The Skype call and the sun and the cracking sound.
Sitting in the low-slung rattan chair that we got just after arriving in Zürich, the spring sun was streaming in through the balcony door and reflecting off the MacBook in my lap. It’s hard to see Christian, my colleague, on the monitor at the other end of the Skype call, so I shift in the chair allowing the sun to hit my face instead of the screen. I hear a faint cracking sound. It’s different from the crackling of the rattan—a sort of internal resonance that most sounds don’t have.
I occasionally have coughing spells. They usually don’t last particularly long, but sometimes they’re persistent. It had been a lot worse though, like in Budapest, having to stop on the walk up to Fisherman's Bastion; bending over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath. The Prednisone was supposed to help with the inflammation, but it wasn’t a miracle, I guess.
Anyway, on this day, the day of the Skype call and the sun and the cracking sound, I cough. Then, a small pinch in my side, under my right arm.
Cough, pinch.
Cough, pinch.
Cough, pinch.
It’s nothing, but still.
A week later the bronchoscopy procedure room was gray. With a huge TV hanging from the ceiling. “You must count backwards from ten,” the Swiss-German anesthesiologist proclaims, a little louder than necessary.
"I actually enjoy this part, to be honest," I say. "The counting backwards and floating." She doesn't acknowledge my comment.
"Ten...nine…”
The doctor, in his surgical mask and face shield, leans over into my narrowing field of vision and asks: “So how did you fracture your ribs?”
“eight…seven...six…”
