listening: julia bentley + andrew gunadie, get away
As I texted at eleven fifty-seven last night from the University of Alberta hospital waiting room to answer a good-spirited 'so what are you doing?': Um. It was a night.
For once, Julie, Craig and I had good house-cleaning intentions: Julie's mom is coming by today to bring us a vacuum, and since she cleaned our kitchen when she dropped Julie off, we thought it was only fair to restore it to that former glory, as well as tidy the front room to prepare for the vacuum we are gratefully receiving. Craig also decided to move to his room from the dining room/fourth roommate's room where he has been for the past few weeks.
A sign reading 'RESTRICTED', left festooning the wall at the foot of the stairs after a party Tommy and Maria had at the house, oh, sometime in July, finally annoyed me enough (in the spirit of cleaning the house) to remove. Unfortunately, I decided that a good time to remove it was at the same moment Craig was hauling his mattress upstairs to his room. So yes, as my brother puts it, I did get owned by a mattress. The mattress slipped, my head was in the way, the wall was near my head, and now? Story!
To quote my father: "What is this, the chimpanzee enclosure? Tell him to stop flinging furniture about willy-nilly!"
The Mattress Incident was at about 9:30. For a couple hours, Julie proved that she is going to make one hell of a nurse. Eventually, however, I was still pretty shaky, my neck was hurting and my arm was not quite right (Julie, on the phone with HealthLink: "Can you describe it any other way than 'it feels WEIRD', Rae?"), and after a consultation with HealthLink we were off to the U of A hospital.
(Many thanks, again, to Andrea and her car: without which we either would have had to take the bus or an ambulance. Turns out I'm really stubborn and cheap).
The waiting room at the U of A hospital : neck braces, ET Canada and the Steve Wilkos show, Julie reading The Host out loud in a very dramatic voice, and a lot of peripheral vision. We were all in pretty good spirits in the waiting room - we had braced for a long wait, and the adrenaline rush was still winning over the tired. I was actually prepared for six or seven hours in the waiting room - one of the things I had demanded, besides pants, as we left the house was books - and so when we waited only three hours I was actually relieved. Turned out, of course, wearing a neck brace I couldn't see the book I was trying to read. Bygones.
(I was not wandering around the house pantless. I was wearing pajama shorts. They are appropriate for around the house, less so for the general public).
It's all kind of a blur after that - overtired, very uncomfortable, sore and stiff and worried. At some point there was a CT scan - where I said to the porter "hey, I'm not so good with claustrophobia" and he said "have you had one of these before?" I had not. He said "oh, they huuuurt," - and some xrays. Craig was famous - every single medical person who saw us said 'oh, so you're the roommate? Dropped a mattress on her?" The xray tech offered to run over his foot with my bed. We dissected semantics - can't say he threw a mattress at me, because that implies force. Dropped a mattress implies standing on a balcony holding a mattress waiting for me to walk by. Discussed Julie's vision of the mattress propulsion being more of a shot-put kind of deal. Many, many jokes about finishing the job. (These including my father later saying "Of course I'm not mad at him. I'd be mad at him if he had missed! That means he's a lousy shot!") Julie read another page of The Host out loud.
We got tired. We got uncomfortable. Julie made it to 24 hours awake and then went home to email her prof. We waited and waited and waited for someone to look at the scans. We talked to the husband of the lady next to me. We tried to sleep a little. And at eight-fifteen, the doctor came in, took off the neck brace and sent us home.
I took two T3s and slept for seven and a half hours. I am sore and stiff and relieved and very grateful that I had friends with me and texting me. I am glad that I have friends who, when I said I wasn't going to the hospital, shot me a look and said "RACH-el," and took me to the hospital. I am glad that "Craig dropped a mattress on my head!" is a good line. I am glad that Julie had a first aid book and solid second-year nursing student skills. I am glad we brought our own blanket. I am glad that it was nothing serious.
So that was my night, in excruciating detail. Don't you feel like you were there? :P
Going to take some more T3s in a couple hours and sleep some more. I'm aiming for 'less sore and not stiff' by work tomorrow morning at 8:30.
ykylm,
rae
