I am with my friend, and we are on our way to Lowell General
for her pre-op blood work. She will be
getting a brand new knee soon. I'm very
excited for her, and I'm even more excited that she is allowing me to accompany
her on this odyssey because we have a ridiculous habit of getting ourselves
into troubling situations.
In other words, it's the opportunity of a lifetime.
Before I meet her at her house, I have to get out of my own
house. Of course my phone rings as I
attempt to walk out the door. This makes
my early start more of an on-time start.
At the end of the road I realize that I am almost out of gas, so I
backtrack several streets and get in line at the gas station.
Well, I sort of get in line.
There is a woman who needs air in her tires. She pulls up to the machine, decides it's too
cold to get out (it's actually beautiful, in the 40's), backs almost into me as
I pull into the station, then parks at the first gas pump. She proceeds to shut off her car and wave me
around her. I don't know where the frik
she thinks I can go, so I cut very close, probably too close, as I eke by and
go to a completely different set of pumps.
Then I wait. And I
wait. And I wait. Gas Station Guy, the one on whom I have a
secret crush, is not here today. Today
it's Happy Short Guy. He smiles and nods
while he works, even if he only understands about a fifth of what I say. His English is strong enough in the
conventional way, but I doubt he understands slang and idioms very well, and he
certainly has zero tolerance for hyperbole.
Eventually Air Pump Woman and Happy Short Guy get her car
where it needs to be, and then he comes over to pump my gas. By the time it is all said and done, it takes
me twelve minutes to make a four-minute pit stop. Now I am officially late. I text my friend just before I pay: "@
gas, be right thr" or something similarly inspirational.
Once I make it across town to her place, we start on the
road to Lowell. We intend to cut through
the back way, but the roads are still snow-covered from the storm the day
before, the storm that was supposed to be a dusting but turned into
shovel-worthy inches of white shit. We
abandon our back road plans and head to the main connecting street where there
are people.
No, not in cars. People. Jogging.
Pushing baby carriages. In. The.
Street.
My friend and I cannot possibly fathom how jogging in the
slush-filled, unplowed roads can be a brightly-thought-out endeavor. But truly the woman with the baby carriage is
the biggest of all the idiots. She and
her baby are completely exposed to the dangerous slipping and the constant
waves of goopy melting snow emanating from every vehicle that passes. Obviously these are not intelligent people.
No sooner do we splash Jogger Dudes and Stroller Ma when the
traffic in front of us careens to a halt.
Some kind of work truck has parked its ass in the middle of River Road
in Tewksbury, right smack in front of the golf course. So, we wait.
And we wait some more. And we
even wait longer than that. It's not
that we cannot go if we really need to, it's that the cop who is
"directing traffic" is standing in the street sort of waving the
other traffic by, sort of sipping on his coffee, and sort of grabbing his
crotch. Unless we start waving donuts out
the window, I doubt very much that this will be a timely event. I am also wondering if I am going to be
arrested as I am sorely tempted to start screaming profanities out the window.
After about eight minutes of this, we are finally waved by,
and the police officer stands in the road.
I know what you're thinking, but he honestly is standing in the only
open passing lane. I drive a little too
close to him, give him a splash on the drive through, and then speed away
because my friend has suddenly turned into me.
She swears at the cop through the rolled-up windows as we drive by. I can just imagine this conversation should
he decide to report me --
ME: But,
officer, we are in a hurry. My friend
has to get to the hospital!
HE: Pull over,
Bitch, I'm gonna write you up a ticket.
ME: Wait! What did I do?
HE: Your
friend called me a fat, lazy asshole.
ME: Shit. How much is the ticket?
HE: One
hundred bucks, Bucko.
FRIEND:
Liar! I called you a balding,
megaton buttfuck!
HE: Now it's
two hundred dollars, Girlie.
ME: Um … can I
see what's behind door #3?
We arrive at Lowell General and discover, amazingly enough,
a nearly front-row parking space. We are
about twenty feet from the front door. I
assume this means that we will come out to a ticket; it does seem to be my
day. The first thing my friend does is
register for her appointment, and she is handed a pager. I feel like I'm at Panera waiting for my
order to come up. While my friend moves
to another line, I sit down away from everyone else. The lobby is huge, and it is the central
location off of which are corridors and offices for radiology and the lab and,
frighteningly enough, the cast room.
This means broken bones must be big business if the hospital has created
an entire office just to put casts on. I
can imagine that dinner time conversation --
NON-DOC: So,
Sweetie, how did you spend your day?
DOC: How the
hell do you think I spent it? I put on
forty-seven wrist casts, twenty-nine leg casts, and I sat on a hypodermic
needle full of Novocaine. My left ass
cheek slept the entire day while I worked the right ass cheek clear off.
NON-DOC: Well,
honey, those are the breaks… (Spouse remembers nothing more after chair comes
flying towards face. Wakes up later
being completely covered in plaster ala Fortunado in Cask of Amontillado.)
There are some strange people here in the waiting area
today, but arguably not as strange as those one might find at Lowell's less
fancy cousin of the dirty-city-underbelly, Lawrence General. There are two random women, one wearing
pajama pants with a giant cast on her leg (See?
He's keeping plenty busy in there.), and the other carrying a giant
pocketbook. My friend wonders what the
woman might possibly keep inside.
"Depends," I answer.
"Depends on what?"
she asks.
"Depends, like diapers for adults. Explains the extra-absorbent purse."
Soon we spy two older women, both stylish and in good
humor. My friend and I decide that we're
looking into mirrors of the future, and that someday soon, we will be these
ladies -- dressed for comfort and fun, properly accessorized, and totally
drop-dead beautiful. They gab amicably
then resort to laughter. We quietly
confer and decide: We want to be them in a few years.
After a short wait, my friend begins her pre-op prep work,
which means she will donate a few vials of blood, undergo a chest x-ray, have
an EKG, talk to the nurse and the anesthesiologist, get her nostril swabbed,
and undergo yet another pregnancy test, as if the Pope has been in town since
the one she took last week for a different appointment connected to the same
operation. The only problem she
encounters (other than the fact that the technicians forget the nostril swab,
so when they remember it, they are so flustered that they take the sample they
need from deep inside my pal's cranium) is with the paperwork.
Oh, yes, the stuff that makes the insurance companies go
'round.
The paperwork is all screwed up. The hospital is trying to bill the wrong
insurance, and they have my friend's father listed as her spouse. Now, this may just be some sort of silly
clerical error, but the implications about her father-spouse are downright Appalachian. My friend insists that the nurse make the
corrections. The nurse doesn't want to
make corrections. She'll make them
later. Wrong, my friend insists, you'll
make them now. If only I'd gone over
to the little desk with them both, we wouldn't be in this predicament now. I could assure this hardy nurse that she is
no match for my friend. My friend has a
formidable mother; my friend has been raised by the Master. Really, Nurse Lady, correct the paperwork now
while you still have a skin on your hide, if you have an ounce of survival
instinct anywhere in your body.
Two and a half hours and four crossword puzzles later, we
are done and ready to leave. A potty
break is in order, so we make the pit stop and wash our hands. And dry them.
I said, and we dry …and … we … I said, dry … Damnit. The hand dryer, the kind where you insert
your sopping wet hands and the machine magically dries your palms and fingers
while you stand there, will not start for me.
It works fine for my friend, but not for me. I pull my hands away, and the dryer
starts. I reinsert my hands quickly, and
the dryer shuts down again. Pull away -
it goes on. Hands in - it goes off. Out, on.
In, off. Out, on. In, off.
I finally shake my dripping fingers into oblivion and exit the place,
determined to make it to my car without further incident. Success!
We run a few errands and decide that we're starving. Honestly, our growling stomachs give us away,
and we head to the luncheon specials at Le Chen's. I love that place because I always get two
meals out of the sweet and sour chicken.
When I go to pack the leftover food up, the waiter seems annoyed that I
only ate two pieces of chicken. I am
reasonably sure I ate more. I did have
soup and rice and tea, so maybe I am full, but the guy counts the pieces of chicken
and says, "No. Eight pieces. You ate two or we make mistake…"
Shit. Now he's going
to bogart my leftovers because he believes the kitchen gave me an extra piece
of chicken. Damnation. I shouldn't have said anything. I'll know better next time. While I wait for my possibly pilfered
leftovers to come back out, I eat my fortune cookie then unfurl the slip of
paper I rescue from its center.
Fortune sides with him
who dares.
I could apply this to the Big Picture of life, but I take it
to mean, Since you dared to grab this
fortune cookie first out of the two, here is your fortune.
Life is so much easier when you cut down on the
expectations. Considering our crazy-ass
adventures in Lowell, that's all the daring I care to do for one day. I know my friend will dream of smacking me
when she reads this, but I am very excited for her knee surgery. First of all, it will be great when she has
recovered enough to walk the beach with me again. And secondly, we have some of the best
adventures. I can't wait to see what's
out there for us after her knee replacement.
After all, fortune has already sided with us, right?
