Some days just are not worth being awake for.
It started when I thought I would be a thrifty young Ful, and bring in a bunch of change to one of those charming CoinStar machines to count and turn into actual, spendable paper money. The weight of the seventy-seven dollars and two cents in coins that I carried in my satchel all morning did something very unpleasant to my back, and I cannot quite sit up straight.
Then I realized that the strange constricty feeling in my throat might in fact be strep. I looked in the bathroom mirror at work, and sure enough. I spy with my little eye, something...white and spotty on the very back of my tongue! Couple that with the tension headaches across the back of my neck and my shoulders. my generally achey demeanor, and the memories of having strep seven to ten times a year for several years running before they finally lopped my bastard tonsils out when I was nineteen, and B-I-N-G-O. Strep.
I left work and went to the hospital (many apologies for my cryptic goodbye, Taydo, but I was a man on a mission, and also I had forgotten that I had not told you about my suspicions of strep yet because usually any time there is the slightest bit of news, interesting, humorous, or otherwise while I am at work, you are one of the very first to hear) where I sat for over two hours waiting for a throat culture.
Actually, after I went through the triage nurse and the registration nurse, I sat watching Dragonball Z (it was either that or Ricky Lake doing lie detector tests) until they called me into E.R. Two, the room where they do commonplace things like throat cultures.
Instead, I hear my name being paged, with the instructions to please report immediately to E.R. One, repeat, please report immediately to the Trauma E.R.
TRAUMA E.R. I get to the door which has several very large NO ADMITTANCE signs posted on it. I hover for a few seconds, uncertain of what to do, and then a man in a suit pops his head out and beckons for me to follow him. Then he and another man in a suit flank me, and escort me down a long hallway to a room clearly labeled "TRAUMA CENTER," which if I remember my T.V. hospital shows correctly, is where they crack open people's ribs. I am instructed to sit on a bed by myself in this room, and the doctor will be with me immediately.
Of course, it took the doctor more than a few minutes to show up (long enough for me to read the labels on all the boxes and drawers and CRASH CARTS sitting near me) and in the meanwhile, I wondered why I had been rushed into an apparent quarantine zone. Was something in my blood pressure or temperature reading really all that troubling? Maybe the triage nurse had been coached in the early warning signs of some horrible disease and I did not actually have strep, but SARS or something, and it was going to be horribly ironic that I had pooh-poohed everyone for worrying about something like SARS that they would never actually catch and then I go and catch it and have to be hooked up in quarantine and all of my friends would have to come in and get tested for it and we would fill up a whole ward of the hospital, us and our SARS, and our not being able to breathe, and oh my god this is getting creepier by the minute and what am I going to
Oh. Right. Here is the nice doctor with the throat culture. E.R. Two was just very busy and E.R. One did not have many traumas today. And then he told me that I have strep. Yeah.
To top everything off, when I left the hospital a rapidly-closing swinging door hit me in the face and broke my tooth. I am so not even kidding. The bottom inside corner of my right front tooth. Broke off. No more tooth corner.
Wrenched back, strep, and broken tooth.
On the plus side, I decided to go ahead with the hair bleach. It is, in fact, very very very...bleached. I have yet to apply toner, and StyleGirl already sang the "My Name Is..." song at me. It was really hot.