Daze of our Ooze

WARNING  

The following representation contains graphic descriptions that may gag somebody

READER DISCRETION is ADVISED 
    

The tickle.  It's not a feather one.  I'm not talking a French one.  It isn't sexy.  And it doesn't make me giggle.  It's the throat tickle.  It is the signal that we both feel at the same time, Tuesday morning--the 1st day.

"My throat's got a little tickle in it," Joe says.  So does mine, but I don't say anything right then; only hoping mine was just "suggested" upon me by Joe.

Two hours later, we are both coughing to scratchy throats, and by the 4th hour, our chests have that down-deep raw sensation.

Sore neck, shoulders, and arms.  I cannot bear anything touching my skin; not cloth, not water, not my own hand.  

Joe and I will journey together in this shared, non-climactic experience that is to last three weeks.  And before it's all said and done, I will come to believe that Joe has stock in the Vick's Vapor Rub company.

Sick moving in

Cough the hot, raw, non-productive hack for two days and nights, until I have a pounding headache.  The nose is HOT inside, the eyes are HOT and they pour forth the waters.  There is that constant sneeze on the verge of happening up inside my nostrils, but it will not materialize.  The nose; it won't blow--there is nothing but a drop or two of water.  I cannot sniff, because it makes that almost sneeze sensation swell in my nasal passage; subsequent violent eye-watering follows.  Nothing into it, and nothing important or relief-giving out of it; this nose.  

Seborrhea--Nope, no itch.  Can't scratch and see-a,
Pyorrhea--The trench mouth didn't bite me-a!
Gonorrhea--Clap,Clap! We don't got no VD-a.  
Diarrhea--Ugh! But why do we got diarrhea?? 

Yessum, we-uns dun got the runs........
       
Once.  Twice.  Thrice.  The fourth?  Go for it.

Violent coughing and diarrhea have never complemented one another.   

No appetite, and everything stinks anyway--taste buds are distorted-like.  Could not care less about the dirty dishes, television, dirty clothes, Facebook, don't give a #$!%--don't want to talk!  I can't even think straight!    

Loose waters rush forth from my raw nostrils, no matter where I am or what I am trying to do.  Shove some rolled tissue wads up in there so I'll not dribble disgust all over the floor, the counter, the food, the coffee, the grocery cart, the other person, the book..... 

Wipe the nose.  Wipe the nose.  Wipe, wipe, wipe.  Raw--the nose.  Raw,  raw,  raw.  Red as a beet.  Looks like I pitched a three day drunk with this red nose.   Sneeze and sneeze and sneeze and sneeze.  Drip, wipe, sneeze, drip, wipe sneeze, and on and on with this relentless nasal horror.

BAD nose

                                       

Day 3:  I must attend a class, and I am the pariah, the disgusting thing that must sit apart from the others, with my tissue box, my Walmart nose-discharge bag, my disgusting vile noises and emissions: hacks and blows and snorts and drips.  Please do not look at me!

A kind fellow student tosses me a couple of cough drops.

Day 5:  Saturday, dizzy in the morning, and weak, and disoriented from the past few days of sickness.  Saturday night and Sunday AM has us sort of feeling like we are on the mend.  My nose skin is dried up to the point that big flakes are trying to come off, so I trim up my nostril holes with toenail scissors before heading to church.  Don't want to show up with a flake-ridden nose.

Are we really on the mend?

Sunday night the sinuses retaliate with a vengeance.  The top of my throat and the far back reach of my nose has that horrid drip sensation.  The sinuses in my face all feel sore, swollen.  I cannot bear the feeling--the pain; in my ear, nose, and throat as I swallow saliva.  This will turn out to be the worst night of respiratory assault.

All night, there is no sleep, as I lie on my face to keep the vile drip from choking off my throat.  I cannot stand for saliva to go down and be swallowed.  I must let it run out onto a towel wadded up by my mouth, which is nearly stifled in the pillow.  My nose is trying to run, and there are rolled tissues in my nostrils.  I have to breathe through my mouth, wedged open by the pillow.  I sleep none.  I wait for the daylight.

I don't even feel this good

Hard, loud wheezing in my chest. 

The coughing returns, this time it is trying to expel something foreign. To no avail.  Blow gobs of things out my nose.  Second, third box of tissue; rolls, rolls of toilet paper; second Walmart bag for snot garbage is full; trash can by the bed is full of its second load of snot garbage.  Red nose hanging on my wretched face again.

Bedside Blow Refuse

Days 9 & 10:  Had wonderful snow all over the place.  Normally I would've wanted to play in it.  I would've wanted to go out and take pictures.  I would've wanted to slide down the driveway on a jagged piece of aluminum siding.  I couldn't do any of it--didn't really care.  I had to stay inside and wait for the HEAL.

I cough and pee in my pants immediately after putting on clean clothes.  

All this time Joe and I continue to work, and I continue to go to a class two nights a week.  I also have a very important job interview one day during this ill nightmare.  It is very hard to appear well and competent when my face reveals illness; the cocaine-looking nose, the addiction to Mentholatum, and the watery eyes of a queen who suffered a previous night of diva drama, and the cough of a serious pot smoker.  And the sounds I make send warnings to stay away.  Why would they think I was the person for the job?  Why should they hire me? 

I need to be put in quarantine.  I want a hospital!

Day 13 of this s%#t:  Cough cough.  I have eaten three bags of Mentholatum cough drops by now.   
I go to class.  Cough cough cough cough... Fellow student quickly flings a couple of cough drops toward me, since I had eaten all mine.  Somebody else throws a handful of Jolly Ranchers at me.

Kind offerings from concerned classmates

     
Keeping in mind that Joe is on this same s&%*#y ride:  I have never seen him so sick from any respiratory situation before now.  It's even worse than the time we both brought back vile infections from a trip to Honduras.  That illness didn't come close to topping this curse.   

Blow constantly for two days.  Cough violently and uncontrollably.  Cough until my rib cage on both sides has pulled loose from cartilage.

web2.sheltonschools.org

I look it up on the internet:  Strained intercostal muscles on the rib cage.  Oof!  I feel like I have been in a car wreck or a street fight.

Cough at night, and it hurts my lungs and my rib cage, and my whole core; and my head pounds.   There is the most disgusting matter I cough up and out.   I am a vile thing.  Never in my life have I seen such repulsive odiousness come from me.       

Vile phlegm.  VILE!!

And from my nose, the nostrils now produce blood globs and repulsive infection-ridden disgust.  Blow!  Again and again.  Fourth box of tissue.  Toilet paper's 'bout gone.  Fill the third Walmart bag by the living room table.  Take more Aleve for this chest and side pain.  Somebody please stick a Shop-Vac to my face!

Goners

Days upon days.  Today is Monday.  This is the 14th day.  Afraid to post this until I am all clear.  It might not all be gone until more days go by.

Day 15:  I show up for class.  Cough cough cough.  Irritated fellow students savagely throw cough drops and hard candy at me--the Jolly Ranchers fly by again.  "I don't want to listen to that tonight," I hear someone say.  Hard things land on the floor about me.  I, who should be outcast, gathered my "crumbs for the reject" and tied them up in my well-used snot rag.  Inside I found the usual cough drops--actually, the whole cough drop bag.  Plus the Jolly Ranchers.  And some money; guess someone wants to pay me to leave.  Why is there is an orange highlight marker?...A few rocks (ouch), a fork (whoa!), a Pez candy dispenser (empty BTW), and some forbidding offerings of .38 Specials.  Geez, I thought the fork was threatening enough!  These are not the gifts I want or expect to see in a "kindness package".

Sent from the Un-Well Wishers

        
Well, it could've been like that.   

Cough cough COFF damn it!  I want codeine, morphine, opium--anything!!  

Five daggers are in my side from this coughing.  I am pilled out with Aleve.  I have to bend over to cough.  I have sated on Halls Mentholatum cough drops for over a fortnight.

I am a decrepit thing.  

Day 19:  Have to bend over to get a deep breath.  Feels like a horse has kicked me in my side. Throat and sinus gurgling.      

Joe, who by-passes the tissue box, blows his nose on his bath towel.  He announces that he's sick of snot.  He keeps trying to push the heating pad on me.  

Sunday is day 20.  This is the first day there have been no coughing fits nor in vitro-worthy nose-blows.

It's Monday and I think we'll be OK.  My side still hurts--the musculature in my rib cage will mend in time.  I am thinking about all those take-outs I've ordered of baby back ribs, spare ribs, and short ribs.

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Emergency Room Lobby

I decided a couple of years ago to go to area locations in order to do one of my favorite hobbies:  People-watching.  This writing is from my hospital Emergency Room (ER) observations.  The reason why I wrote down my people-watching experiences is mainly because I was taking an Anthropology class, and I had to do it for a grade.  It wasn't supposed to be of any entertainment value, but that's the way it came out for me.

Which ER days do I want?

It would seem that the most logical time to visit the ER for entertainment, or at least to see some action, would be on Friday nights and Saturdays.  Not always so.  Thursdays and Sundays, the days I picked, are quite busy.  

Thursdays are busy because a lot of people get paid on Thursday, so drug-deal beatings, barroom stabbings, and car wrecks at the Wal-Mart intersection occur more often.  

Sunday nights are good for domestic violence, because by then the payday money is all gone, and people have had enough of being with their families through the weekend.  Also, people who hurt themselves on Friday night or Saturday do not want to spend their off-time at an ER, so they wait until Sunday afternoon to get the (by then infected) injury treated.  Another angle there is that they get to miss at least Monday's work day while they heal. 

In addition to all that, I figure heart attacks and sports injuries happen a lot on Sundays because of the weekend warriors.  Those are the baby boomers who never exercise except on Sunday, when they try to catch up on all those days of the week they skipped.  
 

Who is allowed in the ER waiting room?

In my small town, anybody can enter the emergency room and sit in the lobby without actually needing medical help.  In big city ERs, you have to pass a security guard and go through an airport style weapons detector, but none of that here, so here is where I stayed.  I did however tell the receptionist behind the desk about the study I was doing, because I did not want her to think I was a homeless person setting up house.

The "Watching" Part

Thursday

       
There is a young woman standing out front of the automatic sliding doors, and she is smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone 90 miles a minute.  She has on Sponge Bob flannel pajama bottoms, flip flops, and a Roll Tide Alabama hoodie.   

Inside the lobby, a television is positioned high up on the wall, and it is tuned in to Law & Order.  Appropriate programming in an ER?  Maybe not.  I guess it could have been on something even less appropriate, like for instance, Dr. G Medical Examiner.  

I get myself seated down in a corner to get the best view of the room’s happenings. 
 

Sitting with their backs to the wall is a young Hispanic couple with two little kids; they look about two and three years of age.  The smallest one looks very sick. Both the kids are quiet, and the couple speaks to each other in really low tones, as if to avoid drawing attention.  In the center of the room is seated a woman, 60-something, and wearing nice dress pants and a jacket.  She is reading a book.  Closer to the TV is a woman about thirty or so, with a boy about 13.  He has one shoe on and his other foot is wrapped up in that beige gauze that sticks to itself.  I think the mom likes Law & Order. 
  

Out of the bathroom come two teenage girls heading towards the vending machines.  Both girls are chatting to each other, and at the same time both are also texting.  One of them gets a bag of Fritos and a Dr. Pepper.  These girls are chopping up some unseen third party pretty good.  They “can’t stan' bein’ 'round her” because she is “skank” and she was “flashin’ it around” the other night at Kenesha’s.  What is “kenesha”?  All the time they carry this on they also text.  How do they multi-task like that?  They go sit against the wall hunched together so they can gossip some more.  Surely neither one of them is waiting to see an ER doctor.

The receptionist calls for Ms. Somebody to come to the desk.  The nicely-dressed reading lady goes over and they whisper some things back and forth.  Reading lady sits back down.  I hear the ambulance outside.  The really gory or otherwise bad ones on gurneys have to be wheeled into another door just to the side of the sliding door, so the lobby-dwellers do not see them.  The nurse calls for Ms. Somebody the book reader, and this time she goes through the treatment door.  She looks alright, so maybe she’s waiting for someone else who is getting treatment. 

   
The nurse comes back out in a bit and calls out a Hispanic name.  The couple with kids goes through the treatment door.  A young fellow with his hand bandaged up comes out of the treatment doors.  He calls out the sliding doors to “Sherry”, the badly-dressed chatty young cigarette-smoking girl, and she comes in to help him listen to the lady behind the desk.  Gossiping girls are still texting.  The 30-something mom is still watching TV, and her teen's head is tilted back like he’s nodding off.  

I hear the rumble of the helicopter coming onto the rooftop.  There is no trauma center here, so it must be picking up the ambulance rider that came in a while ago—a rider who should have been helicoptered directly from his traumatic incident to the big city in the first place.

In come some winners!  

This group of folks has a heavily tattooed guy with his arm completely wrapped up from hand to above the elbow.  It is in a makeshift sling.  Most of his other hand is likewise wrapped up, except for a couple of protruding fingers.  His face has some cuts on it and it looks severely sunburned.  His people include a girl with piercings on her face, two other tattoo guys, and a woman with a very gravelly voice who looks much older than she probably is.  She is extremely skinny, with a face like leather, and her hair is long and scraggly.  She is in charge of the group.  

Everybody hears her mailing address announcement, her smoker’s coughs, and everything else we didn’t want to hear.  What I did not catch is what the injured guy said had happened to himself.  I wonder if whatever he told the receptionist was the whole truth.  I have heard about illegal methamphetamine-concocting contraptions (meth labs) exploding and this looks sort of like the kind of injury one would sustain if that were to happen. 

I should not stereotype people.     

They all go sit down for about three minutes, when Ms. Cough, the injured guy, and one Tattoo go outside to smoke.  So that’s why the hurt guy left a couple of fingers sticking out of his bandage--to hold a cigarette.  I hear another ambulance coming in. 

Nurse calls for the teenage boy with the foot problem.  He hobbles and his mom walks beside him through the treatment door.  After a few minutes, the nurse calls the name of the Cough/Tatoo group, and the pierced girl goes to the sliding door to get the injured guy.  He comes in and goes through the treatment door.  Ms. Cough is behind him griping about something, and coughing quite loudly.
    
That’s all for me today--I'm gone.

    

Sunday 

Three people, a 50-ish couple and 30-ish man, are standing outside the sliding doors, and smoking cigarettes.  

Inside, I sit in a row seat in the middle of the waiting room; there are rows behind and in front of me.  I am facing the treatment doors again but closer in from the wall so I can hear the whole room better.  Not much going on, I guess because it’s too early in the afternoon.  Noisy, heavy 30-something woman with three very loud and misbehaving kids sit behind me.  None appear sick, so I deduce theirs is a routine doctor visit disguised as an emergency due to a lack of insurance (don't stereotype, Reno!).  With an extremely southern drawl, the woman issues criticisms and warnings to her out-of-control kids. 

In front of me the row of chairs are back to back, one row facing me and the other facing away from me and toward the treatment doors.  A blonde girl, about 18-20 and wearing blue jeans, is seated on her knees backward in the chair.  Her back is to me, and she is anxiously facing the treatment doors.  She sniffles softly (I guess, since I can’t hear her over the noisy people behind me) as she brings a tissue to her nose every so often.  Somebody very beloved to her must be in the treatment area.   

Seated at the side wall are a young man and woman, and he has a rag on his eye.  He takes it off and rearranges it some as he keeps his eye squinted.  Other than that, the lobby is empty, so it looks like a short visit for me.  Besides, I do not know how long I can stand the rowdy kiddie crowd behind me.  If the mom has told them once to “be quaiyt!” she has told them fifty times.  She has bribed them with vending machine treats, she has swatted them, she has threatened them, she has cajoled them, and all to no avail.  I felt so bad for the anxious girl in front of me, as I’m sure the racket was not helping her feelings.

      
The nurse comes out and calls a name.  The anxious sniffling girl backs out of her chair and starts walking to the treatment doors.  That’s when I saw the flash.  Sticking out of her right buttock is a shiny crochet needle!  

Now, I know nothing about the art of crocheting, but I do recognize the purplish stick that protrudes out against the blue denim-covered derrière.  It could be a knitting needle, but they are pointed and that would have been easy enough to pull out at home.  That’s why I deduce this to be a crochet needle, with a hooked end that is going to have to be surgically removed.  She has not been worried about another person, she has been crying from embarrassment. 

I wonder how it came to be there, in her buttock that is.  And hey, I wonder how she got here.  Because she could not have driven herself.  She would have had to sit on her side in the passenger seat, and there was no one with her in the waiting room.  I will continue to ponder that--the crochet needle incident--which made this ER trip worthwhile for me.

I have to get away from these noisy kids and their noisy mother.  I'm outta' here.       

      
About the Anthropology assignment:  I didn't get a 100% on this observation--the professor said I had too much fun with it.  She told me to remember that I was not supposed to make a comedy out of it, and that I should keep my snarky opinions to myself.  I did however end up with an overall A in the class--for the record to any interested person reading this.

       

DISCLAIMER

To any readers who think they recognize themselves, or think these descriptions remind them of themselves, or think there is an inkling of a resemblance to themselves:  Know that you are totally mistaken.  If you or any reader claims otherwise, be it known that your claims are bogus.       

  

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