2003-09-07 
 

heart of gold

Got up super early again....well, for a Sunday it was super early. Spent 8-9:30 sharing the waiting room with the same sort of folks that were there yesterday.

Imagine this, we walk in to sit down and are treated to the musical stylings of a rap artist who's every other word is motherf**er. (This is not an exaggeration for the sake of a more exciting blog entry...the never ending chorus was something along the lines of the old Dr. Pepper tune with the aforementioned MoFo replacing the 'pepper'.) It was blasting from a neo-boombox being held up to a young lads ear. It looked a lot like a miniature version of the tape recorder I used to cherish as a teenager. Remember trying to tape songs of the radio on those things and getting all that amusing back ground noise? "Moran!"*

Anyway. It did make snoozing difficult, but overall a bit easier to block out than the elderly man yesterday who kept informing the room that he really needed to take off the bandages around his leg and put a gram or two of heroin inside his wound. "Cuz that'll keep the bastard from itchin' me!"

After a good twenty minutes of the mofo song (he kept rewinding, it really WAS like my old recorder), he suddenly switched it off and began stomping up and down the hallway muttering the lyrics to himself, kicking chairs and generally getting a bit ugly.

Fortunately, it wasn't very long before we were joined by a hooker wearing a leopard skin skirt and movie star sunglasses. She carried a heavy black pocketbook and a white faux-crocodile case of the sort that an old friend of mine once referred to as a stripper's right hand girl. A place to store a change of outfit, all the makeup and beauty products you'd ever want, and nifty secret compartments for money...or anything else you might not want flashed for the whole dressing room to see. Leopard girl walked in, whipped off her glasses, looked back into the hallway at Mr. Mofo and made a little perturbed moue. Walked out the opposite door and after a minute was back again. She smiled and said, "Well hi everyone!" to no one in particular. Within a minute of her settling herself down a few seats over from me, the young rapmeister, who had mysteriously quieted down about the same time she walked out, sauntered in to chat her up. She graciously accepted his comments on her youthful looks and 'tight' clothes. (Tight was being used here as a synonym for "hip" although the traditional meaning also applied in this case. I felt pretty 'tight' myself figuring this out.) Whether to keep the compliments coming or as a favor to the rest of us, I'm not quite sure, but she took him outside for a 'cigarette' and he came back looking quite pleased with himself and much quieter than before. He was called shortly thereafter and she stretched out and began to snooze.

A little more than an hour later we were called into the room, and I got to watch the nurse change the bandaging on G's leg. This was helpful since I'm going to have to do this myself on Tuesday. Ouch. The wound looks almost like someone took a paring knife and plunged it into G's leg. Judging from the amount of cotton rope/wound packing that the nurse took out, it could've been almost that deep. He was in intense pain since there was no anesthetic, but she seemed to be as gentle as possible. Tuesday I'm making sure he takes a double dose of codeine before I attempt to do the changing. I'm pretty good at that sort of thing, but it's hard to see someone you love in pain when it's yourself who's causing it.

I'm feeling a bit gentler towards humanity than I was yesterday.

*Two snaps up to Margaret Cho who nailed that memory on the head!

Labels: dose of mikey, g, medical mystery

* posted by me at 3:01 PM

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