In which I immerse.

My gym buddy, who for the last year has been more my coffee-and-study buddy, got me to try out a gym right next to my neighborhood. My vegetative study style started filling me with ennui just about Sunday night, and by this afternoon (Monday) I was itching to do something I haven’t done since maybe October—go out for a run. But what is a running wannabe to do when she wakes before the sun and gets out of the hospital in the fading twilight?

And I hate treadmills.

And I still have to study.

So I tried to do both today. I propped up my iPad on the treadmill, beeped the ribbon up to my normal pace, and started trying to read a neurology case. I only got the gist that the guy was a wrestler, something headaches, something something. My running was way too bouncy for this. So I switched to radiology. A mile and a half pounded away. I didn’t know I didn’t need to stop. I guess I’m too lazy on a treadmill to dial down the speed for a walking break.

Then I decided to swim a few laps and take a brain break. Nothing clears my head like oxygen hunger. I struck out a few underwater strokes in blissful thoughtlessness. Then at each breath, random phrases would pop into my head. Cerebellopontine angle. Schwannoma. Bilateral acoustic neuromas. Neurofibromatosis type 2. Vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagal nuclei. It was just reruns from didactics this morning. I felt like my head was one of those little plastic stereoscopes, and some relentless puppeteer was flicking through his deck.

Whatever then. I’ll just study in the hot tub. Poor iPad. But I was relishing the utter emptiness of the pool room, after the crowded weight room and treadmill bank. Plus it was getting late, almost 10 PM.

A few slides of ultrasounded uteri later, I was joined in the tub by the most muscular 83-year-old woman I had ever met. She had a flaming red pixie cut. “People call me Red.” “I can see why,” I smiled. For the next half hour, I heard about her first two marriages (both to jerks), her very quality fianceé who passed tragically last fall, and her new flame, who dramatically proposed to her with the biggest honking ring I’ve ever seen (she showed me; my glasses weren’t on and I could tell it was huge, so there you go). It was the stuff of soap—he loved her from afar as her friend for 12 years, he had been alone 17 years after burying his second wife (both passed). She told me about their first date after her fianceé passed away. She and new beau got soup, because of a buy-one-get-one-free coupon. They got right down to the important stuff: life insurance, burial preferences, who would live where, medical issues. “He was pretty pleasant. And he doesn’t smoke inside the house.” She shrugged. “And he worshipped the ground I walked on. Where am I going to find someone else like that?”

Eventually, Red’s gym buddy, a tall, pretty woman about her age who was pretty deaf (I had awkwardly tried to start a conversation in the locker room, no dice) joined her, and I used that as my chance to give them the slip. Red was really good at storytelling, but I had to sleep before another full day of neurocritical ICU. I was really glad for the reminder, though, that though most 80+ year-olds I see are the critically ill, they were by no means the rule. At least my time spent not studying was spent well.