ER ANTICS

Have you ever been rushed to the emergency room, feeling like you were on death’s door and, suddenly had your attention redirected to the lady behind the curtain in the bed next to yours? It can truly be an entertaining experience. I felt sorry for the woman. She was 82 years old and had, apparently, had an episode of very low blood sugar and had fallen getting out of a car. She had a huge gash in the back of her head that had to be stitched up and had broken her neck. It was a fracture in a spot where it had broken before. I heard them talking about how she was hit by a trolley car when she was a teenager and how her leg had never been the same, but, she hobbled through life and faced one challenge after another. She was told that she would have to wear another “halo” to allow her neck to mend, but she was having none of it. The doctors said that if she didn’t wear it, she could be permanently paralyzed. This was obviously not the entertainment portion of the show. That came when she would doze off, reacting to the morphine they had given her for the pain. That’s when her daughter and her daughter’s best friend would start to chat and it always seemed to be about booze. Every conversation involved who could hold what liquor, how to mix drinks that wouldn’t give them a headache, how many bottles of wine it would take before they became totally useless and, in one particularly enjoyable segment, how a guy had given one of them a gift of a wooden box with 2 bottles of Sutter’s Home Wine, which she perceived as the ultimate insult. She said she yelled at the guy and never saw him again. Sheeeesh…whatever happened to “it’s the thought that counts?” I guess she “thought” she was worth a more expensive wine. It was about then that the daughter left the emergency room and her friend started to call other members of the older woman’s family to tell them what had happened. She would begin by apologizing for the fact that the woman’s daughter wasn’t calling her apparent siblings, but, she would add, she needed to get some rest for the ensuing days, which were going to be kind of rough. I suspect, from the conversation during sleep cycles, that what she needed, more than rest, was to sober up. When the old lady was awake, she was very funny and would joke with the doctors. This was completely contrary to the things the two younger women, who, seemed to be in their 60’s, were saying when she was in la-la land. They were pretty brutal. Pretty soon, they found her a room and off she went, with the duo of drunken divas not far behind. As for me, they finally found me a room as well and ran a battery of tests to find out why my blood pressure was plummeting and I was turning blue and having trouble breathing. The tests gave us the same results as the last two times this has happened…... nothing, but, I have to say this was the most enjoyable trip to the emergency room yet. I may have been blue, I may have been clammy, I may have been short of breath, but, the one thing I wasn’t…was bored.