On Sunday, December 14th, I went through the first of six kidney stones passing. The first was the worst. The middle four were bad. Finally, on Saturday, December 20th between 1AM and 3AM, I had one I could no longer stand. I relented and agreed to let my wife take me to a local hospital. The pain, which had been considerable became too much even for my stubbornness to will away.
Also, to be even more of a jerk about it, I have a fear of hospitals. Especially hospitals away up here on the Gingham Coast where I feel an alien and have no doctors who refer me. And especially hospitals when they know you're on medicare. I suspect the hospitals don't make a lot of money from medicare patients. They make me feel like I'm a feral raccoon feeding at a medical dumpster. I suppose you're left only the dregs of care and that's meant to fill your convalescent belly.
Care or service in our modern era is virtually non-existent. 99.799748778-percent of every business in whatever form it takes is understaffed, and the staff that's there is over-worked, badly paid and has no future. Why should they look up from their phones? Work no longer has anything in it for you, other than a slight circumvention of homelessness, which it seems more and more people in America--with the possible exception of the six or twelve-dozen trillionaires--face every day.
Fortunately, though I was expecting nothing short of a Kafka-esque hospital experience, this place wasn't bad. The receptionist saw me, within minutes. I only had to tell her my name and date of birth five times or twenty and my wife had only repeat my name and date of birth five or twenty times more.
Within an hour, I was undressed, be-gowned and ensconced in plastic hospital gowns and plastic hospital drapes. A nurse surlied in and stuck me with an IV-needle and it only took an extra twenty minutes for the actual drip to begin. I believe it was a combination of used spaghetti water mixed with ibuprophen.
The doctor came in, too. He explained what they were doing and what was happening and the medication they were giving me. They handed me a control device that allowed me to buzz for a nurse if I needed one and also controlled the TV so I could flip through 29-different channels all playing some version of the home shopping network.
Before too long, I finished my IV and the doctor returned. He had called in a prescription to my local pharmacy and handed me vials of pills--the sorts of which killed millions of amerrymanikins. These pills also cost McKinsey $600,000,000 in fines for their suggestions to Purdue, who were fined $7,400,000,000 for their crimes, on how to dispense more of them. They came neatly shrink-wrapped and the doctor gave me just two with a prescription to get more.
"I don't want these," I told him. "I'm not going to use them."
"Just take them," he insisted. "I'm not a pill-pusher."
I put them in the front right pocket of my jeans, hoping the pains I'd suffered for the better part of a week would not resume past the point where they could not be handled by enough Tylenol to autism-out a small borough like Staten Island or the Bronx.
It's been 36-hours since I returned from the hospital and so far, I seem, for now at least to be in the clear.
I'd heard a story from a guy up here, our dogs sometimes get together to play in the evenings. He told me his father, who comes from the same stoic-school that I hail from, had kidney stones and his father said his pain was so bad he thought about banging his head against the stones of their fireplace--anything for relief.
As I near my sixth year since being shit-canned from Ogilvy, the whole megillah reminds me of a joke. It tells the story of a man, like my friend's father above, who's repeatedly banging his head on a wall. Finally someone asks him why. And he replies, "Because it feels so good when I stop."
Sometimes that the story I life I guess.
It hurts a helluva lot.
Maybe it'll feel good when we stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment