Intermezzo

So, I was sick.

Connie called a few times asking questions and finally said she would bring me some soup. When I let her in and crawled back onto the couch, she asked if I had called Doc. I told her he was out of town and I had tried to call his colleague. This exchange was Jan. 3; the New Year's holiday fell on Monday. I called Doc on Tuesday. Connie called an ambulance.

The nightmare begins ...

I do not remember much of the ambulance ride, going into the hospital or seeing a doctor. I am not sure how long I lay in the ER before the doctors sent me to ICU. I do not remember the trip there or the shift to a bed, being connected to monitors or the nurse putting in the IV.

I saw this dude on the television, which was not turned on. He morphed into an image I cannot describe except I could not quite see the muted moving colors.

The chair in the room, which caught my peripheral vision, had a man sitting in it. I feared the man as a mouse fears a cat he can sense nearby.

I glanced out the windows and saw people looking in and floating on by, even though the distance from the roof below to my windows must have been 15 feet.

 Now you see (and hear) them, now you do not ...

I could hear people talking. Women who I assumed were nurses talked about the man next door.

The man and his wife, who were in their 80s, were traveling across country. He fell, she tried to catch him with her walker and he died because the staff failed to see the blood on his back. The couple, who were wealthy, were transporting a Mustang, which had never been driven. The wife asked one of the staff where the car would be safe in Amarillo. One of the male nurses gave an address near the central part of town. I "heard" the pair had been semi-famous actors who lived in San Antonio.

Later, I heard the man had a stroke and died.

The ICU staff dressed up to perform a ceremony they did especially for the widow and her elderly friend. The women stood outside the room where he died while eating cake. A jockey-size man dressed in a silk football jacket with staff written on the back walked in front of a gurney covered by a velour blanket. On the blanket was a card the staff had made and some glitter. A pudgy, older gray haired nurse, who wore a gray suit, followed the gurney. She gave a eulogy.

Another man kept wailing because he had taken steroids all his life and became paralyzed when he was lifting weights and stretched his neck. He kept begging forgiveness.

One of the nurses got fired because of a secret life. In a drunken state, she shot her pimp outside a nightclub. She sat dictating her story to another nurse so she could remember details of the incident before the police took her in.

Another nurse, who was pregnant, sat just outside my door. She talked about teenagers and how they bragged about their baby mamas. The number of pregnancies became a status symbol, she said. She later held up wind chimes the size of pipes for an organ. She said thieves sat on rooftops near ATMs and listened to the beeps when customers did transactions. The youths then used the wind chimes to figure out the tones and subsequently the numbers punched.

Image from Rotten Tomatoes

I thanked a male doctor for coming so late in the night. He was clean shaven with long, dark curly hair, and dressed like the orderlies in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." He told me coming was his job.

A nurse tried to change my IV site in the dark. One of my youngin's came to take photographs while the nurse worked. The nurse must have hit a major artery because blood gushed and she yelled because she had no backup.

A nurse came in to tell me one of my friends called. At first I did not remember knowing her, then I denied I did. I heard one of the male nurses saying I was an undercover journalist trying to expose something at the hospital. His back to me, he mocked me and made gestures to the others while I watched.

I remained in ICU four days. I suppose I drifted in and out of consciousness. On the fourth day, I was moved to a regular room. Eight days later, Connie came to take me home.

Addendum ...

* The ambulance driver noticed my Tracleer, told Connie it was gold and said his daughter has PH.

* I never could spit for the lab to get a sample. They gave me a vacuum, it did not help.

* A couple of nuns came to visit me. One had had a stroke and just smiled. The other one told me we suffer to show others how to endure.

* A couple of Shriners dressed as clowns came by to try to get me to laugh. One had an "invisible dog" on a leash. He told me the dog was vicious. I reached my hand out to the leash and said, "You are not a bad dog, are you?" The one clown told the other as they left the room he had never had anyone do that before.

Moral of the story: Never wait until you are sicker to call the doctor. I will not.

Later, Dude.