There Will be Blood

A couple of nights ago, my wife, Agnes (not her real name, but since she has banned me from mentioning her by name on the blog, this is her blog alias) and I were winding down in the kitchen late on a Saturday night. We still hadn't cleaned up from Christmas and Agnes accidentally swung her hand directly into the broken bulb of a battery-powered Christmas candle which had fallen and broken a few days before. I had picked it up off the floor and put it on the shelf, planning on throwing it away later. Unfortunately, I never got around to it, and the jagged bulb sliced deep into her left hand. By the time we got to the sink to wash it off, she was bleeding bad and it was obvious she needed stitches. It was almost midnight when we wrapped her bloody hand in a dish towel and sped to the hospital.

We got to the hospital, checked in a couple of times (this ER had a multi-stage check-in process for some reason) and waited for about 30 minutes before they took us down the hall past two sheriff's deputies and into a room. It turns out our new neighbor was a prisoner from San Quentin. He moaned and screamed for the next 2 hours as we sat and waited for a doctor to come stitch up Agnes' hand. After a while, an orderly or a nurse or a hospital technician (I'm not really sure if those are even real positions in the ER) came in and prepped Agnes' hand, brought in some supplies, and warned me that I was more likely to faint than Agnes was. We laughed at that, because you would have to be pretty lame to faint in the ER.

After a while, I started to get bugged because I forgot a book to read and I had already read all the latest articles on the '08 primaries on my blackberry and Prison Mike next door wouldn't shut up. Finally the doctor came in and she took off the bloody dish towel and started to stitch up Agnes' hand. I stood up to get a better view and was surprised at how ragged the cut was. That's all I kept thinking. "Wow, that's a really ragged cut." After a couple of minutes of watching, a wave of nausea hit me and it felt like someone had turned up the thermostat to 150 degrees. I took off my sweatshirt and felt like I was going to throw up so I sat back down. I started to feel even more dizzy and the doctor stopped stitching and looked over at me to see what was wrong. She told me to put my head down between my knees, and I heard her say, "Wow, he's really pale." I slumped over in my little ER chair but I felt like I was underwater and her voice had a strange echo. I heard the shuffling of feet and before I knew it, my head was cradled in the ample bosom of a large Hispanic nurse, who rocked me gently as she lowered me to the floor. I remember hearing her say "he's going, he's going," in her gravely smoker voice.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor, looking up at a semi-circle of doctors and nurses standing over me smiling. "You fainted," the bosom cradler proudly announced. As she shuffled off to get me crackers and apple juice, I heard Agnes, still being stitched up, ask me if I was okay. They helped me up and put me in a gurney directly across from her so she could laugh at me while they worked on her hand.

When they finished with her stitches, I overheard the doctor tell her two things: first, she couldn't believe my brother was an ER doctor, and second, I wasn't allowed to drive home. So after nearly three hours in the ER, I sheepishly walked out of the hospital and got into the passenger seat so my injured wife could drive me home with her one good hand.

As we drove, I told Agnes that my fainting episode qualified as one of my most embarrassing moments. Funny, my all-time most embarrassing moment was also in a hospital. I was eighteen years old, groggily coming out of elbow surgery, I awoke to a room full of 20-year-old nursing students, who were there to watch and learn how to take out a catheter. Sorry, I'm still not ready to blog about that one.