Somewhere between starting to write yesterday’s post about getting beaned in the head with a block of ice and hitting publish, I realized that things weren’t exactly as they were supposed to be. I was a little dizzy, a little disoriented, I was finding concentration was a little…um…hey, look at that thing over there!
So I picked myself up and took a 10 block walk to the nearest Brooklyn ER.
And oh, what an ER it was.
While I was happy to get into see a doctor after a three hour wait, I literally recoiled at some of the filth in the room. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when they point me towards a bed and I feel the need to I set my coat down on it first.
My stepmother is gagging right now
What’s in the draw? I don’t no.
I also had to call an orderly to clean the bathroom. It is no small feat to try and squat over a toilet bowl to pee in a cup, let alone doing it while dizzy with a possible concussion. So yes, the bathroom was fairly nasty when I entered, but me dripping pee up my arms and onto my jeans didn’t exactly help me feel fresh as a daisy in there, especially with no paper towels in the room.
(Shut up – I had an excuse.)
In any case, I was fully clothed so I decided not to be too grossed out by any of it.
Going in for my first ever CAT scan was a trip. I look up at the ceiling and there are all these bad stencils painted on the tiles, presumably to give the impression of leaves falling from the sky. And then I thought you know, the last thing some people getting CAT scans of the head (um, like me) want to think about are OBJECTS FALLING FROM THE SKY.
I lay down on the little stretcher thing not exactly knowing what I was supposed to do – stay perfectly still? Close my eyes so the alien gamma rays can’t penetrate my eyeballs? The technician, who looked uncannily like Arthur Ashe, never gave me any instructions. I kept finding myself holding my breath, like it would keep me from breathing in radiation or something.
Again, not thinking too straight.
Arthur headed back into his little darkened chamber of doom behind some plexiglass and just then the phone rang. I could hear him talking in a Charlie Brown voice Wahwah wah wahwah wahhhhhh.
Suddenly I was stricken with giggles: He actually the banker on Deal or No Deal. He was in there bargaining for my diagnosis.
Do you want to take the traumatic concussion? You might want to because while we have Clean Bill of Health on the board, we also have Inter-cranial Hemmorrhage and Squished and Entirely Useless Cerebellum.
No Deal!
In the end I took the Mild Concussion which came with a consolation prize, a stack of discharge papers. I was pretty happy on that front. It was presented to me in a sealed case held by one of fifty hot guys in Speedos. Which kind of made up for that ER room.
