Yesterday I went to the hospital.
Not that I had much choice in the matter. My warden/nurse/wife made it abundantly
clear that I had absolutely no say in the matter. When I was informed of this
decision made on my behalf without my insight or consultation, I thought if I
just lay like a lump on a log there would be nothing anyone could do to get me
to move out of my bed. That is when I was threatened with an ambulance ride in
my pajamas. I refuse to be one of those types of invalids. You know the kind,
rolling around Wal-Mart at all hours of the day in a motorized scooter, wearing
their food stained pajamas and worn out house slippers. Not that my PJ’s are
food stained and as for the slippers, I don’t own any. Still, the thought of looking
that disheveled is quite an unappealing thought to me.
So I did what any self-respecting
injured person would do in that situation. I accepted my fate, got dressed with
help and went to the hospital. Once there, I proceeded to wait almost three
hours in the waiting room standing up. You see, my injury to my lower back
makes it almost impossible to sit down. I’m okay if I’m lying down on my back
or standing upright. The pain from sitting is almost unbearable. Okay, that may
be a bit of an understatement. Imagine if every time you tried to move in any
position that there were twelve very angry monkeys with flaming hot dull knives
standing behind you stabbing you right next to your kidneys… then multiply that
by a million. You take in so much pain that your vision blurs at the edges only
to leave white hot pin pricks of veiled reality at the center. But the center
is miles away, and you know that is where the pain originates from. You want to
reach out with your shaking hands and trembling arms and throttle the pain into
non-existence but it is too far away. You can’t reach its physical drowning in
the tunnel that is quickly filling up with liquid agony.
Once there, we were told the
computer admissions printer was broken and the check-in administrator was as
present as bigfoot so all the paperwork landed upon one woman in a small,
semi-private room with a computer an no printer. There were three people ahead
of us in the queue. Me standing and trying to ignore all the bad television
being broadcast to an almost full waiting room by trying to figure out what was
ailing the people in the five hundred square foot enclosure. We waited and
eyeballed the vending machines, two filled with beverages and one filled with
snacks. One machine had the “Out of Order” sign on it. Glad I wasn’t starving.
One woman, thin and tall with several
kids was angry, bitter and snapping at her kids with almost hostile words.
Another woman, elderly and quiet was taking care of a small baby. The baby
cooed and waved at anyone she saw. Quite adorable. An elderly gentleman hobbled
along on crutches and my wife helped him get a wheelchair. He promptly fell
asleep right next to another woman who was sleeping in a waiting chair when we
arrived and looked as if she were in a coma. The woman who came in ahead of us
sat in a chair with a vomit bag in her lap and scrolled through her phones
apps. Every now and then she would get up and make a hasty retreat to the
bathroom only to emerge a bit paler and less steady on her feet. Then there was
the elderly couple who came in behind us, the man attending to his sick wife
who could barely walk. He fussed over her and she allowed him to do so. He
would gently push her hair back and whisper to her, offer her a drink every now
and then and he even got up and talked to the security guard for a few minutes.
I kept my head down, focused on not
being in pain and tried to play video games. It sort of worked. I just couldn’t
get comfortable. Hell, I even tried to sit in a wheelchair but that experiment
lasted about twenty seconds before I got up. I knew if I had stayed in that
damnable contraption I’d have passed out from the photon torpedoes being shot
into my lower back. I think Luke Skywalker was using my back as the death star
trench. Uncool Luke, uncool.
When I did get a room, it was one
filled with four chairs, three were recliners and one was a plain old plastic
chair. No bed but there were five crash carts which is good to know in case I
was about to die. I paced, no, I hobbled the room back and forth. My wife sat
in a chair, read and checked her phone. I tried to explore the inner contents
of the crash carts but they were locked so I started to root through the
shelves near the sink. I found nothing of interest except infant sponges. So I
decided to play with the nitrile gloves. No latex apparently in the hospital.
Right after I finished goofing off
with the gloves, and my boredom was approaching the level of my discomfort the
Nurse Practitioner showed up and started to interrogate me. I willingly
complied. She then ordered x-rays.
I won’t go into the Battan death
march to that room of torture the likes Torquemada only dreamed about nor will
I go into the fact it took three grown adults to contort me into various stress
poses just so they could take black and green photos of my junk and my butt. I
just hope none of you have to go through what I went through. But I hope they
do.
By the time I made it back to my
room, my wife/warden/nurse had gone to a nice fast food place and picked me up
a juicy bacon cheese burger. I’d like to say I enjoyed every morsel of that
square burger and supped with the dignity of a king. Nope, I devoured that
thing as if it were the last burger in the world. Ate it in record time too. Less
than a minute from opening the bag to throwing the bag away. In fact, I managed
to even eat some of the greasy paper the fried meat was wrapped in. Which gave
me pause long enough to think…. I wish there were a bacon wrapped cheeseburger
where the buns were actually made of bacon. I expressed this thought to my wife/warden/nurse.
She was non-plused. I still think it’s brilliant. Just bacon, cheese and
burger, no veggies at all. I’d eat it.
That’s when a new nurse came in
pushing a large cart. She told me she was there to give me a shot. Of what I
asked. Deluded she answered. I proposed to her immediately.
Thirty minutes later, the Nurse Practitioner
had us signed out, me on a bed rest and no work chit as well as a prescription
for some pain killing opiates. I went home. Sort of. We made a couple of quick
stops, and once home, we stood on our porch and enjoyed the almost seventy
degree weather. I informed my warden/nurse/wife I had renamed the front steps
to F/U 1 through F/U 5. She laughed and said the drugs must be working.
I won’t lie, they were.
Now, I’m pretty much relegated to
my bed. I have at least one more day to lie here. I’m not a good patient. I don’t
like being immobile and I don’t like people doing things for me. Yet as I sit
here, the weather now turned back to shitty ice and rain, the porch freezing
over again I can’t help but wish I were doing something else besides being an
invalid. My body is not healing fast enough for my taste. However, it isn’t
really about me and what I want is it? I mean, I was doing an experiment where
I slowed my life down and just as it ended a large roadblock was thrown in my
way. A roadblock that literally put me on my back. Is a greater power trying to
teach me a lesson? Is God saying I’m too old to continue my youthful zeal for
responsibility and life? Am I to not be the one who is always going somewhere,
doing something and giving the answer?
Am I human after all? Is that my
lesson?
If it is, then I understand. I don’t
like it, but I definitely understand.
Have a great week.
No comments:
Post a Comment