THE EARLY SHOWINGS - THE AT THE HOSPITAL PART

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG![1] And we were off to the hospital.

Which luckily was right around the corner.

Except…

There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full.

Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room.[2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem.

Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance.

But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away and they had to cart my sorry ass[3] two and a half miles away.

But it did give me time to catch up with my buddy while he checked my vitals.

We got there and they unloaded me. Patricia walked up. Bob greeted her with a big:

“Hello!”

“Why, hello, Bob!”

“Does he look pale to you?”

It’s nice to have people talk about you like you’re dying. Which, by the way, was how I felt. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, nor could I stop anything else, so there was little for me to do but like there uncomfortably while people talked around me.

And, by the way, hope that Ingo didn’t suddenly call and have someone really hot to see the house. I doubted it would be in shape to show.

The upshot of this little visit was a few pills, a few IV bags and a really intrusive exam with something called a proctoscope[4] was that I had a stomach flu. A particularly virulent one that had caused such violent --- um --- evacuation – that I had ruptured something that would heal on it’s own.

Once again, it was a good sign that it wasn’t black blood.

Hoo. Ray.

While we were waiting, we had another example of multicultural L.A.

I think multiculturalism is a good and healthy thing, but let’s not let that get in the way of having a little fun, eh?

The heavily accented Asian doctor was consulting with the heavily accented Latinos in the cubicle next to us and it went something like this. Apparently the Patient didn’t speak much English and it was being translated by someone we’ll call the Patient by Proxy.

DOCTOR: So you have a condition called a fatty liver. And you’re very lucky that we discovered this.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates and then…) What does she do, doctor?

DOCTOR: well, overeating causes this. So she needs to lose weight, which would be good for her health anyway.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates and then…) She loves sweets.

PATIENT: (HEAVY ACCENT) I like desert!

DOCTOR: Well, you should make some changes in your diet. More fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian diet really is the best.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates)

PATIENT: (Spanish I couldn’t keep up with).

PATIENT BY PROXY: So no meat?

DOCTOR: No. No meat or very little meat.

PATIENT: (Obviously wary) Ooooooooh.

DOCTOR: And you have to watch the kinds of carbohydrates you eat, too. More fruits and vegetables.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (Translates)

PATIENT: (Spanish)

PATIENT BY PROXY: What about bread?

DOCTOR: Very little bread.

PATIENT BY PROXY: She loves tortas.

DOCTOR: No tortas.

PATIENT: No tortas? (A scream of pain[5])

The same doctor told me to take kaopectate and to drink a lot of Gatorade or PowerAde because they had electrolytes[6]. He also said that I’d been through two-to-three days of it, so the worst was over.

He was wrong.

---

[1] As W.C. Fields would say.

[2] And I’m not stepping in the health care debate pile of dog shit, thank you. Just reporting the facts.

[3] Pun intended.

[4] Which necessitated the doctor to proactively put on an Andromeda Strain suit – which really doesn’t inspire confidence in your future.

[5] I’ve read of Laurence Olivier’s scream in “Oedipus”. At the moment the King tears his eyes out, Olivier let loose a rending scream which people who heard it claim that they can still hear. I think it was like this.

[6] “It’s what plants crave” for those of you who also love “Idiocracy”.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 BY SHAUN McLAUGHIN