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After being injected with four milligrams of morphine, the pain finally started to decline. The room was brighter and I said to myself, “This is not how I wanted to start my first day of retirement as a cigar broker?”  But the facts are the facts.

December 1st, 2024, and around 1 am I politely asked E if she would take me to the emergency room.  She knew this was a serious request considering my aversion to hospitals in the first place.  Plus I had been getting in and out of bed unable to relax for the last ninety minutes due to the excruciating pain on my right side just below the ribcage.

Retirement.  Ahhhh.  (Take a deep breath.)  According to some, retirement can be a blessing or a bane.  A time to finally stop and (no cliché here) and finally enjoy a cigar!  Indeed, I had no plans once I dropped the bomb, but retirement had been on my mind for some time. 

 

“So, what’s going on?”  The ER doctor appeared and I wasn’t even in the mood to bark back, “YOU tell me, YOU’RE the DoKtor!”  So we talked and it was decided that I would go in for a CT scan with contrast.  Even though the ER was busy when we got there, it was apparent that my condition was a priority. So away we went down several cold halls, through a thousand doors, and finally into the examination room.

Done.  I mean, after 20 years of slinging tobacco, it was time to walk away on my terms.  And I did.  I can limn a million reasons for my decision, and I’d love to list them - but I won’t.  I just wasn’t, as my son always says, “ . . . feeling it” anymore.  I know, the cardinal sin of a cigar lover - not reaching orgasm just thinking about the industry.  I mean look at all those smiling faces on FB and Instagram! 

 

Then I began to feel that morphine settling into my system.  Hmmm.  Maybe The Times Square hustler, Herbert Huncke, was right - junk can be good.  The added contrast smelled like iodine but didn't burn as much as I was told it would.  Yet, warmth, right now, was not an unwelcome feeling.

After a few more minutes the orderly pushed my bed back to the pod I started in, somewhere in the Ds (number forgotten) and I waited for the doctor’s return.

  

“You have cholelithiasis!”  (Just what I thought.)  “What?”  “Gallstones, he said with a grin.”  My mind rested on his diagnosis.  Me?  Gallstones?  He continued to explain his findings - “That’s right, those pesky little globules of solid bile that form in the gallbladder and can get lodged in the bile ducts and cause excruciating pain.”  And then he went on that the gallbladder had to go before it became infected and complicated my situation down the road.

 

As I have - had to go - caught in time before any snags developed.  The years I spent in the industry were fabulous, (some of them, let’s be real here).   But when I started, I had to claw relentlessly at the granite walls of distrust,  eventually carving out a niche by continually scratching into made-up minds until Irv CigarBroker was accepted.

And these stones were sooooo real.   But by resting on the bed, and allowing the morphine to continue to do its job, I eventually got up, slowly walked out of the pod, down the hall, and into the cold garage toward our car knowing full well that the impending surgery could be done on any day of the week - at any time.  I smiled.  Ahhhhh.  Retirement is good.

Irv CigarBroker

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