It is 6 a.m.  Light from above abducts me from the best dream I’ve had since coming to hospital: I dreamt I was going home. A nurse says good morning to me in a voice dripping with insincerity and routine, and I want to reach through the haze of the rude awakening I feel around me, grab her face and bite it.

 ”How’d you sleep, honey?” she says, adjusting my IV tubes that have coiled around my neck and left arm during the night.

 All patients are either honey, sweet thing, baby, darling, or–my favorite–snookums. Snookums!  I heard that from a CNA one evening and lay stunned at the possible images the word could elicit.  Its root is snook, which is a large fish from the Caribbean, or a gesture called cocking a snook, which indicates contempt in what we commonly call a Bronx cheer or thumbing one’s nose. Snookums must have an endearing root, but it probably falls into that category of words created for sound and for implication. I mean, if I’m a fish, it’s not very endearing, and a Bronx cheer kind of guy? No.  I was lead to etymology, which I couldn’t access from the confines of my hospital bed, but when I could get to a library, online of course, I learned snookum is a term of endearment used in Britain for “hypothetical person” dating from around 1860.  It’s equivalent to Joe Blow in America.  Also, snooks probably dates to the Domesday Book, from snoc, which referred to a promontory, maybe in reference to a big nose.  Whatever, I’m a Snookums, endeared, evidently, by at least one CNA.

I can’t finish this today because I have a doctor appointment. He will remove this blasted feeding tube I’ve been wearing for over three months.  More on that wonderful experience later.