If this story had a title it would spoil the end.
I used to live in upstate New York. It was pretty cool - I worked in a haunted house five days a week, and the other two days I spent with my then-boyfriend a couple of hours south, outside of Albany. I'd leave work at 4:30pm on my last shift and run like hell to catch the twice-daily bus that runs between Toronto and NYC, then get the bus back a couple of days later and turn up at work just in time to get into costume and start my shift.
Anyway. One memorable time, I arrived in Albany and took the bus out to Troy. I walked up the hill from the bus stop, past the porno cinema (it always had birthday greetings for someone on the advertising boards outside, which never failed to entertain me), Uncle Sam's Bar and the bowling alley, through the university buildings and up to the apartment. All of this was just as normal. What was unusual was that I found my boyfriend huddled at the foot of the steps to the apartment clutching his belly, his face the weirdest shade of greyish green that any face has ever turned.
I did the obvious thing first and poked him to see if he was dead. The wail he let out suggested he wasn't, although I poked him again to see if he was Undead and might not come after my brains. He didn't, so I did the next sensible thing and asked what had happened. Apparently he'd eaten a tuna melt at the diner at lunchtime and had been feeling off ever since. He thought he might have been huddling on the steps for thirty or forty minutes but couldn't be sure. He was sweating and shivering and asking me to make sure his parents got his ashes back if he died. I asked him if he could walk to the taxi office across the street. He couldn't.
The taxi office was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my time in the US. The guy who ran it was a Hell's Angel and invited us to a bunch of parties. He delighted in introducing us to new people and then telling us toe-curlingly shocking things about them when they'd gone - we met crack whores, a couple of convicted murderers, a guy who made specialist tiny-penis pornography (apparently it pays surprisingly well). When I went across the street he responded with great good sense, locking up and coming over to take a look at the huddled mess in the stairwell.
This is where I started to get alarmed. Taxi Guy refused to drive us to the hospital, on the grounds that if he died in the car it would be messy and involve a lot of lost earnings. He asked us if both of our visas were up to date (yes), and if we had health insurance (yes) and then called 911. Within five minutes we heard the sirens and a pair of angelic paramedics descended upon us, loaded the sick one onto a gurney and in, put me in a seat alongside and off we sped, blue lights and sirens going. The movement of the ambulance seemed to cause significantly greater pain; there were wails and whimpers like nothing I'd heard before, and when we arrived at the hospital we crashed through the doors at speed and were dropped in an examination cubicle to await the doctor.
As we sat there, someone came along and asked for insurance details. I passed them on as best I could, and then we waited for a doctor. A nice nurse came in and took his preliminary obs - temperature normal, BP astronomical, pulse absurd. She asked if he still had his appendix and palpated his belly.
As she left the cubicle, his face changed from "contorted with pain" to "utterly aghast". I asked what was wrong, envisioning an apparent catastrophic loss of bodily function control that would, once he removed the blanket, be revealed to be a haemorrhage. Nothing as dramatic: the palpation had freed the agonising pocket of trapped wind to a location significantly closer to the exit, and his condition was revealed to be the result of over-enthusiastic eating and not a potentially fatal organ rupture. The offending air pocket was released just as the doctor arrived, and with blushing explanation we were free to leave, speeding out of A&E on a cloud of his toxic gases.
It was a funny story, until he got the bill: $5500 for the ambulance; $500 for the examination. The most expensive fart ever? It seems entirely likely.
Anyway. One memorable time, I arrived in Albany and took the bus out to Troy. I walked up the hill from the bus stop, past the porno cinema (it always had birthday greetings for someone on the advertising boards outside, which never failed to entertain me), Uncle Sam's Bar and the bowling alley, through the university buildings and up to the apartment. All of this was just as normal. What was unusual was that I found my boyfriend huddled at the foot of the steps to the apartment clutching his belly, his face the weirdest shade of greyish green that any face has ever turned.
I did the obvious thing first and poked him to see if he was dead. The wail he let out suggested he wasn't, although I poked him again to see if he was Undead and might not come after my brains. He didn't, so I did the next sensible thing and asked what had happened. Apparently he'd eaten a tuna melt at the diner at lunchtime and had been feeling off ever since. He thought he might have been huddling on the steps for thirty or forty minutes but couldn't be sure. He was sweating and shivering and asking me to make sure his parents got his ashes back if he died. I asked him if he could walk to the taxi office across the street. He couldn't.
The taxi office was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my time in the US. The guy who ran it was a Hell's Angel and invited us to a bunch of parties. He delighted in introducing us to new people and then telling us toe-curlingly shocking things about them when they'd gone - we met crack whores, a couple of convicted murderers, a guy who made specialist tiny-penis pornography (apparently it pays surprisingly well). When I went across the street he responded with great good sense, locking up and coming over to take a look at the huddled mess in the stairwell.
This is where I started to get alarmed. Taxi Guy refused to drive us to the hospital, on the grounds that if he died in the car it would be messy and involve a lot of lost earnings. He asked us if both of our visas were up to date (yes), and if we had health insurance (yes) and then called 911. Within five minutes we heard the sirens and a pair of angelic paramedics descended upon us, loaded the sick one onto a gurney and in, put me in a seat alongside and off we sped, blue lights and sirens going. The movement of the ambulance seemed to cause significantly greater pain; there were wails and whimpers like nothing I'd heard before, and when we arrived at the hospital we crashed through the doors at speed and were dropped in an examination cubicle to await the doctor.
As we sat there, someone came along and asked for insurance details. I passed them on as best I could, and then we waited for a doctor. A nice nurse came in and took his preliminary obs - temperature normal, BP astronomical, pulse absurd. She asked if he still had his appendix and palpated his belly.
As she left the cubicle, his face changed from "contorted with pain" to "utterly aghast". I asked what was wrong, envisioning an apparent catastrophic loss of bodily function control that would, once he removed the blanket, be revealed to be a haemorrhage. Nothing as dramatic: the palpation had freed the agonising pocket of trapped wind to a location significantly closer to the exit, and his condition was revealed to be the result of over-enthusiastic eating and not a potentially fatal organ rupture. The offending air pocket was released just as the doctor arrived, and with blushing explanation we were free to leave, speeding out of A&E on a cloud of his toxic gases.
It was a funny story, until he got the bill: $5500 for the ambulance; $500 for the examination. The most expensive fart ever? It seems entirely likely.
| < Attention Foster/Adoptive parental infidels | gah. bugs. > |
Post to Twitter
