Tuesday, June 5th 2007:

 My world finally came to a standstill. After a week of working under intense pain, shortness of breath, difficulty in breathing and just all around feeling fucked up, I decided at my wife’s insistence of course, to check into the hospital.

So, off we go to the emergency room. You know that dreadful, dungenous place that we all fear to tread…

 That place where you check in with what “YOU” think is the most terrible, the most horrible, the most serious affliction of anyone there and then once in triage, they check you out and relegate you to the back of the line with the kid who scraped his knee trying out some new skateboard trick on the handicapped railings outside of the hospital…..And damn, you thought you were sick…LOL..

Now there is a trick to the whole emergency room debacle,
and you are about to be schooled in it. So pull up a chair, bust open a Heineken or beer of your choice, get comfortable and take it all in.

“Mirrors on the ceiling
Pink champagne on ice
And she said
We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
Relax said the night man
We are programed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave”

First off, just getting seen in today’s post-Katrina hospitals in New Orleans takes nothing short of a miracle. Come loaded for bear. 27 different types of I.D. Your first born male child, perhaps an arm and a leg from the daughter wouldn’t hurt, and being able to say that someone in the last three generations of your family belonged to the Gambino/Genovese crime family wouldn’t hurt.(We got a awful lot of business’ here named Gambino’s)…

• Always make sure you walk in by yourself. Insure you are looking as pale, pitiful, and weak as possible. Hold one or the other side of your chest and breathe in short shallow spurts. Once you get to pre-registration, you have to fill out basic I.D. paperwork and the sort, make sure you fake a little “drop to one knee” action and make that orderly run for that wheelchair. Once firmly implanted in said wheelchair and your continuing to fill out the preliminary paperwork, insure a couple of real good choking type coughs, you know the kind where people can’t quite decide whether or not you’re going to puke in their lap or on their desk; it tends to expedite the paperwork.
• Once the initial paperwork is done they send you back to never never land which is the waiting room; and so begins your seven to ten hour stint of waiting to be seen, no matter how bad you are hurting. Luckily for me, because I had previously had a collapsed lung, they took me a little more serious, and of course my superb acting skills up to this point are definitely moving me up in the running for “Best Lead Actor in a Hospital/Drama series”

1. Now you have to remember, you’re fighting for your small spot of comfort supposedly reserved for only the worst of the worst; simply meaning, if you do not have a bullet wound, a knife sticking out of your back, an axe protruding from your forehead (or something they just can’t figure out at a glance, fix, and send you home). YOU AIN’T GETTIN A BED! CAPISH?