Still hard to kill

[illusionofjoy]

Tuesday evening, 5:00PM – someone is driving a knife into my stomach. The problem is that I can't see this individual so as to fight beck, nor can I pull back away from the blade, so I can quietly bleed to death. So, I do what any sensible individual faced with an invisible attacker would do: I take a couple of Tums and lay down for a nap.

The next thing I know, it's eight in the evening and I am still intestinally distressed. At this point, I take some more meds and resign myself to the fact that the day's session with The Sims 2 would remain incomplete, going to bed. I wake up around midnight thoroughly parched and in need of what would become several trips to the water closet. joi_division places a bottle or water next to my side of the bed so that my corpse won't be a completely desiccated husk and I try to get in a good night's sleep, hoping that whatever is tormenting will have gotten bored of the games by morning.

At 6:00 on Wednesday, I am calling in to work telling them that not only will I not be in that day, but instead I will be taking a trip to the hospital. Joi calls into her workplace to let them know that she won't be in because she's driving me there.

One of the things I've learned in my lifetime is that no trip to the hospital is complete unless there is a screamer somewhere in the building. The first of the day made himself known in the waiting room not ten minutes after Joi and I had arrived. He was a fat 40-something yinzer with a handlebar moustache and what would have been an afro, had he been black. He wore a baggy T-shirt and jeans, both of which looked to be in bad need of a wash. He stumbled in with his 20-something son, sat down in one of the waiting room chairs and immediately began moaning and groaning.

Before we could even mutter, "what the fuck is that guy's problem," Yinzer's cell phone rang. I glanced over at the sign on the wall saying, "Cell phones banned on hospital premises" before hearing the behemoth grunt a few more times and then loudly proclaim, "yeah – I'm having a kidney stone attack!"

His groaning and moaning, whilst rolling around in the chair continued for the duration of my stay in the waiting room. Granted, I was in pain myself, but I think I've learned to handle such things with some degree of decorum. Every time my invisible enemy slipped the knife into my gut, I'd clinch my fists and grit my teeth, but that was the extent of my spectacle. Yinzer, on the other hand, wanted everyone to know that he was in pain – horrible pain! He began to cry out that he was going to pass out, and I prayed that the kidney stone would put him under, so we'd no longer have to hear him and he would be put out of his self-emasculating misery.

At least his son was there to care for him. Yinzer Jr. could be overheard saying to his father that he hoped they would get on with admitting him, so he "could get to work already." Nice family.

I was admitted and triaged, eventually ending up dressed in a hospital gown and laying in a bed in the emergency room proper (where one of the screamers sounded like Chewbacca). The details of my examination are of no consequence, but to make a long story short, they think I had some sort of nasty virus. From where I caught it is a mystery, but Joi and I both place an accusing finger towards the rapidly declining quality of the food in the cafeteria where I work.

In the end, I got a doctor's note excusing me from work for both Wednesday and Thursday along with a prescription for some drugs to make life more pleasant while the disease ran it's course. I was home by early evening and in bed not long after that. I didn't get out of bed again until yesterday afternoon.

So, I'm not feeling great, but I'm doing much better. If you ask real nice, I may even show you the tape marks on my arm from where the IV was (there's an extra set because the nurse putting the thing in missed the first time).