The Early Showings -- The Off To the Hospital Part


It was around eleven in the morning. The kids were at school. Patricia was at work and…

…Dare I say it…?

I had fallen. And I couldn’t get up.

And without one of those alarm things, too.

It’s not very funny when you’re inside of it. When you’re hot and uncomfortable, there’s a grabbing feeling inside your stomach and it won’t let go. Add to that the room spinning and not enough strength in your arms to push yourself to even a sitting position and there’s not only no one there to help you, but there won’t be anyone for hours.

I managed to turn myself around and crawl out of the bathroom enough to reach my cell phone[1], like someone suffering from poison gas in an old Republic serial. I called Patricia at her office and told her she needed to come home.

And then I noticed the blood[2].

I’m not going to tell you WHERE the blood was coming from. And there wasn’t a lot of it. But, as a general rule, when blood is coming from any part of my body that blood shouldn’t be coming from[3], I panic. I called Patricia back and told her that I was calling an ambulance.

It’s not easy to call the ambulance, beyond dialing 9-1-1. But there’s an emasculating feeling to doing it that you can really only do when you’re bleeding. It would have been better, in a way, if I were bleeding from a gunshot – but maybe not.

I managed to unlock the door and get to the couch while waiting. Some firemen showed up first[4] and they took my blood pressure and made sure I didn’t die before the paramedics showed up.

As if it wasn’t embarrassing enough to have to call the paramedics because you had blood coming from your ass, the next thing I heard was…

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard your name…”

And I look up[5].

It’s someone who used to work for me.

At least it was someone I liked.

So I had to suck it up and tell him my symptoms.

“At least it’s red blood,” he said. “When it’s black it can be a problem.

Well, that was good to know[6].

[1] Which I put on a linen counter so it would be nearby if it rang and I was pooping. I do this because I’m in show business and sometimes cliché’s are cliché’s because they’re true.

[2] Please notice how I built up to this and then dropped it into the story. On the other hand, it wasn’t very fucking entertaining at the moment.

[3] And that’s about all of ‘em.

[4] Interestingly, one was one of the men who had been there the night Ruth died.

[5] Which was about all the energy I could muster.

[6] But if it’s black, can you even identify it as blood?


ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE LAST DAY IN PARADISE

Image
“ Isn ’t it cold there?” She asked me. “Colder than it is here,” I said. I was standing outside my son’s Third Grade classroom in Woodland Hills, CA [1] , waiting for him to let out so I could put him in the car and drive twenty minutes to wait outside a motel for my daughter’s middle school bus. I was talking to one of the other mothers. I say “other mothers” because many people think I’m a real mother – but perhaps the context is a bit different. “Does it go below freezing there?” She asked. We were talking about the fact that my house was on the market and I was moving my family out of Los Angeles, likely close to my hometown of Buffalo, NY. “Well, sure. I mean, it snows. It has to go below freezing.” She looked at me for a long time, obviously cogitating over the my weather report. “Don’t you die?” “Sorry?” “If you go outside and it’s below freezing --- don’t you die?” I like to tell the story of when I was working in Montreal. The first day I was there the...
Read more

Home Inspection, Part Two

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew. We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal. We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see h...
Read more

Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be...
Read more