3 a.m. and I have disrupted the quiet calm of the surgery wing. All I wanted was to top off my giant hospital issue Styrofoam drinking water jug with ice.
That's all.
I know where the ice machine is. And I don't want to ask the night nurses to break their sacred rhythm, so off I go with my hospital gown flapping in the breeze behind me.
I made it as far as the ice machine before my head became a coconut full of juice and pulp and white light in the middle of the night. Maybe the morphine caused this?
Mayday mayday!
I was going to pass out in front of the ice machine!
But after I dropped my ice jug on the floor and before I followed it with my head someone grabbed my elbow and said "an I help you?"A
At this juncture I thought I was saying something completely logical, witty and erudite but what actually came out of my mouth was, perhaps, Sanskrit.
Here's where it gets surreal if it hasn't already become so. The surgeons in this hospital, when they're dealing with abdominal situations like a nice clean antiseptic field of operation. So we candidates for surgery undergo much the same prep as one would , say, associate with a colonoscopy. It is vicious unpredictable and the one thing that will make me just sit down and cry.
So on my perp walk back from the ice machine the inevitable had to happen, and that medicine kicked in causing me to have no control of anything.
Nothing brings a nurse running faster than a code brown. And in the blink of an eye I was cleaned up the hallways mopped I was put in bed and told to stay there the rest of the night. And for my part I guess I should be cooperative and not walk around at night anymore. Because now I know they put a LoJack on my bed. If I get out of it, it goes off!
Runner Runner!
