living, mostly chroming hydraulic cylinders. I’ve made peace with the twelve-hour workdays, sixty-to-sixty-five-hour work weeks, exhaustion as a permanent state of being, with a stoicism that could be mistaken for utter stupidity at a glance. Last week, the stress finally got the better of me.
The last week of the month is a special time for the employees of Hydra Hydraulics. Special because the incompetent managers try to shoehorn three weeks’ worth of work into four days and act like we the operators are somehow responsible for their clear lack of planning and leadership.
“Just work your magic, Polish Hammer.” This is what the boss tells me.
Which I take to mean, cut as many corners as you can to get the product out the door using incredibly shoddy equipment and fixtures that nobody wants to spend the money replacing or even the time repairing. Goddam, I can feel my blood pressure elevating just writing this shit. Of course, this is when the quality assurance personnel who waste most of the month gleefully playing on their phones or pontificating on the Crimson Tide’s latest football game decide to descend upon the chrome shop and one hundred percent inspect every part.
I will tell you this, I have been in the manufacturing business for thirty years, never have I once manufactured a product in any capacity that could withstand a hundred percent inspection. I’ve hit eighty percent a time or two before an out of spec dimension was discovered (and then dismissed from my mind). As far as I’m concerned, quality inspectors can fuck right off and take their gauges with them.
So, what happens, the cats in assembly who don’t feel like working any more than I do, starts rejecting parts for flaws that were perfectly acceptable only days earlier. Quality looks closer, they decide I couldn’t run an acceptable part if my life depended on it. So, I get angry. And since it’s socially unacceptable to express one’s anger by crushing heads with a mallet, I internalize my rage until it feels as though my entire body is going to come shuddering apart like scaffolding erected by my knuckle-headed son. My heart started slam-dancing in my chest. And I started getting worried. I’d been anticipating this sort of cardiac behavior since I turned fifty. You can’t eat Hamburger Helper half your life without expecting your arteries to coagulate like wet pixie sticks.
The fingers on my left hand treated me to a bit of numbness. A weird, pulsing sensation, like a greasy, knotted dishrag being yanked up and down the artery in my neck alarmed me. The obligatory pressure squeezing my chest ensued bringing along with it an all around sense of calamity. I felt pale, if that makes sense, more pale than I felt even when I used to work for a plumbing company on the southside of Chicago.
“I got to hit the bathroom,” I told my son. He’d been partnered up with me in the chrome shop close to four months, now, and was used to my disappearing acts. We alternated bathroom breaks throughout the shift. Neither one of us could survive an entire shift without constant fifteen-minute microbreaks.
By the time I reached my wife’s office (sadly, she also works at Hydra Hydraulics as a production scheduler), I was so certain, my life was at an end, I was mentally compiling my last will and testament (burn me and everything I own in a massive pyre, divide the ashes equally).
I busted into her office, wild-eyed. She regarded me calmly. I often busted in to her office, wild-eyed.
“I’m having a heart attack,” I said.
“Really?” Nonplussed. “I seriously just had a panic attack earlier. I had to go into the bathroom and take my bra off and sit for ten minutes. I literally thought my heart was going to explode.”
“Take me to the hospital, now!”
“I was really scared for a second. I prayed to Jesus to get me through this. After about ten minutes, my heart rate started easing back to normal, than I was able to breathe again. It felt like I held my breath the entire time.”
“Jesus ain’t gonna save me now. He’s the one that got me into this mess by allowing me to hire back into Hydra.”
“That didn’t have anything to do with Jesus.”
Nothing about this conversation calmed me in the least. In fact, the shooting pains going up and down my arm led me to believe cardiac arrest was imminent and the last place I wanted my restless spirit to spend eternity was this goddamned cesspool, listening to incompetent jackasses make stupid decisions.
“Hospital, now!” I spat.
I was out of her office and near the side factory door when she finally caught up with me. She looked worried at the very least, which was reassuring in a funerary sort of way.
“Which hospital?”
“Marshall Medical North.” A decision which surprised my wife since the hospital had a track record only slightly better than Northside Veterinary’s euthanasia room.
Halfway there, away from Hydra Hydraulics, away from the scuttled chrome shop and the rejected parts and the grim certainty I’d be working twelve hour shifts the rest of my fucking life, my heart rate went back to normal, my breathing regulated, and I was back to feeling like the good ole, not a care in the world Polish Hammer.
I couldn’t let my wife know this. So, I continued regarding her with the pouty expression of what I imagined someone wrestling with mortality after pissing away an entire life not very well lived might convey.
In the emergency room, I tried to downplay the episode so they wouldn’t shoot me up with any sort of medication that would actually induce a heart attack.
“On a scale of one to ten, what would you say your pain level is right now?” The nurse asked.
“Existentially, a definite ten. If you mean, literal pain like a broken arm or something… one.”
“I see.”
“I had a panic attack earlier today,” my wife said. And the description of her episode continued for the next half hour while my blood pressure blipped up and down like the worst game of Pong in the world.
By the time, the doctor came into the room to tell me I need to start back taking my thyroid medication, my wife had told her panic attack story to six separate nurses and a doctor in training. “What is he in here for?” They’d ask.
“Oh, he just can’t handle a little work stress.”
And then they’d smile thinly at me while I tried to catch a few minutes of sleep.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
