Wrapped in Emergency Room, but Mostly About Something Else

So the "lovely" thing about having or having a loved-one having had (I just wanted to show off my mad conjugation-of-the-verb-to-have skillz) any sort of scary-sounding illness such as the BIG C (ok, that sounds more like some kind of Vitamin Water drink with cutesy ad copy and a terrifyingly orange color), is that there's a little tinge of panic about subsequent every day blechs. Not to say every time there're sniffles it's the end of remission or anything like that, but because you just have so much more context for what benign symptoms could be.

And let's not forget the inevitable panic of having to explain to everyone that you may have insisted on taking your mother into the ER with what was probably a stomach bug, but well could have been a bowel obstruction resulting from her prior hysterectomy without every one remembering THE BIG C and getting sad-puppy face because they think you're putting on a brave face about the fact that she's seconds away from death's door. Because, honestly, when people believe something about your life en masse, it doesn't take too long for you to wonder if maybe you should be believing this too.

As an illustrative but tangential anecdtoe: when I was a teenager, I was very shy around boys. Actually, I was very shy around every one, but I was - shall we say - uncomfortable with my sexuality. The idea of being grounded in a physical body with concupiscent needs lacked the light and airy quality of pure fantasy, and this became kind of disturbing to me. The terror of that link between my physical body's needs and the sheer emotional vulnerability that they clearly could trigger terrified the crap out of me. I flirted with boys and had crazy crushes on them, but they never went anywhere. Not th least because I kind of mediated my fascination with the opposite sex against that terror of becoming physically and emotionally entwined by forming close "friendships" mostly with men. Given the fact that members of my family are gay, many people did suggest with more or less seriousness that perhaps that discomfort/inexperience was my way of fidgeting around in the proverbial closet.

 What's funny is that I started to kind of believe it, even if I had experienced ongoing emotional and physical attachments to boys (fantasies, a taste for men's scent, etc etc) since I was a child. I really could spend months obsessing about certain boys who were my friends, and yet feel that this was just my brain's way of compensating for the fact that maybe I didn't want to admit to my underlying sexuality which was weird for two reasons (1) that I might not know to whom I was genuinely attracted and (2) that I might have these underlying prejudices against something I always had thought of as no big deal!Our self-concepts can be so mutable and a contrary consensus about an aspect of identity can feel so unnerving. Not for because of what the perception itself is but for the dissonance that shows us just how little we do understand ourselves and questions whether self is really a particularly legitimate concept in the first place!

But back to the ER. My mom probably had the flu. She wasn't keeping liquids down, had bad cramps and was getting dehydrated, so after putting on my best Jewish Mother impression, I encouraged her to go in so they could iv fluids and maybe give her better pain meds.The ER is interesting. It's actually really nice and not at all the sort of crazy television model that I might have expected. There were definitely characters - by the television we had a roofer and a Russian. RRRRRR. I'm not sure about the roofer's story exactly, except he hadn't worked in two years and had recently made the change from power bars to candy corn. I tend to like roofers, since two of them bought me my first drink at a bar on the afternoon of my 21st birthday. The Russian - or some form of Slav at any rate... I just liked the alliteration - spent much of his time groaning, but did try to tell me a story "we have in our country" a story about a crocoDEEL and a monkey who was I think grating a banana or something and the crocodeel kept asking what he was doing and finally gave him money to find out and then the monkey said something about cleaning off the pit of the banana and the crocodeeel said "stupid monkey" and the monkey flashed the money he'd gotten and smiled. 

This was related to the news covering the fact that Bank of America is charging for debit card use now, except I think he misunderstood and thought they would only charge him if he didn't use it, becaase he kept muttering 'if I DOOON use my dyebeet card, they weeeel charge me'

The highlight of my ER experience was that they have free books in a pile by the television. I was moderate and only stole two. I love free books, mostly because they encourage me to sample books by obscure authors based on descriptions that would not ordinarily prompt purchase of the book. And occasionally this leads me to discover a new favorite author. This is how I discovered Russel Hoban. The library had a free copy of The Trokeville Way, a children't book that just happened to incorporate Libertango into the puzzle theme of the story about a boy and a painting and... it's kind of complicated but beautifully told, and intrigued me enough to look into his other fiction.

The other highlight was that there was nothing horribly wrong with my mother, they gave her the iv fluids and sent her home. I feel that if nothing else, it was a good practice for having children in the future, since I hear being a parent involves a lot of worrying about loved ones and evening trips to the ER. And hey, it's nice to know that if that happens, there will be free books and stories about crocodeels to greet me.