January 18, 2011
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Le Hospital. (A Serial.) -Episode 2
Saturday: Pilot episodes always suck, there is too much exposition and introductions. It’s like when you show up early to a party and the first hour sucks: you’ve covered the school/work/hometown/small facts of what you were told conversations, awkward yet unavoidable. This is more of a set-up, with quips and descriptions of my surroundings. Then just like LOST or any other serial series bang it hits you.
So I wake up around 8am that morning to a well-groomed, styled, tan man with a half-sleeve tribal tattoo on his left arm and a perfect ivory smile.
“Luigi,” I hear as I try to fight through the sleep that’s still cloaking me. “I’m your man today.” I’m still not awake and thinking, like my mind is tumbling through a thick spider-web forest. He then walks out says “Good Morning,” and immediately make a joke about he can’t stand working with ugly nurses. He’s full of sass and love. And is so flirtatious.
My nurse Mary comes in. She is grandma plump, like she’s about to burst with love. She has gray shoulder length hair and a bedtime story voice, well with a Worcester accent. She tells me I have beautiful veins, I tell her she’s making me blush. “Now you’re making me blush,” Mary is great.
I want to thank all of my friends and family for coming that first day, it really meant the world to have non-stop visits till around 10:30. Especially when the last thing I thought was that I was going be even admitted to the hospital in the first place.
The day is full of me joking with the nurse desk, screaming “Mary, I’m beeping!” every time my oil rig-esque IV machine was done pumping me full of antibiotics. This machine literally does the work of an hours drip in 20 minutes. It pumps and pumps until it goes dry and then charges me an arm and a leg, or in this case my heel to have it.
Squirrel guy does not come back. Turns out he was Section 12-ed. I miss him.
Hospitals are such a fucked up thing. I went on a walk with my parents this day to the Atrium, which if you haven’t seen it I suggest you do. There are real living plants and a three story waterfall with people always bustling around. But, while yes what has happened to me was and can be a life-threatening thing there are people dying in this building.
“This place, while you may see some of the most heartbreaking, fucked things you’ll ever see. Some of the funniest goddamned things you could never even think up yourself happen too,” says my great friend Shannon True, a nursing student.
She speaks her last name. And I still get the care and attention I deserve, and all with a sense of humor! It is contradictory, yet it is perfect, despite the mistakes and wrong turns.
Luigi and I had a discussion of how tiny I was and why I didn’t work out right before I started to give my self a little sponge bath. Mind you he is ripped, like gay guy ripped (Greg Giraldo). He said that he sees all these little kids shooting steroids, like 15 year olds. And they get mad when he laughs as they check themselves out in the mirror. He says, “They so tiny like you, but you don’t care. But that’s roid rage and most people don’t have that. So that’s good.” He then proceeded to ask me about my girlfriends and then if there were any that I would wake up next to the next morning and question my decisions the night before. Then I introduced him to my mother.
The point is you have to understand people. Not understand how they tick, but to be understanding. SO TAKE THAT GLENN BECK!
Stay tuned for the next episode of Le Hospital. (A Serial.)!! Will I get any real news about the infection? Will Luigi prove time and again that he’s great? Will Mary reveal that she plays World of Warcraft?? And what do zombies have to do with any of this? Find out on another rousing episode of Le Hospital. (A Serial.)!!!!!
