I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) (4 page)

Rolling Down the River

H
ELP ME!” I screamed when I saw anything that looked like a hospital uniform pass me by.

I was nothing but a fool.

A big, dumb, yelping fool.

Had you asked me merely thirty minutes before if I thought I could hold it together if faced with a good deal of physical pain, I would have said, certainly yes.

Of course I could hold it together.

That’s very important in those kinds of situations, I would add. It’s almost necessary to have a certain amount of decorum and not scream and bawl like a ninny; that only makes things more painful. In fact, when I see people moaning, crying, and complaining on TV that they’re hurt, it almost makes me want to laugh at them or possibly even hurt them myself for being such insolents. When you are in pain, you have to be strong; I should know. When I was in sixth grade, I was jumping rope when I fell and the cartilage in my knee tore completely, and instead of crying, I picked myself off the playground proudly and hobbled to the nurse.

Alone.

And in pain.

Without a sound.

Thirty minutes previous, that most assuredly would have been my answer. But now, as I gasped, reaching out to grapple at any pair of legs in teal green that walked within my reach and shrieking like a demon being doused with holy water, beaten with a crucifix, and pelted with Communion wafers, I clearly understood that pain had been a stranger to me. Until now.

Thirty minutes before, I had been standing in my kitchen when I felt something sharp stab me in my right side. It sucked the breath right out of me, and before I had time to recover, another stab hit in the same spot. In a moment, I was down for the count, screaming and writhing in pain.

Now, let me explain a little something about the sort of physical discomfort I was experiencing. It was a kind of pain that far surpassed anything I had ever felt before or documented on my ‘Laurie’s Random Pain Pangs’ chart. This sensation made my “Cancer of the Upper Asshole” stab feel like the gentle, playful tickle of a peacock feather in comparison. In fact, it had my mind spinning, trying to decide whether it was possible that I was about to give birth to a pony via my belly button or had unkowingly been impaled by something, fearing that if I looked down I would see a pitchfork or perhaps a telephone pole protruding from my abdomen. Should you have been, at one time, ripped apart limb by limb by wild vicious dogs, a rather hungry lion, or the pack of women crowded in between the size seven-and-a-half racks at a Nordstrom shoe sale—while experiencing a charley horse cramp strong enough to cripple a nation—
and
you survived to tell the tale, you’d know a little something of the displeasure that was currently conducting itself in my body.

When my husband found me, I had somehow made it to the couch and was rolling from side to side as if I were on fire. Luckily, we live a block away from a hospital, so somehow, he got me to the car and within minutes we were in the hospital parking lot.

Now, even I, in my incredible state of agony, noticed the word
EMERGENCY
painted clear as day in huge block letters across the automatic sliding doors as we entered the hospital. However, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who saw it, because despite the definition of the word “emergency,” I’ve had shorter waits in the return line at Home Depot the morning after Father’s Day. Truthfully, if we were to call a spade a spade and really be honest about what went on behind those doors, the word painted across them would not read
EMERGENCY
but
REMEMBER: YOU’RE THE ONE IN AGONY, NOT US
or
HOPE YOU BROUGHT A GOOD BOOK, SOME SNACKS, AND YOUR OWN PILLOW.

It was going to be a bit of a wait.

There, sitting randomly in chairs across the crammed waiting room, was someone covering an eye as his remaining good eyeball stared blankly toward a wall, a girl in a cropped top holding her head between her knees as she rocked back and forth and moaned, and a wrinkled little man in a cowboy hat and a thin mustache holding a towel-wrapped bundle that looked suspiciously like a limb.

They had obviously been there for a while.

See, in my book, the word “emergency” kind of constitutes a sense of urgency, as in end-of-the-line urgency. It rarely ever gets more urgent than in the word “emergency.” People go to Emergency because they assess their situation to be rather critical, they’ve determined that whatever is going on is not something they can handle or fix themselves, so it’s about time to seek outside help. NOW. As in RIGHT NOW. Because honestly, the next level beyond “emergency” is a rather basic, no-frills drawer at the morgue with fabulous air-conditioning.

But to the employees of this emergency waiting room, it was obvious that the word “emergency” had kind of lost its gloss, its zip, its emergency-ness, as doctors, nurses, and people in latex gloves just strolled about as if they were shopping for paper towels at Target. No one paid any attention to the “patients” who sat and waited, and waited, and waited, cradling their possibly severed arms and trying to prevent their eyeballs from springing out of their heads like Slinkies. In fact, it’s amazing to me that hospitals across the country haven’t even tried to cash in on the basic needs of their waiting room patients by renting out camping equipment.

Because every seat in the waiting room was full, eventually someone plopped me into a wheelchair, but I hardly noticed. By this point, I was drifting in and out of consciousness in between my pitiful cries, like just after a night on the town in the good old days, except that then no one typically prodded me for my insurance card unless a spoilsport took signs of alcohol poisoning seriously and dialed 911.

Now, the next time I woke up, I was at the admitting station and my husband was fumbling through my purse for my wallet. When I came around again, the admitting lady was forcing a clipboard and a form with all of my vital information on it into my dead, lifeless hands.

“And please print clearly,” she added sharply.

“Well, of course,” I truly wanted to reply. “Naturally, making your job easier is my first priority at this time when the skeleton hand of death is inside my body, wringing my vital and tender organs out like a sponge.”

Then she made me sign more papers than I did when I bought my house, to which I just started scribbling blindly all over. “And that one,” she informed me as I scrawled over the last line, “gives your husband power of attorney.”

“Dear God, do not plug me into anything,” I managed to squeeze out as I shook my pen at her. “Don’t even get me near an outlet! He’s been waiting for an opportunity just like this since the day we got married.”

I did the best I could under the circumstances, but honestly, that form looked like I had filled in the blanks with either my feet or a monkey proxy. Even I couldn’t read my own writing, but as I tried to hand back the clipboard, a robust, full-throated moan was emitted from the waiting area, and I turned just in time to see the half-shirt girl—who had been clutching her head moments before—stand up, bellow again, and then crumple promptly to the floor. It was a maneuver straight out of a death scene in an eighth-grade play; the way her hand flew to her thrown-back head, the way her knees gave way first, the way she lay melodramatically on the floor, her hand still thoughtfully draped across her head as if she were a twelve-year-old Ophelia. Well, except for the part where a package of GPC menthol lights shot from her body, skidding across the floor, and her cropped top flew up, exposing one whole braless knocker that sported a rather large and confusing tattoo of either a unicorn or a donkey wearing a dunce cap.

Even though I felt unconsciousness creeping up on me again as agony was sinking its teeth deeper into my side, I knew this show was too good to miss. Suddenly, the emergency waiting room came to life, as if finally, FINALLY, they had a worthwhile emergency on their hands, a patient worth their training, as they gathered around the unicorn boob girl like ants around a bread crumb. Within moments, she was slid onto a flat board and a brace was looped around her neck, although I guess covering up her floppy, tatted booby didn’t really fall into emergency care procedures, because the sagging donkey just kept winking at us as Ophelia was carried away on the stretcher. The stretcher had almost made it all the way to the ER doors when Ophelia opened her eyes, lifted her head, and cried, “Hey!! Isn’t anyone going to get my smokes?”

She had faked it. You see, Good Old Uni-Boob had apparently decided to take matters into her own hands, and if the medical professionals weren’t going to come to her, she was damn well going to make them. And she had given me more than a cheap look at her private parts. She had given me an idea.

“Help me!” I shrieked as soon as I saw a pair of booties or a paper hat come my way. “Please help me!”

After the first several professional medical people ignored me, I decided to start reaching for their legs, and screaming louder. I didn’t feel guilty at all about demanding help; I felt I was simply vocalizing my pain. And I was. But I might as well have been sitting on a street corner, shaking an empty coffee cup and demanding change for my next fix for all the attention I got, which was not even so much as a stare.

Finally, I was admitted to the triage room, although I don’t know how since I was pretty much unconscious. I believe I probably fell on someone passing by and they simply could not lift me off, so they just wheeled me in. When I came to, someone was struggling with my underwear, and I was almost alert enough to screech, “All hands on your own deck, buddy, it’s not your birthday!” until I looked up and saw a lady.

This was the moment that my mother had devoted a majority of her lifetime to prepare me for; the time had finally come. And I had failed miserably. Earlier that morning, I had chosen foolishly. I had spotted a 1998 model, barely gray pair of panties in my underwear drawer, but instead had gone for the ones with little more than a rubber-band waist holding up something of a loincloth. As I had stepped into them and they flapped around my ankles like a hula skirt, I remembered thinking, “It’s Sunday. Who is going to see these besides my husband? It’s not like I’m going to be exposing myself to the world, is it?”

Now I had my answer. And it was YES.

This in addition to the fact that before I had left for the hospital, I was rather too busy fending off death to look for a razor and then use it on my, shall we say, most remote and secluded areas. In essence, the garden had not been tended, and was a bit in need of maintenance and something of a trim. I mean, really, I wasn’t expecting that any strange company would be coming over, I’ve been married and off the market for some time now, so my
OPEN HOUSE
sign is rusty and somewhere in the garage behind the Halloween decorations and flat bicycle tires. Nevertheless, there I was, overgrown, unruly, and in combination with my castaway underwear, it was a wonder I wasn’t ID’d as Sasquatch and sent to a kennel.

On my right arm, a nurse was digging around trying to find a vein like I was a fetal pig in AP biology class. In all honesty, with my cookie exposed to the world, my shaggy, gray shredded underwear sitting beside me like a mechanic’s rag, rockets of pain going off in my abdomen, and a lady poking me in the arm with a needle so many times I could have qualified for methadone treatment on sight, I swore I had probably died at the check-in station and was now in my orientation session for my new lifetime/eternal membership in hell.

Pretty soon, I was sure, classmates from high school and old boyfriends would be passing by, commenting on my weight and how very poorly I had aged. How could this scenario be any worse?

The lady attempting to give me a homemade tattoo picked up my wrist and looked at my bracelet.

“Oh, look at that,” she said. “You’re that girl from the newspaper. Oh, oh, yep, here we go. Got a vein. There we go. I was beginning to think you were dead!”

“Could you please arrange that?” I replied.

And then, in a matter of seconds, all was peaceful. All was lovely, all was soft, and pretty and painless. All was as it should be.

I was on a Demerol drip. You could have brought cameras into that place, propped me up and shot away, and printed the gruesome image on top of every column that I wrote and at that moment, I would have let you. I would have
encouraged
it.

I was HIGH. I was really HIGH. I used to think I had pretty good connections, but none of my guys ever came through with anything like
that.
I was higher than I was in all of 1994 combined, and that was the year I was
totally
into Janis Joplin.

I smiled at my husband. “I want to take this stick home,” I said, grabbing my rolling IV drip. “I want to keep it by my bed and just be happy and soft forever.”

I could have sworn I saw tears gather in a rush in his eyes. “Oh, Doctor,” he cried. “Thank you! Thank you! This is the girl I married!
There she is!
I haven’t seen her this happy since she stopped self-medicating!”