HMD

Last year Alex had her ‘good’ mother’s day. I woke up on Sunday at 5, drove into town for breakfast and Starbucks and delivered it to her in bed, after having locked the children and dogs in the garage and sealed the doors with wettened towels to muffle the screaming. This year’s event, however, lost a little of its previous luster, as I could not get out of bed before noon, having spent the previous night downing an 8th of Cuervo at Samantha’s gala extravaganza fete, during which I sat quietly against a wall downing an 8th of Cuervo. I actually didn’t think I had had that much to drink, until I woke up at noon on mother’s day with my pants still on. Halfway on, anyway. Reasonably close to the bed.

But this was the good part of Alex’s special day. For the last week our house has smelled vaguely of death, everyone suffering from some sort of mysterious ailment, delivered upon us daily from the children at Prairie Elementary School. We are at war with these clever creatures. We cannot strike them when anyone is looking, even though we know they are making us sick on purpose. Our son has become their unwitting stooge.

Alex succumbed to the illness last night at 8, and we had to take a trip to the ER, where they told her she was fine. She, of course nodded, because her hearing had left her by this point, and she thought they were administering last rites and asking, “Have you all your affairs in order and would you prefer your death certificate in fuchsia or lavender?”

But then she tried to explain to them that she could neither hear nor breathe, and George the Nurse smiled and asked, "Have you experienced anal bleeding or been out of the country within the last 6 months?". And this, my friends, is a wicked cruel question to ask a foreigner who learned about American culture by watching episodes of COPS.

Still, she tried to explain that her illness was real, and she talked and talked until she was blue in the face, and being an ex-EMT, I was like, “Dude, she’s blue in the face. Even I know that’s a sign that requires more intervention than making her change in and out of that paper tissue dress so that you can ogle her breasts.” But seeing her bosomy outline through the paper tissue dress reduced ME to ogling her breasts, and made me useless and I was rendered feeble in my chair, unable to rise, and so I downloaded Texas Hold’em onto my cell phone and promptly lost 280,000 of what I hope to be virtual dollars and let her fend for herself with George the Nurse

Finally, around 11:30, George the Nurse came back in and gave her four vicodins, and I stared at her and screeched in Romanian, “I’m getting half of that, woman!” and an antibiotic pill so large that I assumed it could only be administered anally, and then only by some used up hooker with nothing left to lose. But Alex took that sonofabitch and swallowed it with barely a sip of water, and I half expected her to whinny like a horse.

And thus ended her Mother’s Day Adventure 2005, with the two of us in the ER parking lot wrestling over a little brown vicodin vial like a couple of crack fiends. The end.

Oh, and Toni tagged me with a meme, so being unable to say no to any request, my entry is below:

Turk in a punch bowl,
Is the perfect metaphor,
Turk in a punch bowl,
To describe what the health care system has reduced us to feeling like after 5 hours in the Emergency Room.