What Goes Down Must Come Up
A few nights before my business trip, I was restless and uncomfortable. I couldn’t sleep. I chalked it up to the five cups of coffee I had that evening. About 1:00am, I got up to watch television.
During a DVRed episode of The Daily Show, I started to feel nausea. Before I knew it, the nausea was at full tilt. I’ll spare you the specific details, but for the next three and a half hours, in 45 minute cycles, I was running between the bathroom and the couch. I had never before been this violently ill, and there seemed to be no end in sight.
I asked my wife to take me to the emergency room.
The only times I have been to the emergency room previously were to have the doctors sew up various open wounds on my body, mostly on my face. I’ve had more thread in my body than a Central American sweatshop.
This time, though, I was sick. I was extremely grateful for the anti-nausea meds, which allowed me to sleep. Mrs. Lefty sat in the corner of the room, patiently reading a book. As I was starting to fade out, I thought about wonderful tricks I could play on the ER staff.
I could pretend to be delusional, asking my nurse why there were hundreds of spiders crawling out of the cupboards, or who was that man in the orange jumpsuit and carrying a roadside flare who kept coming in and messing with my IV? Or, maybe I could feign a sharp pain in my abdomen that kept moving around each time the doctor thought he had located it.
But no, I behaved. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of some car accident victim just because I was playing a prank on the doctor.
Maybe, though, I’ll try it out on my family doctor after I have to sit two hours in the waiting room.
As for the illness, the doctor speculated it was only a severe flu and not food poisoning. It took me a few days to get back to normal, but fortunately I was well enough to drink myself silly on my business trip.
During a DVRed episode of The Daily Show, I started to feel nausea. Before I knew it, the nausea was at full tilt. I’ll spare you the specific details, but for the next three and a half hours, in 45 minute cycles, I was running between the bathroom and the couch. I had never before been this violently ill, and there seemed to be no end in sight.
I asked my wife to take me to the emergency room.
The only times I have been to the emergency room previously were to have the doctors sew up various open wounds on my body, mostly on my face. I’ve had more thread in my body than a Central American sweatshop.
This time, though, I was sick. I was extremely grateful for the anti-nausea meds, which allowed me to sleep. Mrs. Lefty sat in the corner of the room, patiently reading a book. As I was starting to fade out, I thought about wonderful tricks I could play on the ER staff.
I could pretend to be delusional, asking my nurse why there were hundreds of spiders crawling out of the cupboards, or who was that man in the orange jumpsuit and carrying a roadside flare who kept coming in and messing with my IV? Or, maybe I could feign a sharp pain in my abdomen that kept moving around each time the doctor thought he had located it.
But no, I behaved. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death of some car accident victim just because I was playing a prank on the doctor.
Maybe, though, I’ll try it out on my family doctor after I have to sit two hours in the waiting room.
As for the illness, the doctor speculated it was only a severe flu and not food poisoning. It took me a few days to get back to normal, but fortunately I was well enough to drink myself silly on my business trip.
Labels: business trips, coffee, pranks
posted by Lefty at 2:06 PM
8 comments
