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GenePool
Humor
A Day in the Life
I guess we all get the call eventually. My call came on a Sunday.
"Dear?" It was my mom. "We need your help. You have to take your father in for his operation."
As the dutiful son, who has always been attentive to the needs of his parents and respectful of all they've done for him, I quickly replied "dad needs an operation for something? When did this happen?"
"His hernia operation. We told you about this a month ago."
Of course, they may very well have done so. Equally possible, they told Deb, and either assumed she would tell me, or thought they were actually talking to me. After ten years of marriage, we're hard to tell apart. Our kids have the same problem.
As I am now thirty-two, you might think that my parents are perhaps turning the corner on their sunset years, and as such, might be in need of somewhat frequent attention by now. Fortunately, this is not the case; they are both in their early fifties. (I say fortunately because I just don't have the time for that sort of thing.) That my mother couldn't take dad to the hospital herself was something new. She's a very good worrier, and strongly believes that the closer she is to whatever it is she's worrying about, the less likely it is that something bad will happen. She, however, was extremely sick with the flu.
This actually worked out pretty well, because it meant I didn't have to drive my car all day. I'd received notification over the weekend that my insurance carrier had no use for the check I sent them. I don't know why. They had it for a month, and it was a perfectly good check, which they would have discovered had they bothered to apply it to my outstanding balance. If the operation went well, I'd have time to drive over to their offices personally-- in an insured vehicle-- and assault them.
So bright and early (waaay too early) Monday morning I went with my father to the Mount Auburn Hospital. It would be very easy to start an "I hate hospitals" column of some kind right about now, but to be honest, I don't really hate the Mount Auburn Hospital. I just don't understand it. Walking around this particular hospital is a lot like being in an episode of E.R., and I don't mean because there are lots of bodies being wheeled about with people shouting "stat" at random. I mean, you're never sure where you are, what you're looking at, where you're going, or why the camera keeps bouncing around so much. This is because Mount Auburn was built in pieces. There are three separate buildings attached by two ground floors. There are two ground floors because there are two grounds; the hospital was built on a hill. (The original hospital was a triage unit during-- I think-- the revolutionary war. It was easier to elevate the feet of the patients by lying them down on a hill. Yes, I made that up.) I once spent a half an hour there just looking for the maternity ward. See, I knew it was on the seventh floor, but I didn't know which seventh floor. I tried all of them. Fortunately, someone who knew which seventh floor to go to had already wheeled my wife there, so I was in no big rush.
It is imperative that once one finds where one is supposed to be, one stays there for the duration. I couldn't do this, though, because, as the emergency backup worrier, I had to keep in regular contact with the primary worrier. I would ordinarily do this with my cell phone, but they had all these signs up warning all concerned not to use cell phones inside the hospital because of the risk that they could cause a plane to crash.
So once my father was safely hidden away somewhere where hernia operations are conducted, I had nothing to do except wander out of the hospital, and wander back in again. Just for variety, I tried worrying for a while, but I couldn't seem to get the hang of it, so I gave that up. I also bought a paper, read every single word of it, did the crossword puzzle and the jumble, figured out the chess problem, read everyone's horoscope, and tried very hard to find the humor in Garfield, although in this I failed miserably. It was shaping up to be a long day.
Which is why everyone hates hospitals. There's no getting around the fact that all the action takes place in areas where only medical personnel are allowed, and frankly, I think this hurts the overall entertainment value.
I did have a book to read. Finishing this book was one of the big pluses of having to spend the morning in a waiting room, and was even higher on the list than throttling insurance drones later on in the day. Then I finished the book. Let me just say, without mentioning the title by name, that the next time I invest my time in reading a nine hundred page suspense novel, the bad guy better goddamn well get caught at the end of the book.
Some time around Noon (dad was out of surgery, mom was at her own doctor's office to find out why the flu had lasted two weeks,) I tried to eat. If you are ever at the Mount Auburn Hospital and elect to order a plain hamburger at the cafe, be forewarned: they don't know what this is. The guy at the counter kept repeating it back to me like he'd never heard of such a thing. Then the cook put cheese on it. When I sent it back all the employees gathered around to consider what to do next. I could hear them. "He doesn't want cheese? How about tomato? No tomato? Lettuce? Perhaps we should call the police." Finally, they decided to give me what I asked for. "Look, he's eating it!" one of them said. They stopped everything to watch. My condiment use was particularly compelling. In the end, I got a nice round of applause.
Eventually, they let dad leave, which is where the remainder of my official duties lay. I got to drive him home. This required that I first locate the car. I grant that as I'd been a passenger at the time it was parked, so I should have known where the car had been left, but I really didn't have my eyes open at that time. Worse, we'd driven in my mother's SUV, which looks exactly like every other SUV, and there were several hundred in the lot. Fortunately, the car has one of those automatic unlocking buttons, so I just wandered around pressing the button until I got a vehicle to respond appropriately. (Dad didn't have to witness this; they wheeled him out to the front door and I picked him up from there. This was good, as he could not stand up straight.)
Mom made it home in time to greet us at the door, and with good news; she doesn't have the flu at all! She has pneumonia! Woo woo!
So mom couldn't breathe and dad couldn't stand up. Of course, as the dutiful son-- and the only healthy adult left in the family that didn't live in Baltimore (Deb had the flu)-- I took it upon myself to get the hell out of that plague house before something happened to me too. If they got hungry, they could always order take-out or something.
Besides, I still had the keys to mom's car,
and a score to settle with my insurance company.
© 2001, Gene Doucette
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