More heart drama

Well, it did not stick.  About a week after my shocking New Year’s Eve I learned that the top part of my heart started flapping around again.  I would need something more invasive – sticking a tube into a vein in my leg and running it up to my heart where they would burn off some cells that are causing the electrical problem. 

Bummer. 

I tried to escape and fly down to LA.  It was my first time on an airplane since getting laid off.  I thought it would cheer me up. But even as I sat in my birthright, seat 1A, drinking champagne and making eye contact with the poor I was unable to fully enjoy the experience.  I even broke the bulkhead of the Virgin America airplane again.  But when I tried to sit down and write about the trip it I just could not do it.  I have this thing hanging over me and I am sick of it.

I made arrangements to get this thing fixed, but then I had to push it out a couple of times for work.  Yesterday was the day. And yes there was drama, but I am undead.  Wait, that is not right -- undead refers to zombies and vampires.  I am neither a zombie nor a vampire, although there was a bit of zombie action yesterday.  No, I remain a middle-aged, potato shaped, classist snob, but a living one.  Emphasis on the living.  I support this, living.

So here’s the deal. We get to the hospital, the Cherry Hill campus of Swedish Hospital at 6:00AM.  It’s the old Providence Hospital that looks like something from a Stephen King movie.  Soon we are ushered into a small hospital room by this chirpy nurse named Candi.  Candi is trying very hard to be perky and positive.  But there is single thin curtain separating us from what appears to be dozens of unwashed masses all waiting for some kind of scary procedure to be done to them.  I am having a class-based panic attack.

Candi reconfirms my request online about not wanting a priest or nun anywhere near me today and then almost immediately a Russian woman rips the curtain open and says loudly, “I am Svetlana and I am here to shave you for procedure.”  Oh great.  I have not remotely grown back my chest hair from the shaving they did to me on New Year’s Eve when they shocked my heart.  Now what?  Are they going to shave my ear hair?  No, of course not.  Svetlana rips my blanket off and lifts up my robe. “Get underpants off!”  Fuck.  They are shaving me down there.  Soon she is buzzing away with her electric clippers while other health care professionals continue to come and go through, opening the little curtain at will so anyone can see what is going on.  If you are male then you fully understand how one’s penis can shrink when it is cold, especially if you are in a wet bathing suit.  That is nothing compared to the penis’s ability to shrink while its being held by a Russian woman in one hand and an electric shaver in the other hand while your curtain keeps opening and closing and the general public are walking by.  I’m surprised she should even keep ahold of the poor little thing. 

Soon the buzzing stops and I hear a ripping sound.  Svetlana is pulling the back off of what look to be giant bandages.  Oh no!  She’s going to bikini wax me.  RIPPP!  Yep, she has just stuck the bandage to my crotch, pushed it down to make sure it had melded to my skin, and then rips it off to ensure every hair follicle is permanently removed from my body.  RIPPP!  RIPPP!  RIPPP!   As this is happening I consciously say to myself that I doubt that I will ever have an erection again, or pee.

Next comes some older nurse named Lillia, but whose family calls her Lila.  She is going to try to stick an IV in me.  I explain that when I was here on New Year’s Eve they tried to stick an IV in my hand 3 times and finally gave up and stuck it in my arm.  She says hands are for amateurs.  She is right. One poke and we are in.  She rambles on for a while wishing me good luck today as I hear Svetlana buzzing across the hallway.

Then this black woman comes in.  She has dreadlocks and is wearing flowing robes.  She pulls out a feather quill and some ink.  She starts to draw the letter x on various places on both of my feet.  Everyone else has introduced herself, but she does not. 

Me: “Hi, what is your name?”

Her: “Mama Legba.”

Me: “What are the x’s for?”

Her: “They will bind you to this place.”

Me: “What the fu…..”

Candi pops back in, “Who was that?” she asks as Mama Legba backs away into the hall. 

Me: “Oh my god.”

Right then they kick Mark out and then a plump nurse with a mullet named Marge shows up.  She’s upset.  The elevator took too long so she wants to see if I will walk to the surgery room. I’m like, “What about my giant naked butt poking through this silly little hospital gown?”  She finds another silly little gown, puts it on me backwards, and says, “I think you are covered, let’s go.”

We literally walk through the main corridor of Swedish Hospital, patients, visitors, doctors, policemen, firemen, all staring at me like I am some kind of demented fool with black x tattoos on his feet who just escaped from the psych ward.

On the main elevator for the whole building Marge hits B and we go downstairs.  They don’t have a room ready for me so she grabs a very tall chair and has me sit on it in the middle of the surgery center in full view of everyone.  There are dozens of people running around doing things.  Some don’t make eye contact.  Many just shake their heads.  Finally two doctors come up and ask what I did to get the discount service today?  Discount service? I don’t think they could have said anything worse to me right then.  Being frugal, saving money, being cheap – whatever you call that mental abomination -- it is so totally and completely offensive to me that the fact that someone would think it is funny to say that I am getting the discount service while I am sitting almost naked in a high chair, with a shrunken penis,  no body hair, and voodoo tattoos on my feet,  in the middle of a  hospital, well….all I can do is cry.  It works.  They are embarrassed and rush me into the surgery room. 

Of course the humiliation is not done yet. They have to shave my back so that they can attach electrical zappers in case they need to restart my heart.  I explain that I lost my passport back there once.  Crickets.  

Soon I am on my back and everything fades. 

Then someone shakes me awake. 

Them: “You are done.”

Me: “Is Hillary president yet?”

Them: “No, it’s only one hour later.”

Me: “Can you put me back out until Hillary is president?”

Them:  Crickets.

Great, I have just had a large tube stuck into my groin and then run up to my heart by a bunch of Bernie Sanders fuckwits who then burned around my heart with a soldering iron.  They were probably cackling and saying “Feel the Bern!” I feel so violated. Fuckwits.

Soon I am in the recovery room.  Mark shows up.  It is only 9:30.  We thought best case it would be 12:00.  Good.  I want to go home.   

I am supposed to lie there and not move for 4 hours.  CNN is on.  I hate CNN.  There is no BBC News, because this is some kind of cheap ass discount hospital populated by Bernie Sanders supporters and voodoo queens.  I make clear to Mark that his primary focus needs to be to keep Mama Legba away from me.  He agrees.

I go in and out of sleep, but at some point I have to pee.  Yes, I said I would never do this again, but it turns out that there is no direct connection between the amount of liquid in your bladder and the size of your penis.  I am not allowed to sit up so the  nurse says she will help. Before I can protest the blanket is off and my robe is lifted and she’s trying to find my penis.  I’m like, “I think I got this”.  She goes out into the hallway and then I try to find my penis.  If you think trying to pee in a public restroom with a bunch of other men talking to you is difficult you can probably imagine how well this went.  For about 10 minutes I try thinking of being in a warm spa surrounded by fountains.  Then I think of drinking a lot of beer. Finally there is a little trickle.  The nurse asks if she can come back in and I tell her emphatically no.  Twenty minutes later I have filled a 2-gallon plastic container. 

Finally they get me up, take my blood pressure, and have me walk around for a while to see if the hole in my groin starts to bleed.  It doesn’t and I am free to go. Except that they lost my clothes.  I just can’t deal with this so I make Mark go read them to filth.   He comes back and says, “Fucking hippies.  I bet these people are Sanders supporters.”  

My clothes finally show up and I escape out into the bright sunshine.  Not a vampire, not a zombie, and not dead.  I am quite pleased.

We stop at PCC on the way home so we can make Chicken Tikka Masala. As soon as I get home, I try to wash the little black x’s off my feet.  They are not coming off.  I concentrate and try to see if the x’s are emitting any kind of an aura. They are.  Black and smoky. I focus and extend the hazy clear aura that normally surrounds my hands into the x’s on my feet.  Quickly they fade and are gone, hopefully like the presidential campaign of a certain cranky old man from Vermont.

I go back in a month to see if it stuck this time. 

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