Saturday, September 18, 2010

Three Days is an Eternity

2:09 PM
I hate hospitals.

2:15 PM
Loath them. Abhor them. Despise them. Deprecate. Detest, disdain, deride, disparage, disfavor.

2:17 PM
So many words. So little time. I wonder if anyone has noticed quite how many synonyms of 'hate' start with the letter 'D'? I bet you if I used a thesaurus I could have a much longer list.

2:20 PM
Hospitals, apparently, do not have thesauruses. Just cheeky little nurses padding about asking me if I need anything and then refusing to give me what I ask for.

2:22 PM
I think a thesaurus is a perfectly reasonable request. It's a shocking lack that this hospital doesn't even have the most rudimentary of libraries. One of the nurses had to lend me her own personal copy of a book to occupy the dry, empty hours with.

3:00 PM
On top of everything else, the doctor is coming in a few minutes to "check up" on me. There's nothing to check. I am not dead; I've gotten quite good at not being dead, thank-you-so-very much, so if you please I think it's time to be discharged now.

3:07 PM
Here he is now.
"Miss Evans, how are we feeling today?" If there was a true and just god, He would have smote this nitwit where he stands on the basis that he's speaking to me as if I were three years old.
"I don't know how we are feeling today. I'm perfectly well, but I hope you're having a horrible day." That was a partial lie; I feel like I've been steamrollered to the bed. Everything else was true, though.
He's smiling at me. Humoring the spunky little old lady. "We do sound rather more robust than normal, don't we?" Smarmy, rich little twit.
"When are you going to discharge me?" Perhaps if I'm brisk and efficient with him, he'll stop using 'we' as his direct object and resort to being correct in his speech and say 'you.'
No such luck, he's gone off on a dumbed-down lecture of what a 'coma' is and why 'we' can't expect 'us' to recover in only a few short weeks... Why does he have to make recovering a group activity? Is this supposed to build my morale?

3:20 PM
If he keeps going on like this I'll darn well give him something to recover from.

3:34 PM
Better news than I expected; I must endure only three more days of being here, and then I'm free to go home.

3:36 PM
Three; a symbolic number. Everything comes in threes in stories. Except Noah's Arc, where groups of three would have been awkward and extraneous.

3:40 PM
I do get tired easily, but I think it might be a survival mechanism; all these white, surgical walls and the ugly, puce green and pink furniture are encroaching on me, and I'm hooked up to so many IVs that I certainly can't make a break for it; so my body shuts down in pure self preservation.

12:13 AM
And it wakes back up at the most cursed inconvenient times; nothing good is on television at this time of night and I've only got one book--Pride and Prejudice--and I've read it four times already since I woke up from my coma.

12:15 AM
I'm getting a bit prejudiced against it.

12:17 AM
Hahahaha.

1:30 AM
One would think that at my age, sleeping wouldn't be difficult. After all, isn't that one of the things old people are famous for doing? Sleeping? Falling into peaceful dozes not only at night but also in the early afternoon?

1:32 AM
Clearly such peace and tranquility is not for the likes of me. However, I have just figured out how to adjust the bed with the little automagical button. It can make the bed sit up...like so...and then lie flat...like so...

1:40 AM
This is more fun than I think I'd normally find it. I shall stop now before my roommate wakes up and howls for the nurses to complain about me. She is a most unforgiving sick person; I can't move for having her complain that I'm bothering her in some obscure fashion.

1:42 AM
Pitched an absolute fit when she overheard me asking a nurse if I could keep my cats in the room with me.

1:50 AM
In here, three days is going to be an eternity.

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