Pain In The Glass
Saturday started out pretty good. I woke up around 8:00am, and played some Star Ocean, finally catching up to my old save file from when I initially stopped playing it a year ago. Zai woke up and suggested we go to breakfast. Breakfast is always a good idea, so we hoofed it to Las Esparanza’s, a little Mexican place just downstairs. It takes us a whole minute to get there.
I sat there looking at my chorizo gordita, which looked a lot bigger on the menu, and decided that that night, I wanted to go to the Grande Lux cafe downtown. They have a buffalo chicken sandwich there that’s as big as my head. Zai, always willing to go downtown, thinks this is a wonderful idea.
At about 3:00pm, she begins getting ready, and I wait patiently, playing more Star Ocean. I figure once she’s done I can start getting ready. I’m pretty hungry at this point, breakfast was tiny and I skipped lunch in anticipation for buffalo chicken nirvanna.
Then it happens. She starts calling for me in the kitchen, “I need your help!”
I go there and she’s standing there on one foot, “I stepped on a piece of glass, help me to the couch.”
I comply, sitting her on the couch, then sitting down myself to take a look at it. I made a very big mistake.
Hell hath no fury like a woman with a shard of glass in her foot. She yelled at me to get tweezers, then yelled at me when I asked where they are. I decided to just keep my mouth shut and offer whatever assistance I could.
The assistance I could offer was apparently breaking the part of the glass outside her foot off while she screamed in pain, so she had a nice little piece dug deep into her heel. I suggest going to the hospital to get it professionally removed. She was not fond of the suggestion. She recommended that I continue to poke around in her foot, regardless of how much she cried and screamed.
I finally convince her that she needs to go to the hospital. I ask her what hospital she goes to, and she says she’s never been to one. I then ask where the nearest hospital is, and she doesn’t know. So we end up calling her mother up so she can drive us to the hosptial. All the while, Zai trying to rationalize not going to the hospital.
“Maybe it will just fall out.”
For those curious, the hospital is about ten miles away, and I pass it on I-290 on the way to work.
So we go to triage, and sit and wait. Hospitals have always given me a queasy feeling, and even moreso now that I’m older. I can’t help but look at any number of people sitting near me and think, “they might be dying, they may walk right into that room with the doctor to get some very bad news.” That notion just does not sit well with me.
You may end up in the graveyard, but the process of dying usually begins in the hospital.
I see a man missing most of his teeth walk up to the counter. After him was a lady carrying a plastic shopping bag full of at least a dozen pill bottles. An old woman in a wheelchair sat in front of me in a hospital gown, eating a well past its prime banana, its peel far more brown than yellow.
Finally, we’re called by the nurse, who leads us into a room with three hospital beds divided by curtains. We sit and wait, Zai continuing to make up excuses why she should just leave. Incredibly scared of getting a shot in her foot. I tell her firmly to sit down, that she is going to get the glass taken out of her foot.
Finally, after an hour (its 5:30 now, we got to the hospital about 4:30) a doctor asks Zai her last name. We are then informed we’re not in the system. So we’re entered into the system, and now we OFFICIALLY begin waiting.
At 6:30, the doctor finally arrives, pokes at Zai’s foot and says, “Yeah, there’s glass in there.”
Thank you, Doctor.
So another half-hour passes, the nurse brings a tray of medical implements including a syringe, scalpel, and what looks like a tiny triangular spade. The doctor fills the syringe with anesthetic, and Zai begins whimpering. The doctor warns her not to move her foot, and instructs me to hold her down.
Ehwa?
So, I hold her down, which was a good thing because she would have likely kicked the doctor in the face. After giving her the shot, the doctor took the mini-spade and dug the piece of glass out, a nice small bloody hooked piece of shrapnel.
The doctor bandaged her up, and a nurse came by to give her a tetanus booster. Then we waited to be released. It was 7:40pm when I finally had enough and we just walked out. What can I say, I was starving. The doctor caught us and gave us the release papers, and a small lecture on coming back if it turns red, swollen, or begins to leak pus.
Nice.
So, finally, at 8:30, we return home with Quiznos subs to relax with some anime. It was a fun day.
Oh, and Zai’s sister, being the budding artist that she is, has provided this artistic interpretation of the day’s events:
