Observations from my ER visits

Despite my horrific experience in the ER, earlier this year and on Sunday, I did make several fascinating and petty discoveries:

(1: Even in the ER, you must prove yourself. There exists an underlying, unwritten code of conduct where you must prove to other patients around you that you REALLY are sick or hurt, and that you truly BELONG THERE. Now, I was in the ER earlier this year for severe nausea/ulcer related stuff, and despite being hooked up to IV for hours, when I looked at the faces of patients and doctors, they glared back at me with contempt and defiance. Of course, when they talked to me, they seemed to console me genuinely, but even then, I could pick up in their voices a slight hint of condescension...This continued until I threw up uncontrollably and violently for 15 minutes into a bucket. While I was vomiting the entire contents of my stomach, I could hear whimpers of other patients around me -- but they weren't whimpers that manifested their own pain, they were whimpers of pity for me! I knew then that I earned my gurney. To use a baseball analogy, it is said that a player played hard if his uniform is dirty. Well, that day, my gurney was dirty, and so it was recognized by all that I played my guts out.....

This past Sunday, however, not only was I NOT hooked up to IV at all, but I didn't even throw up once. I did nearly pass out several times, but that's just not very tangible, and certainly not meaningful without any disturbing medical results to back it up. Furthermore, I was amongst tougher competition -- I mean, how could I possibly be competition for the biker guy who for hours was screaming in pain, "Please God! Please! No!!..."On Sunday, he was the star.

(2: I LOVE the Raritan Bay Medical Center fruit cup! It's true, it was an heavenly oasis within a hellish day. It contained peaches and an apricot. As I devoured the fruit cup and realized its greatness, I adopted an increasingly existential mindset, as I realized, "At some point in the future, there will be no more fruit cup.".....A nurse asked me if there was something wrong, but I merely told her that "there's something in my eye"....

(3: I have extremely long lungs. This is what one of the nurses told me while taking X-rays of my heart and lungs. At first, after 1 frontal and 1 lateral X-ray, I was told that she would have these analyzed in a minute or two.......At the 5 minute mark, I still hadn't heard from her, and I was getting nervous....I thought, "Maybe I really DO have a heart defect"....Finally, she emerged and told me that because I have extremely long lungs, she needed to do another frontal X-ray so that they could fit on one shot. I was strangely proud of myself at the moment, because it was one of the very few times that I was able to demostrate my masculinity in public. What do I mean? You see, I'm the guy that just doesn't down a ton of food at one time. I can't eat 7 slices of pizza....I don't have big arms....I don't have big legs.....I'm not 6 feet tall....and I'm a Web geek that loves RPG's and computers.....and I hate cars and have never worked in a garage before. So when the nurse told me that I had huge lungs, that meant something to me...

There are more, but those are the ones that stand out...

I will have some opinions regarding the rules for the death match v. Brooke tomorrow..Ciao!