Dear Diary

6a: Wake up. Make coffee. Smoke. Decide against showering. It's too difficult and really only needed a few times a week. Take a Percocet.

7a: Wheel down to cafeteria and snag a frozen cup of OJ and a warm yogurt.

705a: Eat leftover bacon from a friend's visit on Sunday.

8:45a: Wheel to the hospital. Occupational Therapy: Get arm warmed, then manipulated.

9:45a: Smoke.

1045a: Physical Therapy: Walk. Get tired. Get limb and stump checked. Walk a few more laps. Check for an available exercise mat. They're all taken. Pop a Percocet.

11a: Washington Redskins Cheerleaders arrive. Several people comment how they should put some clothes on. Soldiers on meds equals no sex drive. Politely decline teddy bear. Twice.

12p: Yoga. Share a laugh with the amputee soldier on the mat next to me when the instructor suggests Downward Dogs. Lie there comatose. Point out to soldier he isn't doing many of the moves, and he points out he came there to nap.

1p: Smoke. Check Blackberry. Try to fit four wheelchairs with Marines and myself into one elevator. We accomplish. One Marine is high out of his mind and keeps yelling, "Lemme outta here! I'm gonna vomit!"

2p: Therapy. Question your survival and suggest dying would have been f*cking easier. The therapist tells me a psychiatrist who has seen me in the MATC is "worried" about my attitude.

315p: Smoke. Catch the shuttle back to Mologne House. Soldier in the wheelchair next to me doesn't speak. Idiot. He must be new.

3:30p: Eat everything in the tiny refrigerator in my room. Then devour the chocolate people have brought me.

4p: Chat on phone to connect with outside world. Wondering when I can go to bed.

5p: Smoke. Sunny, breezy and cool outside. A soldier complains, "This is shit, man. The steel in my bones is freezing." He wheels inside. And I am left alone.

8p: Full moon. Stunning. The soldiers and Marines and I sit outside and talk about our Methadone addictions.