Today I went back to the doctor’s office about my mysterious illness—the one with the baseball bat and the tailbone hammer. It just wasn’t getting better.

That was at 11:30. That doctor decided I should get a CAT scan, in case something was wrong in some vital organ, namely a reproductive one I don’t ever care to use again (i.e. my uterus). Since it’s SUNDAY, the only place to get a CAT scan is the ER. Here’s how I passed the ensuing NINE HOURS in the ER today:

- Listening to the same poor old woman ask for a glass of water—yes, for all nine hours (she wasn’t allowed to, because of certain tests she had to have)
- Joking with my sister about the doctors’ finding Violet’s twin—a little knot of hair and bone with a face—in the CAT scan
- Noting what a dump the ER is in so many respects
- Using the bathroom once and then eventually having to pee again but holding it (see above)
- Feeding a smuggled-in Violet while wearing a hospital gown … ah, memories
- Counting my blessings, like the one about how I was not having contractions, and the one about how there was no blood gushing out of my mouth
- Holding onto and caressing my cell phone like it was a security blanket
- Eating nothing except the two granola bars Steve smuggled in for me … what’s with our hospital trying to STARVE ME???
- Resisting the urge to push buttons on machines with which I was left completely unsupervised for hours at a time
- Listening to a crazed drunk man having an exchange with the nurses about signing himself out, a decision the nurses forbade
- Listening to another man get scolded for trying to sneak out to have a cigarette as nurses were waiting for his Dilantin levels to stabilize
- Watching my first nurse prove her ineptitude several times in ways I don’t really want to talk about here … All I’ll say is, she repeated this phrase: “It was the wrong anatomy” enough times to take me beyond Mission: Decode into Mission: Escape With My Life.
- Watching the security guards chase out two twenty-something guys and tell them not to come back again … one of them was wearing a Penn State hat, which I wanted to snatch off with the indignant explanation that he was shaming the Lion
- Missing Violet
- Feeling mad that my visit with my sister has been all about my being ill, again
- Eventually finding out nothing is wrong with me. Nothing. At all.
- Wishing TO GOD I had thought of the old warning to always wear nice underwear in case you get in a car accident or, say, end up in an ass-bearing gown in the ER … Of all days to be laundry-down to the old red pants!