Guess where I went again?
Yep. As you can see by the picture, as I lie there trying to wrap with as many stinky, warm blankets as possible in the sub-zero freezer they call the ER, I begin my hospital journey landing on that old tried and true Monopoly board square "Go to Hospital, Do NOT pass Go, go directly to Hospital." Oh wait, you say the Monopoly board square says "Go to Jail?" Well, let me tell you, a hospital is not very far off from a jail!
So here's the story, ever since I got these new cheap pillows from Walmart a couple months ago, I've looked at them with a lot of suspicion.
Wait, what's this shit about pillows?, you say, I thought you were going to tell us how you landed in the hospital? Don't worry I'm fucking getting there just hold your fucking horses okay?!
Though they were bought from one of those mid-aisle bins, wrapped in plastic, and they looked brand new, where the fuck do you think these pillows come from? China, of course. So they're shipped on a big container ship all the way to America and they're probably packed-in, vacuum sealed, and all that shit, but let's face it, these were manufactured in some (maybe grubby) factory somewhere in some backwater (let's bathe in the river) town in remote China. They're essentially all-fiber, a perfect nesting place for little buggie-boos. That's right, I suspect that the bites I've had over the last month or so are the result of some scabies eggs that made their way into these pillows, hitchhiked all the way from Asia and sprouted on me after I bought them. So that's one mystery, I guess, solved since I never found one fucking bed bug. I have no indication of fleas, the only thing I can think of is: the bites happened literally the week I bought these fucking pillows!
So was it the bug bites or scabies or whatever that landed me in the hospital? No.
My story really begins in regards to this hospital visit, around midnight Thursday night. I'm trying to lay down to go to sleep and I'm feeling these shooting pains, but oddly, not from my chest to my shoulder, but from my shoulder to my chest. Now I've had these aches before and I've always suspected, even before these new pillows, that they were the result of the janky way I fluff my pillows into this scaffolding for my head and neck so that I can get a night's sleep. You see, with sleep apnea, unless you go the CPAP route, the only other result that you have for relief is to let your jaw hang open so you can breathe through your mouth. If I lay my head flat and my jaw shut and breathe through my nose, like I can very easily do when I'm awake, my unconscious fat mouth and throat are too stupid to fucking allow that so I can't breathe through my nose and I'm soon in a semi-conscious state waking up and turning around so I can get my fucking mouth open. That can happen a gazillion fucking times a night. Believe you me, that gets fucking old fast.
So was it the bug bites or scabies or whatever that landed me in the hospital? No.
My story really begins in regards to this hospital visit, around midnight Thursday night. I'm trying to lay down to go to sleep and I'm feeling these shooting pains, but oddly, not from my chest to my shoulder, but from my shoulder to my chest. Now I've had these aches before and I've always suspected, even before these new pillows, that they were the result of the janky way I fluff my pillows into this scaffolding for my head and neck so that I can get a night's sleep. You see, with sleep apnea, unless you go the CPAP route, the only other result that you have for relief is to let your jaw hang open so you can breathe through your mouth. If I lay my head flat and my jaw shut and breathe through my nose, like I can very easily do when I'm awake, my unconscious fat mouth and throat are too stupid to fucking allow that so I can't breathe through my nose and I'm soon in a semi-conscious state waking up and turning around so I can get my fucking mouth open. That can happen a gazillion fucking times a night. Believe you me, that gets fucking old fast.
Long story short, I couldn't get to sleep because of the aching neck pain and it seemed to progress through the night, and though I got a couple hours sleep, by morning, I clocked in to do my George Costanza job, clickety-clacketing at my computer in my underwear. But before long, I was laying out an outfit and making plans to drive my ass down to the hospital. With my weight, with my blood pressure, with my diabetes, (pronounced please as Wilford Brimley would) I guess I can't fuck around with things that could be "heart related." By the way, I did take my blood pressure before I went to the hospital and it was okay, like 130 something over 70 something, not super high, kind of in the regular range for me, so it wasn't like one of the last panics I had where the blood pressure was sky-high. There was no AFib, just this persistent shoulder to chest ache.
So I get to the hospital of choice, that is, NOT the Jesus Hospital with the theme park music out front. (Music that makes you think, "Welcome to the hospital and listen to the strings of harp music, cuz you're going to be in heaven soon!") Yeah, I don't need any of that fucking shit, so I go to the atheists choice, HCA Florida Highlands Hospital, a smidge farther away down the road, but I figure, what the fuck, Paris, in this case, is NOT worth a Mass.
The dude checking me in at the triage desk of the ER is literally twice my size, and all I kept thinking is "And I'm the one with heart problems?" He takes my info. One of the nurses or doctors, I don't know, I can't tell the difference these days, milling around, hears as I go down the list of my diagnoses: morbidly obese, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Bingo!, diabetes. He goes, "Oh yeah, that's it, you're going to be staying." I felt like I was being processed in County Jail. Or maybe the analogy should be a little closer to that Monopoly game and these folks all saw dollar signs in their eyes "Pay $50 for each roll of the dice to get out!"
So I get to the hospital of choice, that is, NOT the Jesus Hospital with the theme park music out front. (Music that makes you think, "Welcome to the hospital and listen to the strings of harp music, cuz you're going to be in heaven soon!") Yeah, I don't need any of that fucking shit, so I go to the atheists choice, HCA Florida Highlands Hospital, a smidge farther away down the road, but I figure, what the fuck, Paris, in this case, is NOT worth a Mass.
The dude checking me in at the triage desk of the ER is literally twice my size, and all I kept thinking is "And I'm the one with heart problems?" He takes my info. One of the nurses or doctors, I don't know, I can't tell the difference these days, milling around, hears as I go down the list of my diagnoses: morbidly obese, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Bingo!, diabetes. He goes, "Oh yeah, that's it, you're going to be staying." I felt like I was being processed in County Jail. Or maybe the analogy should be a little closer to that Monopoly game and these folks all saw dollar signs in their eyes "Pay $50 for each roll of the dice to get out!"
Plunked into my jail cell, aka, one of the tiny little rooms that make up an ER Department these days, on my tiny bed, made to feel like a slab of beef thrown into the freezer. And I do mean freezer! Some of the parade of people coming in to pick, poke, prod, and question me, mention the fact that the room I'm in is the coldest of the department, and the way the old A/C system is, the rooms in sequence up the line get a little warmer and warmer as you go, to the point where, by say room 20 or however the fuck there may be, it's a freaking sauna! Well I guess the freezer is better than the sauna, at least there's these heated blankets I can put on. Oh, and I say blankets, they're really nothing more than thick sheets, and as I said before, stinky. I guess because of the current-day attitude about perfumes and chemical fragrances, they choose none-of-the-above, so it's literally just the smell of old cotton that's been washed over and over and over again. Yet no matter how many times it's been washed the essential funk of human beings is still embedded in its fibers so that even a clean sheet, I mean blanket, smells a little like fresh raw pork.
So eventually after a few hours of
So one of the dudes tells me it's not that busy today so, "Yay!" I get to go up in relative Fastpass speed, only 6 hours of waiting! I get up to my room and there's two beds and the orderly pushing my wheelchair in says, "Oh yeah, about that..."
When the hospital first opened, I later found out, in the mid 60s, the rooms were built large enough to accommodate two beds each. And that's the way it was for a while until the 80s or so, (such timeline like this is my own speculation) when they were made into the much more popular single rooms. Then came Covid. Due to the need for admitting more and more people, the rooms went back to doubles, and here they still are. "So since the pandemic is winding down, does that mean there's just always an extra bed in each room?" No, they fill each bed and the orderly told me that I'm most likely getting a roomie soon.
As it turned out though, no sooner after a couple hours did I get comfortable, well you know, as comfortable as I could get, my nurse, (young family member) Cole, comes in and says, "Oh Mr. Michael, we got to move you since the new admission is a female and they don't like blending (as he gives me a knowing side-eye since he he knows, as a gay man, I could give a fuck less about a female) you know would you mind? You don't have to..." But, well, being the good camper I am, I said all right, and they wheeled me across the hall at 10 pm to a room already occupied by a crusty old man named Walter.
How do I know his name? Oh it doesn't take long for HIPAA to be thrown out the fucking window when it comes to shared rooms because you hear everything when nurses come in and talk about the shit going on with the person in the bed next to you. You see, back in the '60s when open wards and shared rooms were common in hospitals, there was no fucking HIPAA. But how are they going to maintain HIPAA now, going back to this doubled-up rooms shit? There's no way I don't know what that guy has. I heard them run-down all his meds, all his diagnoses, as he heard mine. I'm not saying I give a fuck as far as me, but this makes this a total bullshit situation, in modern days, when everybody's all fucking HIPAA-crazy.
But that's not the worst of it. This old man never spoke boo to me. The minute I got laid into my bed, he starts pumping up the volume on his fucking TV, yes the only TV in the room, and he has the control for it. What's on TV? Does he ask if I want to have any say in it? No of course not! And, of course, it's all the Fox News/Donald Trump is fucking God, religious channel "How Holy we Republicans are!" at volume 11! And does it end as we get closer towards a traditional "sleep time?" Nope. It's full volume ALL-FUCKING-NIGHT-LONG!!
Next day, sun comes up, I'm tired as all fuck with absolutely no sleep all night. TV still blaring throughout the long, long day. Breakfast: reconstituted scrambled eggs, hard-as-a-rock English muffins, grits and cow's milk. Risked tooth damage crunching on the muffins with sugar-free jam, a couple bites of the "egg-like" shit and I don't eat the rest. Lunch was a little more palatable: a hamburger with really good sweet potato fries, small salad and canned peach slices. I didn't stay for dinner...
By mid-afternoon, within seconds of the end of the echocardiogram test, I asked my nurse if I could go. I told her I had no pains (yet I still have a few shoulder aches but I'm now convinced this is all due to muscle aches for the above mentioned crooked neck reasons) She shrugs. She's probably trained to make patients "roll the dice" at least three rolls (see Monopoly analogy above). She texts the doctor and in a "zippy" couple hours, I'm free! Free at last!
And not a moment too soon...
Mr. "I own the TV" MAGA, Walter, having had no bowel movements since he was admitted six days ago, starts, finally, shitting in his bedpan....just inches away from me...