In closing of this tri-strip story, someone shakes it like a Polaroid picture, because ice cold is cooler than cool.
In all seriousness? I forgot about this post, just like . . . totally forgot it until about now, when the first of the freakishly early will be knocking at my virtual doors, demanding the free journal entry that I have failed to provide them on time. So not only am I racing against time until posting itself, but until I begin to lose most basic skills and abilities. Thinking and typing being two of them. Even now, my keys, normally trained with accuracy and effectiveness, sluggishly stagger over the keyboard, skipping letters, hitting them twice, even pressing adjacent keys in one fell swoop.
It’s been one heck of a week considering that I have spent almost all of it asleep, or in some pseduo-state of sleep. My surgery got screwed up somehow, (unforeseen discoveries and such), and jumped from a pleasant scheduled time of about 3.5 hours, to a nightmarish 7. Of course, I was totally asleep, and blissfully unaware of the grim atrocities that involve waking up from 7 hours of powerful anesthesia.
Before I begin to fill you in on the details, I would like to introduce a new program that we are installing here at Good in Theory called the “Good in Theory Awards,” also known as “Gits.” These awards will attempt to recognize the proud, proud dedication to failure that Good in Theory endorses because remember: “The more of you who fail, the fewer there are to get in our way!”
My story actually begins with the awarding of a Git, to some gentleman or lady somewhere in post-surgical who decided that I would have an easier time breathing as I woke up, with a long breathing tube still crammed down throat. I actually don’t know how anyone could breathe with one of these in, considering it blocks your nasal passages, so the air comes into your nose, and slams against the tube blocking the hole where your throat used to be.
“Oh no!” You and the air particles simultaneously exclaim as they struggle against the tube, just a few of them barely making it through.
Trying through your mouth is a waste of time, as there is no way to actually make air go into the tube, so anything attempted from this angle reaches the same impassable point. I tried to say that I couldn’t breath, (which, at the time, seemed like an important fact). All I could do was emit small grunts and thrash as they tried to restrain me and reassure that it was “just a breathing tube.”
If you, for any reason, feel compelled to share in this experience take a small straw, like the kind you get for stirring coffee, with the hole at the top so small a grain of sugar wouldn’t pass through. Then, while leaving the ends open, add clay around the straw to increase the diameter to a point where you can easily slide it into your mouth and breathing tube. At this point,your hands and feet should already be duct-taped togther, you should have drunk a bottle of cough syrup, and then begin hopping around the streets begging strangers to remove the thing from your throat.
So anyways, things looked bad for me, our hero, yeah? I tactfully spoke the language of vomit. I hurled a thick pudding-like vomit from every hole in my head. Nothing quite says “shut the f*** up and listen to me” like throwing up upon yourself and others. The tube was very, very quickly removed.
There was another time when I had come out of surgery and was extremely nauseous. As in, my stomach was looking up at me and saying, “Uh . . . hey . . . nothing personal, but I am probably going to be sh*tting out of your mouth not to long from now.” It was an extremely unpleasant, yet highly remedial instance. Some slip up had happened and I had been put in a share room for a short time (they put the people who have to recover for long periods in private rooms), so the shade was drawn, but this family still got to hear me talk to this dumbass doctor, who ever the hell he was: the next winner of a Git! I have spent so much time in hospitals, around hospitals, dealing with hospitals, and dealing with medications. I was looking for an anti-nausea medicine which I will call, “Oda.”
He was a real asshole, some new doctor who was so shiny new his skin was still shrink-wrapped. After being forced to reach elbow deep into the rancid assholes of hobos, and scraping out bedsores on patients for quite some time as an intern, he now finally had the title of “Dr.” and thus was a notch higher in the medical hierarchy.
I asked him for anti-nausea medicine, and he replied by telling me that I had already had some while in recovery. I suggested “Oda,” which I had routinely had a prescription for, got nearly every single time I had been inpatient, and had a bottle waiting back at my apartment not ten minutes away.
He smugly informed me in a very doctoral way that it had to be “ordered.”
If you haven’t had experience with hospitals, the process of ordering is usually a nurse puts in a request to an office, who calls up some doctor, who is too busy jacking off and looking handsome in the mirror to give a shit about you. These are the people who are always in the background, not the competent ones who I interact with and run the show.
Here I was confronted with one of these douches, and I began to yell at him. “I AM GOING TO THROW UP UNLESS YOU GET ME THE ODA! THIS IS RETARDED! I COULD GO HOME RIGHT NOW AND GET SOME! THIS FAMILY HERE DOESN’T NEED TO HEAR THIS, SO DO US ALL A FAVOR AND GET ME SOME . . .”
At that point I vomited into the pink bucket I held on my lap some of the spray lapping over the side and sprinkling over his perfect new doctor coat.
I handed him the bucket full of reeking sludge.
“See, I need Oda.”
Anyways, back to the current story. I have been spending the last few days extremely drowsy and doped up on morphine and other things that weren’t doing anything to reduce my pain. I have a few more Gits to share with the pain control people who decided to take my pain medicine cocktail that I had used the past four times and COMPLETELY CHANGE IT FOR NO REASON.
. . . . huh? What? Where am I?
Sorry, the pain killers are hitting me again and I am getting pretty zoned out.
I happen to experience dreams that happen while I am awake, like I will be lying in bed, hallucinating that I am in a boat, and I will yell to my dad, “TURN WEST!” To which I will be confused while they are confused. It’s like having some strange kind of hallucinatory torettes. I will suddenly imagine a bicycle wheel spining gently in my torso, at which I will twich and cry, “NO!” I have been doing this for several days. One of the best ones was when I told my mom that I had lost my shoes, when she asked where, I replied “on the airplane . . . battling pirates.”
I try to steer clear of most internet areas, or emails, and the like when in this state, but not even Joel’s blog was able to escape this week. Here is the comment I made earlier this day:
All of the pictures [in your post] were kind of freaking me out when I first saw them, and was heaviliy influenced by Indians.
Morphine! Morphine! Not Indians!!! Where did that come from?!!
Oh, and like, just before posting this, I noticed that Noah wrote a post earlier, in which he writes damnable lies. You can read them right below this post if you like reading terrible UNTRUTHS!
-Nathan
I peed over 7 liters in 24 hours!
