Free My Life, Deleted by Scott Bolzan Page A

to enjoy them. At the same time, I didn’t want my pain to distract or take away from Taylor’s day. I didn’t know the name for this emotion yet, but I was feeling guilty about my accident and how it was affecting my family.
    Taylor spent the rest of the morning and afternoon with her boyfriend, Anthony, while Joan and I relaxed and wrapped her presents: a bottle of Juicy Couture perfume and some designer clothes she’d wanted.
    That evening Joan and I took Taylor to P.F. Chang’s, her favorite Chinese restaurant, where Grant met us and behaved badly.
    Joan’s parents and Anthony joined us at the house for dessert and the opening of gifts.
    Joan had prepared me for what we did on Christmas, but she didn’t give me a heads-up about what happened next, and I didn’t like surprises. She turned off the lights in the kitchen, where we were sitting around the table, with an ice cream cake in the middle, and everyone started to sing. But there was only one problem: I did not know the words to the birthday song. Feeling very uncomfortable, I watched everyone else and tried to mimic the words by mouthing along. I’m sure I was way off, but I didn’t like looking stupid because it was such a basic tune, so I tried to appear as if I was keeping up.
    I soon learned that I could feel a little less overwhelmed and frustrated at how much I didn’t know by actively learning whatever I could in any way that I could. Watching TV seemed the simplest, fastest, and most comprehensive method, and it became like a life-sustaining medication that was just as important as my painkillers, if not more so. It also helped me cope while I suffered from severe insomnia.
    In the beginning I’d get so tired that I’d go to bed at 9:00 P.M. Joan lay down with me and rubbed my chest until I fell asleep, then left and came back to bed an hour or so later when she felt tired. At first I was scared when she got into bed with me, and although I wasn’t as uncomfortable with her touching me as I’d been in the hospital, I was still feeling uneasy about it. I wondered if I should say something or just let it go, and I decided to choose the latter. I wanted to do everything normally—act the way I used to—and I figured the best way to do that was to follow her lead. It took me a few days to get used to it, and then it was okay. In fact, I grew to enjoy the attention.
    As time went on, Joan and I went to bed together around 10:00 or 10:30 P.M. , but I was lucky if I fell asleep for an hour or two before waking up and going to my chair in the living room, where I sat up for the rest of the night, flipping around the two-hundred-plus channels on DirecTV. The satellite service offered me a channel for almost any topic I could want, from business or political news to stock market tips, sports, cooking, history, and movies. With my fallback standard, Fox News, starting up at 3:00 A.M. , I never had a problem finding something to watch. Some nights I couldn’t fall asleep at all, and if I dozed off for an hour in the afternoon, that would be the only sleep I’d get for forty-eight hours.
    Often the pain was so bad that I’d have to take my medication before I even lay down, so it became a challenge of timing. The pills took up to forty-five minutes to work, and I had to take them every four hours to focus on anything, including sleep. Frequently I’d have to get by with just resting my eyes while I listened to the TV. Joan didn’t tell me this at the time, but the Percocet often made me quite irritable. I couldn’t figure this out for myself, of course, because I had no basis for comparison.
    The basic knowledge I gained from watching around-the-clock TV—stopping only to sleep, to eat, to talk with Joan or Taylor, or to take the occasional trip out of the house—helped shape my immediate responses to whatever was going on around me. Over time I would come to