a pretentious little quadrangle, with overtones of morbid obesity
Still too woozy from my latest hospital visit to do a useful post, but very soon I shall put up a restaurant review-style comparison of the multifarious psychoactive substances the wonderful Canadian healthcare system has been doling out to me gratis. Not sure whether to rate them on overall experience or just quality of hallucinations, but definitely in there somewhere.
Today the Emergency Room doctor told me my Demerol space cosmonaut monkey hallucination was “totally awesome.” I think it made his day. God knows, it made mine.
Is it TOO MUCH TO ASK, Universe, to wake up on Christmas morning to find Julian Assange and Laird Hamilton under the tree, naked, tied together with leather straps, and very happy to see me?
So this may be a weird post, but nonetheless it’s a post that captures the Zeitgeist of right this very second: Kardashians and soul-seeking all on the same page. Actually, I think I’ve spared you Kardashians this time, as I’ve covered actual out-of-the-closet hookers instead.
Solitude doesn’t only afflict the elderly, however. “I’m 37 years old and I’ve been deeply unhappy for too long,” one woman wrote this year, in a letter excerpted last week in Montreal’s La Presse. “All I really want for Christmas is to find my soulmate.”
This week, a letter arrived from a soldier-in-training who will be a father for the first time – yes, there are Santa believers on the battlefield. “Dear Santa, I haven’t written to you for a long time. I hope you haven’t forgotten me,” he wrote. “This year for Christmas I ask you nothing more than to give health, happiness and love to my young family.”
Filtered through the missives is a hint that, at a time of shifting religious faith, something of the Christmas spirit exerts a powerful pull on at least some Canadians. Like the middle-aged mother who wrote to Santa to say she was broke, they’re looking for a bit of hope at Christmas.
“Dear Santa, I bet it is a rarity for you to receive a letter from a 50-year-old woman,” she wrote. “This is the first year in my life when I have been unable to give Christmas presents to my family. I am on unemployment this year and my son has not been able to find work. As a mother, it hurts to see my son fighting the frustration of not having work. That would be the gift I would give him if I could this year: A job so he would feel better about himself.”
She said oil in the furnace and saving up for winter tires would have to take priority over gifts. “It has made me rethink Christmas and what it really means to give from the heart.”
Santa, she added, “I am writing to you in the hopes of finding the little girl I lost. You see, no matter how old I get, I know she still exists just as you do. You represent the kindness of a soul who carries himself from home to home in the blink of one night to make wishes come true … most of all you represent the hope that anything is possible. How can I not believe in such magic?”
And now, back to our regular superficial programming:
I had a friend like that once. I told her "I choose very unsupportive friends". She didn't get it.
Some curious and brave souls have asked me to describe what I’ve been going through (although they seem to wish me to leave out the “gee, it’s taking a lot longer to digest corn” info for some reason: EQUALITY FOR BOWEL UPDATES is what I say! If Mommybloggers can do it, so can I; bloody age-discriminationists! If baby doodies are twit-worthy, so are social media specialist spoor! That’s what I always say, or at least since this afternoon anyway) and I have decided, under pressure, to tell them.
Or rather, because I am lazy and a better artist than me has already done all the work, to show them. To show them, in fact, this video, which neatly captures the feeling of being a patient in the medical system. It is far less Ralph Naderesque and far more Franz Kafkaesque than one might expect, however familiar one is with the concept of hospital care as a whole. Tug on something, and something else starts to unravel. Ravel it up again, and wires go hay-style in places you never even knew you were wired. You spend half the time in the waiting room, 1 third of the time trying to keep your stupid hospital gown from mooning everyone in the ward, 1/20th of the time unconscious and, it seems, most of the rest on WebMD looking up what just happened to you.
And this, my friends, is exactly what it feels like.
Yes, it’s another in our popular series, “Horror Stories of the Gastro-Intestinal System” starring none other than moi. But you’ll like this one: it is considerably less splenic and considerably more amusing than the previous installments (really? I don’t have a “gallbladder” tag? Seriously?).
This morning I was woken up in my least-favorite way, which is at 5:30am by a loud, tinny alarm clock I am not immediately well-coordinated enough to shut off quickly, and then the cat came over and farted on my face. I guess she just thinks that’s the best way to start the day, so tomorrow I intend to start mine by waking up at leisure, walking over, and farting on HER face. I sure hope she isn’t smoking at the time or this could get epic REAL fast.
My favorite way to wake up, by the way, is being sung awake shortly before noon in an isolated cottage on the beach at Not-Ucluelet: the song is a langourous Portugese fado, and the singer is: Jake Gyllenhaal, Viggo Mortensen twenty years ago, or Hugh Jackman. Or maybe Prince Caspian, but not the one from the movies, the one from the books. If the song hadn’t woken me, the smell of the fine double espresso (16-second shots) he immediately brings me would have. There are biscotti: pistachio, chocolate-dipped biscotti. There are red-and-black mackinaw-plaid blankets that feel like cashmere and look like what Kurt Cobain sleeps on in Heaven. Oh, what the hell, Kurt is there too, having kicked the heroin and skank habits.
But where was I, besides coming down from a Demerol high? Oh, right, explaining my day. Or rather, my gastro-intestinal system’s day.
The day which started so insanely early, because I had to catch a suburban bus to be on time, and they’re like every six weeks or something if you’re out in the boonies like I am right now. And I had to be on time, because my appointment was for a very high priority chimney sweeping of my bile duct, it appearing that my liver was slowly being poisoned by a backup of bile (and how odd is that, really? I mean, anyone who reads me knows I don’t keep the bile to myself but like to spread it around as freely as Rihanna spreads herpes!) and that if I didn’t have the procedure, I’d essentially poison myself to death in a few weeks, although not before giving myself an orange tan the likes of which the Jersey Shoreites would kill for. And god knows, I hate being tanned, so that was NOT an option, hence the bus ride to my 7:30am appointment for said chimney sweeping.
Actually, it was supposed to be more “sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads” than “prancing Dick van Dyke,” but it seems that my obstruction was more in the nature of clay rather than rocks, and so the sharks remained in their tank while the doctors conked me out with something and proceeded to drag a basket-like device up and down my bile duct, clearing things out considerably. I imagine it was something like the big round brush that goes over the whole car at the car wash, only with rhyming Cockney slang.
The Chinese doctor was very businesslike. The Irish one ignored my medical chart and picked up the book I’d been reading, Masterpieces of Murder: the best true crime writing from the Greatest Chroniclers of Murder, and said, “well, whatever else she’s got, she’s got good taste.”
And that is my kind of doctor, I’m telling you.
So, they wheeled me into the room, which was in Radiology for some reason, gave me a green, snorkel-like thing to bite on, stuck an oxygen tube in my nose, and put something in the line in my arm so I was OUT, like BLAM, GONE. They’d assured me most people don’t remember a thing, although it’s not technically a general anaesthetic. I woke up towards the end of the procedure, quite confused, on my belly with this masky thing in my mouth and breathing tubes in my nose and a big hose coming out of my throat, or it might have been several of them. Well, what would you do if you woke up in that kind of disoriented, context-free environment, with your arms tied down quite securely?
I can tell you what I did, deep in the tentacles of a Demerol daze: I immediately concluded that OF COURSE I was one of those monkey cosmonauts that the Soviets had shot into space back in the 60’s. Well, makes total sense, right? And I couldn’t see the control panel, which was of course supposed to be right in front of me, because there was this stupid TOWEL in front of it, so I think I tried to smoosh it out of the way before the nurses put it back, and then I don’t remember anything except waking up in the recovery room feeling healthy for the first time in weeks, and very, very loopy indeed.
For the next few hours I remained rather as likely to walk at a 45degree angle to the ground as a right angle, but other than that and the Great Cosmonaut Monkey illusion, I can’t say Demerol was much fun.
Hell, on the antibiotics they gave me I’d seen a pair of three-foot ravens, a dachshund that did not exist that was being walked by a couple who obviously DID, a ghost lurking on the porch, and a huge glob of Elmer’s glue that dropped from the ceiling to the floor right in front of my eyes and which also was not there.
On morphine, I’d become compelled to explain the ethnobotany of the Haitian Zombie (and HELLO what the fuck kind of podunk spellchecker doesn’t have “ethnobotany” in it, eh? I ask yez) to the nurses AT. LENGTH. To the point where they’d go out in the hall and flag down other nurses, going, “you HAVE to hear this!” I also saw the angels surfing on the rays of the setting sun over English Bay, and St. Peter actually winked and gave me the thumb’s up. I didn’t realize till after I’d gotten out of the hospital that the room I was in didn’t have a view of the sunset: it didn’t have any windows at all.
Anyway, since I’m on a clear liquid diet, that’s as close to a restaurant review you’re gonna get from me. Demerol ***, antibiotics **, Morphine *****.
Also, if you want to know what I was going through these past few weeks, try watching this video. I’m serious: watch it all the way through. Your guts will ACHE, I guarantee it. Also: be sure you’re wearing waterproof mascara. You’ll need it.
raincoaster 