Medical Mayhem And Every Schoolboy's Dream

I have far more contact with hospitals than I am entirely comfortable with. When I was young, I avoided them like - forgive the poor pun - the plague. I can think of two times before my accident where I was forced into those hallowed halls of healing. Once when I went into Animal Control and needed to be vaccinated for rabies and once when I blew out a spinal separator. Both trips were unpleasant, clinical and left me with a distaste of needles and mind altering pain medications.

Then came The Accident. I'm amazed I was even conscious to remember the trip to and first night in the hospital. I had two IVs pumping morphine into my system, which I was assured by various EMTs would dull my pain. They lied. They lied easily and they lied well, but they lied. I still felt everything - save for my legs which at the time I couldn't feel at all.

Two hours and more morphine later, I was still fully conscious and still very much in pain. In too much pain, even, to enjoy the fact that a pair of cute young nurses were cutting off my clothing. Generally, this is the stuff of which dreams are made. How often does one experience a buxom blond in a snug nurses uniform telling them they have 'adorable panties' before cutting said adorable panties off? The fact that an improperly placed catheter came next will be ignored. I will cling to the memory of the buxom young blond and her stainless steel scissors.

The rest of the night was something of a blur. Being wheeled from one end of the hospital to another for various tests and X-rays, demanding something that would actually stop the bowel melting pain that wracked my body, a young X-ray technician struggling to move me by herself without causing strain to my spine....

All in all, it was a hellish experience. I was told I was 'fine' and my 'minimal fractures' would heal on their own. If I could walk, they told me, I could go home. I was still in more pain than I thought it possible to experience and live. And the nurse - a large, smoke-smelling old broad now - was very insistent that I could, indeed walk. I took two steps before collapsing and grabbing the bed in pain. I could walk! she announced. I was being discharged. With a two month prescription of oxycodiene.

It's the next two months I don't remember much of. But once the drug induced hazed cleared, I realized there had been none of this natural healing I was promised. In fact, I felt worse than when I left the hospital. Maybe it was my imagination. Maybe it was that the drugs that kept me asleep and in the magical land of daydreams had made me forget what my level of pain had been. Or maybe, just maybe, the hospital had screwed up.

The answer would be C) The Hospital Screwed Up. A few months and one out of court settlement later I was in another hospital with giant needles in my spine. A treatment I would need for the rest of my life, at varying intervals. Did I mention already how much I hate needles? The little ones to draw blood were bad enough, but here I was stretched out beneath needles the size of baseball bats. Local anesthesia? Screw that, knock me out!

To this day, I will not go to the hospital without a fight. Something horrible always happens to me. Whether it be needles, having things shoved in orifices that shouldn't have foreign objects shoved up them, or malpractice, I have no luck with modern medicine.

I can only hope that one day, one glorious day, shall find myself again in the hands of a buxom young blond nurse. And maybe, if I'm very lucky, she'll cut my panties off in private.