BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

(Continued from City On The Edge Of Forever…)

In case you haven’t been following the bouncing (or not so bouncing) Merp, here are the basics. I fell off a roof about 15 feet to asphalt. didn’t die (even though I thought I might), broke several parts of myself, cracked a lot of jokes with paramedics, spent 6 hours in the ER (cracking jokes with nurses) and then ended up in a room on the “my back and foot are broken” floor of the hospital, whereupon I received my award for sticking the landing – a cold turkey sandwich and some pudding. If you want more details than that follow the link above this paragraph – as well as the links at the top of each successive post until you get to “When Ladders Attack..” – then start reading forward again.

Now that we are all on the same page… Or post, as it were…

Hospital beds are one of the most uncomfortable places to sleep in the world. I’ve found more comfort in the reclined front seat of an ’85 Ford Mustang LX than I have in a hospital bed, but at least I was no longer strapped to the back board. I had already been informed that I would be living in a fairly constricting back brace for several weeks, but they still had to fit me to one, so just lying still in the bed was what I was supposed to do. I was allowed to gently roll myself onto my side (no easy feat considering the 3.8 metric tonnes of plaster and ACE wraps confining my injured leg) so that I could pee in a graduated jug, but that was about it. Oh, wait… I was also allowed to incline the head of the bed to 45 degrees (NO MORE THAN THAT) so that I could shovel some food into my face or maybe look at something stupid on satellite TV. In order to keep me from escaping they had two levels of security – an alarm that would go off if I got out of bed, and a whole lot of sedation.

Here are a couple of things they don’t tell you:

1. Sometimes the alarm goes off when you roll over to pee in the graduated jug. BONUS TIP – this is often a much faster way to get someone to your room than the call button. More on that in a later post.
2. Pain medication really doesn’t help with the pain. It pretends to for the first 10 minutes or so, then it’s all like, “PSYCH! Just kidding asshole. Let’s ratchet it up to 37 while making you sleepy but not allowing you to sleep!”

There’s other shit they don’t tell you, too. I could get into a whole list, but let’s just take them as the come…

So, there I was, covered up in an uncomfortable ass hospital bed, tanked up on FramoLiptoSoluTrampolineadol QZ, an IV dripping into my vein, a sandwich and pudding in my gut, my foot and leg screaming bloody murder – oddly enough, my broken back didn’t hurt at all… Well, with the exception of the bruises that ran from my foot, up the back of my leg, across my ass, and up my back, but seriously… The broken back part didn’t hurt. I suppose in retrospect it might have, but it was just so overshadowed by the 37 in my foot that its paltry 6 or 7 was just plain unnoticeable. At any rate, there I was… Bruised, broken, exhausted, drugged, depressed, unsure about much of anything, and Evil Kat was hanging out in a chair next to me. She had to be exhausted, too. Between working, rushing about because of my injuries, and the emotional toll of realizing there was no life insurance to collect – again, JUST KIDDING! Still, she had to be exhausted and there were still things to do at home, but she hung out anyway even though I wasn’t exactly the best company. As the saying goes, it must be love.

But, back to the FramoLiptoSoluTrampolineadol QZ… While it only pretends to do anything about the pain, it DOES have the effect – as noted – of making you drowsy. Not really drowsy enough to get real sleep, but it’s probably not the drug company’s fault. After all, there’s a lot of other shit going on that it wasn’t designed to deal with. Even so, drowsy I was. Exhausted I was. Channeling Yoda I am… and I drifted off.

Unfortunately, drifting wasn’t really the best option of the moment, because, you see, this is where one of those other things they don’t tell you comes into play.

The rung on the escaping ladder caught my foot and yanked me backwards. Much like you see it happen in movies, my entire world shifted into slow motion and at that moment as I pitched into a head down fall with nothing to grab onto, I had a very real feeling I was going to die…

So, I screamed. As I understand it, the screaming was mostly in my head. I was making noises according to Her Supreme Evilness, and later the nurses, but not flat out screaming. You couldn’t tell me that, though, because inside my head I was screaming “OH FUCK!” all over again as I would start and awaken from the twilight slumber the damnable Framowhatzitshit had lulled me into.

But, you know, Framowhatzitshit combined with exhaustion is pretty pushy, and it lulls you into that false sense of security once again, and within a few short minutes to boot. So, your eyelids get heavy, you feel a weird wave of comfort even though you are in the most uncomfortable bed in the world, and then everything goes black.

The rung on the escaping ladder caught my foot and yanked me backwards. Much like you see it happen in movies, my entire world shifted into slow motion and at that moment as I pitched into a head down fall with nothing to grab onto, I had a very real feeling I was going to die…

And you scream “OH FUCK!” all over again.

And you do it all night.

ALL. MOTHERFUCKING. NIGHT.

And then you start wondering if you are actually dead and even though you are a Secular Humanist Atheist that maybe this is what Hell is all about…

More to come…