Thanks to some stupid decisions earlier in my life, I’ve been dealing with some chronic medical issues for the last few years, but I never imagined they would land me in OB/Gyn, but that’s where I am now, and I’m not a visitor!

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Landing in this bed about 9PM Friday was just the end to a weird day, so it’s only fitting that the day culminates with a 6’ 1” red-blooded American male winds up in a room with a bed with attachment points for stirrups.

I started the day with my doctor trying to get me a bed in the hospital at 8AM (carried over from attempts from the previous day). At 1PM the doctor’s office called me and said the admissions office had told them to have me go to the ER and wait in the ER until there was a bed available, not a thrilling prospect.

First there is the matter of wailing kids. I understand this…kids that don’t feel good and aren’t old enough to understand why tend to wail a lot…but that doesn’t mean I tolerate it well, especially when I’m feeling crappy myself.

Then there is the matter of the restroom (Why do they call it that? I don’t go in there to rest, do you?). Yes, it was clean…and the air conditioning was in superb working order. I have seen meat lockers that were warmer. While sitting in the waiting room for 6 hours, I had to pee piss urinate several times, and each time I went in the bathroom the cold would make everything “draw up” (yes, EVERYTHING, even that) and my muscles tighten so I could barely dribble.

I’m just glad I didn’t have to crap. I think my ass would have frozen to the toilet seat.

And then there was dealing with the tornado warning.

We were having some nasty weather and I was watching the “we interrupt regular programming for this bulletin” report on TV. It showed a tornado WATCH, not warning, in a county 60 miles west of us, and the system was “showing signs of rotation”, no an actual tornado or hook signal, and was headed in a generally ENE direction.

Now, don’t get me wrong…I love my neighbors. Really I do. I live exactly where I want among the people I want, but…they can be drama queens. By the time a story of Aunt Mae’s bad cold gets passed through 4-5 people, Aunt Mae is in downtown Atlanta, at “Big Piedmont” (as opposed to our local affiliate Piedmont Mountainside Hospital), in ICU, on life support, 10 minutes from death with quadruple pneumonia.

It’s a quiet, idyllic life up here, and some translate that to “boring” and need to spice things up, OK?

Anyway, in a waiting room with 25 adults in it, 24 of them (all but me) with cell phones, all of a sudden everybody was calling everyone they knew telling them a tornado was on the ground, 30 seconds from wherever they were, with winds of 942 MPH, and headed right for them!!!

The mamas were making more racket than their sick kids.

Hospital personnel, good little sheep that they were, herded everyone into rooms away from windows so there would be no flying glass cuts to sew up…just in case. It didn’t matter than one glance at the radar on TV plainly showed the storm was going to miss us by 10 miles or so…gotta follow policy, ya know.

That was how I came to be locked in a small x-ray room with 23 other people for 45 minutes. The one good thing was that the lead shielding in the room cut off cell service so everyone had to hush up. Mostly. One woman apparently thought she could overcome the lead walls by talking loud. REAL loud.

 

It didn’t work.

Ooops! Gotta go! The nurse that checked me in tried to protect me. He put a “No baby on board!” sign on my room door when he was setling me in, but warned that since I was on OB/Gyn ya never knew what might happen. My new shift nurse is coming now. I gotta make sure she isn’t carrying stirrups and a set of forceps. If she is, I promise I won’t go down without a fight!

 

 

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• Meteorological Mayhem & Overkill (sephanipaige.wordpress.com)
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• Severe weather slams the Carolinas – msnbc.com (news.google.com)