Film at 11

writing a blog

Thank you, reading public, for your lovely comments. Aren't you impressed that I came up with that schlock in ten minutes? Anyway, today's blog is online. (Al, note that I am blogging and that I expect a comment. Mike, note that you need to link me to mohea). But I digress. What I really want to tell you about is: Meredith's Visit to The Emergency Room Unlike Curious George, I did not get into the ether that the nice doctor provided. Like Curious George, I am fine. So what happened? Here's the deal: I left Berkeley at about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. By about 4:00, I noticed that I had a sore throat. At about 4:15, I noticed that my tongue wasn't working very well. By the time I got home at 5:00, my tongue and throat were starting to swell shut and I couldn't really talk. Mike came home, and we called the nurse hotline. They told us to call 911, so we did. Within about ninety seconds of calling, three firefighters in a shiny red engine showed up at our front door. They threw the coffee table out of the way, and spread equipment out on my living room rug, hooking me up to oxygen and a heart monitor. My blood pressure was slightly elevated, perhaps from the shock of three burly men appearing in my living room within a manner of minutes. They recommended that I ride to the hospital in an ambulance, just to be sure, so two paramedics arrived, put me on a gurney, and wheeled me into a shiny ambulance that took me to El Camino Hospital. As I rode, I looked out the window to see Mike tailing us in the new car. Who knew I married an ambulance chaser. Once we got to the emergency room, they wheeled me into a curtained-off room and the world's most underpaid, overworked nurse took my blood pressure for the billionth time. I felt fine by this point, so I spent most of my time observing my fellow patients. One man had to have a lot of blood taken, and a nurse accidentally spilled some on the floor. She looked at the blood, mopped it up with a towel, then went on about her business. Remind me never to touch a hospital floor again. It turned out that my family doctor was actually on call, so he stopped by, looked at my throat, and, like everybody else, determined that I had had an allergic reaction, who knows to what. We figured it was spicy mustard, strawberries, or almonds. The whole thing took about an hour and a half, and it was quite the adventure. The only disappointment was not getting some ether. Perhaps, next time, I will make Mike wear a yellow hat.