The Conclusion of "After Christmas"

The moral of this story is: Don’t try to see Manhattan in one day.

Picking up (and finally concluding) this story, I take you back to December 27th, which is when I got home after a fun family Christmas visit down South.

Note to readers: I was perfectly healthy when I flew to Atlanta on Friday, 12/24. By the time I returned home 2-1/2 days later, I had a miserable head cold, gastric flu, and a pulled muscle in my neck.

It was that day (12/27) that I heard about the Indian Ocean tragedy that claimed over 150,000 lives and reshaped several continental coastlines. The 9.0-magnitude underwater quake and resulting tsunamis wreaked a devastation that defies human comprehension. I must admit that, after seeing the destruction on the news, my pains and troubles seemed much less significant.

By Wednesday or Thursday, I was able to start eating and working again, and was doing my best to get better before my friend Vonceil’s 12/30 arrival to the Big Apple from Mississippi. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was too sick for her visit, so I psyched myself into a quick recuperation.

Weeks earlier, Vonceil had sent me a list of around 25-30 places she wanted to see in NYC, and I had mapped them all out nicely in Microsoft Streets & Trips, printing out pretty, labeled color maps for us. I was really excited about her 3-day trip. Oh, and the weather was absolutely fantastic! I couldn’t get over the mild temperatures we had. We were so lucky!

That first evening we walked all over midtown, along with hundreds of thousands of other people who were here for New Year’s weekend. Among other places, we saw St. Patrick’s Cathedral (my first time inside that stunning church), Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and a red and green lit-up Empire State Building. It was the eve of New Year’s Eve, so Manhattan was packed. We squished our way home through the people in Times Square.

By the end of that first evening, my neck and shoulder had started hurting. When I awoke the next morning, I hurt so badly I thought I was gonna die. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Seemed like more than a pulled muscle, at that point.

To make a long story short, Vonceil and I saw nearly all of Manhattan by the time she left at 4am the following Monday morning. She kept insisting we’d walked 15 miles altogether. I actually napped a total of two times while she was here—more naps than I’ve had in five years or so. Between infrequent trips home (for me to apply heat and ice to my throbbing neck), we wore ourselves out seeing the sites. We even stood in line two hours at Lombardi’s in SoHo to eat the world’s best pizza in America’s first-ever pizza parlor. And one of the highlights was Vonceil finally meeting her policeman friend Kahn, whom she’d known for 11 or 12 years but had never met face-to-face. That was pretty neat.

The coolest places we saw were the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. Both are overwhelmingly large—you can’t even begin to see either in a day. The space show at the history museum was so spectacular that Vonceil was moved to tears. Narrated by Tom Hanks, it is a show inside the planetarium that allows you to see the world from a spaceship rocketing out into space from Manhattan. You fly further and further out into the universe until all of our local galaxies combined appear smaller than the size of a pinhead—with millions of new stars being created every second. Wow! I’ve never felt more insignificant in my life. What a truly thought-provoking and surreal experience. (After that my neck pain seemed even less significant—even though it didn’t FEEL any less significant.)

Anyway, she and I had a blast exploring various areas of Manhattan together. There’s just so much to see that I feel really lucky to actually live here and be able to truly experience New York!

By Monday I was unable to function physically. The neck and shoulder pain was unbearable and created nausea and headaches that only compounded the problem. Vonceil had joked, “I broke Susie!” That’s how I felt. I couldn’t sleep, and to this day there is no position I can get into that is painless. It will probably take me four days to write this blog. Ack!!

Ultimately, after a miserable day in Roosevelt Hospital last week that included two separate blood lettings, two lumbar punctures (the first didn’t go so well), a urine test, a CAT scan, and an MRI, I found out that I had “cervical radiculitis.” As my sister said, “That’s ridiculous!” I must agree.

My C3-C4 disk is herniated. And to think I’d gone running all over Manhattan in that condition! Holy molies. This was not good news. It meant that my years-old spondylosis - (a fancy word for degenerative disk disease) - had moved north, migrating from my lower lumbar to my neck.

So I missed two more days of work on my new job after Vonceil left last week. How stressful is that?! Fortunately, I have a very understanding boss who puts my health ahead of the job. I’m so grateful for that, in light of some of my past bosshole experiences.

I actually once had a boss who made me come into work for a meeting after an emergency double wisdom tooth extraction. I sat there in silent pain with an icepack on my face for what proved to be a pretty useless 2.5-hour meeting. To top that off, my boss interrogated me the following week about “why” I scheduled my emergency tooth infection for the same day as the meeting. I kid you not. Ah, but those days are gone, and I’m lucky to work in a great organization now.

In closing, I must say that being in midtown, Manhattan, on New Year’s Eve was quite an experience. I’ve never seen so many cops in one place in my life. There were a total of 15,000 police officers in Times Square, and nearly 1,000,000 other people. Vonceil said she'd never felt safer.

Around 6pm that night, Vonceil and I filmed a lot of this excitement on Broadway, where the crowd had already packed itself in as far back as 52nd street. We ate dinner at a Greek restaurant over on 9th Ave just before venturing home to my apartment. Right at midnight we could hear the crowds outside voicing the final countdown in unison—even from my 10th floor apartment with closed windows. It was such a cool feeling just being so close to all that energy and excitement!

This brings us to New Year’s 2005. Happy New Year, everyone, and always remember that no matter what, help is on the way!