This next blog works out to be an addendum to the head cracked open story in my last blog. In that account, I stopped bleeding very quickly. Just before I left the project on my trip home I noticed that I had a sore spot on the inside of my thigh and that it appeared to have some related swelling. I thought, Oh great! Varicose veins! I got to Lima and called Julie to get me an appointment with a doctor starting a trepidation train that, by the way, was completely justified. Mom’s, ergo, wives spend a good deal of time in this avocation. No exception, Julie does a great bit of her own fretting. Her expressions of concern always begin with, “Now see, that worries me.”
To make this short, I got home to go with Leah to her competition in Indiana but I arrived with a Deep Vein Thrombosis or blood clot in my upper thigh. This is a result in part of too much sedentary travel in airplanes and pickup trucks at very high altitudes and probably some other factors. The good news is that I made it home with out the clot tearing loose and causing me a stroke, heart attack or just simple suffocation. Neat huh?!
Julie had set up the doctor's appointment at 4pm. My Doctor told me that I needed to go to the ER. Her nurse made me sign a form absolving my doc of responsibility should I not go to the ER and die in the plane the next day. Julie and I went down to the hospital and checked into the ER. There began the true odyssey. The packed waiting room had a slice of humanity that truly boggled my mind.
A very large, high-decibel woman with an amazing telephone, accompanied by all of her offspring who spent their time whining and speculating on the potentially fatal foot injury their mother had sustained turned out to have an injured tendon. A guy named Chad had cut his knee with an axe and seemed a no brainer to get in quickly. He managed his pain pretty well and was upright with a compress. However, no one even said, “Stat!” the whole time we were there. We asked the young guy sitting across from us how long he had been there, “Four hours,” he responded. Judging by the little plastic arm band he wore, he had been triaged already. I started my skid into resignation.
To our right another, very large wheelchair bound woman named Inez accompanied her blonde boyfriend in a t-shirt with the sleeves cut away to expose all of his ribcage and the intricate thorn and multi-skull motif tattooed on his right arm. They accompanied an older couple Juan and Lidia. Inez called Lidia mom when asking if she was going to go smoke but said, “Juan,” when she spoke to the elderly man.
Across the room the TV carried a program called TruTV that had a story line about police investigation but either did not hold the interest of or was too close to home for this eclectic crowd. Someone got up and changed it to the Monday Night football game. I am convinced that football won out only because of a paucity of adequate WWF, NASCAR or Monster Truck Pull events on Monday.
At some point they called Juan back and with the disappearance of his colorful clan through the coveted ER door came a hefty sweat suit attired, trio; mother, daughter and daughter’s baby. They seemed to be the caregivers of the baby given the overheard conversation. The mother was complaining that her grandbaby kept surreptitiously “barfing,” and that it, “Smelled gross.” What a stunner, gross as opposed to a yummier smelling barf or what? The daughter blamed the foul smell on antibiotics but I could not extricate the proposed comparison of barfs from my head.
Once back in the ER they sent me to one of those beds surrounded by curtains, next to the telephoning woman from the waiting room. Canned Heat sang described her in “Quiet Woman Blues.” Thankfully someone had collected her children but this did not stifle her loquacity. Though I could not make a single phone call, she had full coverage the entire time and my goodness; I want a battery like hers. I heard every snippet of her telephone conversations. She began to share excessive information about her bodily functions with the doctors and everyone else in telephone range. The sleep patterns of her friends crossed my mind. She called them all night long with her incessant diarrheal blathering. There was a certain irony in this given that so much of the chatter had to do with her own incontinence problem.
At some point she got out and they replaced her with an in obnoxious woman that is the source material for pigeonholing. Pardon my frankness… She made the former resident seem a retiring violet. Bossy, pushy and just insufferable, she had received some medicine at the other facility (not clear at all to me which) and she had chest pains. Her "medical training" indicated to her and she shared ad nauseum with the nurses that this medication was at fault for her current discomfort. When they came to take her blood and asked if she were allergic to latex, she said in a Deep South drawl, “Whaaa, yes ah am and you ain’t goin’ ta give me no iodine, ner betadine ner nothin’ like that neither.” When they started to take her blood she shouted, at volumes exceeding single stroke engines, “Ow, ow, ow, y’alls fixin’ ta keel me!” Julie witnessed that I have not exaggerated. Brashly, she repeated these phrases stridently and abrasively for as long as they attempted to draw her blood. Though I never actually saw her, I am confident that no stereotype of her would be an exaggeration.
Subsequently, they announced that a man was coming in, "not" in custody but who had been firing off a pistol in downtown Albuquerque and they needed to restrain him. I think he actually came in while I was being ultra-sounded but later we heard him cackling high-pitched and raucously, like someone in a Vincent Price horror movie down the hall. He got me to pondering and wondering just what it might take to get oneself arrested in Albuquerque.
In the end I was impressed by the complexity of the ER and the lack of racism, just a spectrum of mankind. Indeed, it was a collection with all of the variety and spice of life, a virtual humanity rainbow to make Jesse Jackson proud. I tried to take note of names of those who floated in and out of my dream, there were LeShaun, Juan, Chad, Jesus, and Pilgrim and I saw more mullets and shaved heads and tattoos than I have seen in ages. There almost seemed a required style in t-shirts, undershirts, ball caps and sweat pants. I came to the conclusion that those ER TV shows are a poor representation of reality since they try to mute the reality for more sensitive viewers. Yet we had an excellent Caucasian doctor, a fine black X-ray technician and an adorable Hispanic nurse named Alicia. She repeatedly apologized and thanked us for our patience. I told her that she has the most interesting job in the world and that she needs to write a book. She said, “It's never really dull here.” her understatement stunned and in the end, I had the distinct impression that I had participated in an episode of,” Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
