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…

(Continued from With Six You Get Eggroll…)

And so… People in official looking hospital type clothing streamed in and out of the room for the next day and a half… Well, not really a day and a half, but as noted in the previous blog, around 6 hours. One ego would be telling everyone how it was going to be, and then another ego would show up and they would piss on each other for a minute or two, then I would interject a word or two about how, ya’know, it was MY body we were talking about so maybe we could all get on the same page. Of course, that didn’t work – except with the RN’s. They were the real heroes in there. And, I missed the ER Doc in Charge, but she was off saving other people and I had been turned over to the maintenance staff.

By now, we had progressed into late afternoon. It was just me, my ice chips, the FramoLiptoTriptoDiFremulene XQ, morphine, some truly fantabulous RN’s, the egos, and a shift change. By shift change I mean a shift change. My team of RN’s changed up, and so did my on-site family, as EK left work an hour or so early and came to the hospital to relieve the Teen of Doom and check to see if she could collect on the life insurance yet.

Just kidding. She’d definitely wait an appropriate amount of time so that it didn’t look suspicious.

JUST KIDDING. I don’t have any life insurance.

DAMMIT… I’m just kidding, for reals. Y’all know Evil Kat really isn’t evil. She just plays Evil on my blog and other places you don’t really need to know about.

So, anyway, yeah, full on shift change – except for the egos, although, there did seem to be a few new egos added to the mix and some other egos had disappeared – not all, but some. I don’t know if some of them just lost their pissing matches, or if I just wasn’t a “Dr. House” worthy anomaly that would get them the recognition they thought they deserved. However, it really didn’t matter. There seemed to be an endless supply of egos to replace the ones who had gone tooling on home in their BMW’s.

Now… let me again state, there are some truly fantastic docs out there who don’t have swelled heads. I’m actually good friends with a couple. Not only that, my primary care physician is a pretty cool guy. I am currently – or was, because as of this writing I have been discharged by two of them – seeing some docs of various specialties given the range of my injuries who are personable, down to earth, and even pretty damn funny. They listen to my concerns, and even my objections and decisions about my own care given that I have a team of RN’s, a couple of Paramedics, and a Doc who are long time friends who have been conducting their own “Remote Care Regimen” on me via Facebook Messenger, Text, and Phone. Granted, they were a bit taken aback the first time I told them, “I don’t think so, because Little Red Riding Nurse says XYZ instead…” I did have to stop and explain that I had every reason to trust LRRN and the rest of my FB medical team, and really no reason at all to trust them, which might have been a blow to their individual egos, but instead of huffing and puffing, they rolled with it and said, “Yeah, I can understand that, and this Little Red Riding Nurse person is right about XYZ, but can we do ABC in conjunction with that?”

Compromise, man… It works.

But, now I am getting ahead of myself in the story, so let’s step back in time to the ER where we were before.

 

 

 

 

After a lull in the activity a mess of scrubby folks came in and and told me I had been chosen to star in a remake of the Star Trek (TOS) episode, City On The Edge Of Forever. Okay, so not really. What they actually said was, “We’re going to take you for a CT scan.”

Now, this is one of those things you always hear on the medical dramas when they are yelling out the gimme this, gimme that, while calling for 3 million units of whole blood, epinephrine, sodium bicarb, and shocking asystole – which any medical professional and most any writer who did an ounce of research will tell you is a lost cause, as it won’t restart your blood pump – but, I digress. What I am saying is that in just about any medical drama, while all of the above shit is going on, someone usually demands a CT Scan of something. Seems like it’s usually a head CT or some such, but there’s always a CT scan happening on TV. BUT… (saw that coming, right?) we don’t usually get to see it happen. They just holler out for it. So, I, like many others, don’t really know off the top of our heads what it looks like to get one.

Well, in my case they weren’t just sticking with the head (not that they were going to find anything in there anyway) – they were going for the full motherfucking monty. Every last inch of The Merp was going to get passed through a big ass degaussing coil. OR, as noted in the title – a time portal.

 

 

So, yeah, my SciFi Geek side thought of the above. My electronics tech nerd side, however, thought of this:

 

 

Admittedly, I was tanked up on morphine and Framostatotriptofromulene ZX or what the hell ever, but the brainpan was still firing. In reality, the machine they used on me looked like a giant, white degaussing coil just like the one above, all except that it had a motorized table that passed back and forth through it. Now… Unfortunately for y’all, at this point the RN’s had decided I was no longer amusing and therefore had upped my doses of Framostatotriptofromulene ZX to elephant killing levels just to shut me up. Seriously, though, they really had been pumping me full of painkillers due to the fact that the 6 kept turning into a 15 with an occasional 20. I actually heard more than once from those tending to my care that they didn’t recall the last time they’d encountered anyone with as high a pain tolerance as I seemed to have. I kept telling them that it was because they weren’t giving me bourbon. If they would just give me a bottle of bourbon everything would be okay. They opted instead for shit I can’t pronounce, even though I told them to just grab the cash out of my wallet and run down to the liquor store for a handle of Devil’s Cut.

Anywho, at this point I was still hurting like a sonofabitch, but at the same time I was drifting in and out of a twilight sort of state. Things were a bit hazy, but I recall that after passing me back and forth between 1938 and 2017 for several minutes, they rolled me around for a bit, and then took me upstairs to the psych ward. Okay, okay, it wasn’t the psych ward. I think – IIRC – that it was actually the neurology floor, because everyone on the floor had either broken their back or had back surgery of some sort. Seems that was a big ass concern for them – the fact that I had a compression fracture of my T12 vertebrae. They had even shown pictures of it to EK and ToD.

 

 

So… there I was… 6 hours later, admitted to Mercy hospital, in a room on the “I’ve Fallen And I Can’t Get Up” floor, and the RN and Tech assigned to me are oohing and ahhing over my story. Remember, all of this started right after I had shoved a handful of groceries down my neck at 11:30 in the morning. Now, as I said, things were a bit fuzzy, but IIRC – and I may not on this part – I think I said something about being hungry and EK asked them if it was possible to get me something to eat. Well, as the story goes it was past dinner time, but since there is no real schedule for idiots like me falling off of roofs, they keep some stuff in the icebox to reward us for sticking the landing – or not. A few minutes later I was presented with a cold turkey sandwich, some pudding, and a cranberry juice.

It was probably just an effect of the Framostatotriptofromulene ZX – and being sorta hungry – but it was a damn good turkey sandwich for being some dry ass turkey on a whitebread hamburger bun and smashed up in some cling wrap.

EK hung out with me for the rest of the evening while I tried to get comfortable, they took my vitals, and injected extra Framostatotriptofromulene ZX into my IV to keep me from running away.

Eventually, I started drifting off to sleep in the wake of a rather trying day and a whole lot of chemicals – and I am NOT talking about L-Tryptophan from the turkey.

However, as something resembling sleep descended upon me an entirely new kind of personal hell broke loose…

More to come…