GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN
After turning 45 a few weeks ago, my guarantee must have expired, and like with any household appliance, suddenly everything started to fail unfix-ably. In the middle of the night I wake up with a small, red balloon shape on my left elbow, hurting whenever it touches something slightly more solid than air. No big deal, according to the doctor - 3 months before it will be fully gone. I still have no clue how I got it - too much elbow work at the office ? (nah, I’m the last one) Too much reading on one side in bed ? (nah, impossible after a life’s training), so the mystery remains. Pills, rest and ointment. Soon the skin starts to blister off, the balloon shrinks and the pain stays.
Then my abdomen decides to turn itself into a double eight knot and perform inside-out acupuncture with rusty nails (or so it feels). A couple nights and days of trembling, sweating and having crazy fever dreams convince me this isn’t going away by itself - back to the doctor. After trying to punch me at the right spot to maximise the pain, dear doctor starts to look a bit more worried. Casual questions quickly evolve from “Where did you eat last weekend ?” to ”Any stomach cancers in the family ?”. Immediately stop pills #1 (elbow), take pills #2 (antibiotics) & #3. Echo immediately required. This triggers strange memories of pregnant bellies, but this analyst assures me that 95% of the echoes he does are for sports injuries. Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to look at my elbow… . Echo only reveals that my liver is in perfect condition - once I get off the pills, I look forward to a continued life of beer sampling ! Off to a hospital scan - drinking a liter of foul marker fluid, getting stabbed with needles in the remaining functional arm and pipes in places that should never see traffic in that direction, I get cooked in a giant microwave. “This will feel hot, this is normal”. I bet that’s what that woman said to the poodle as well. She finishes me off with a few tight turns of irremovable tape over my hairy arm.
Now God really gets going : over the weekend I develop an eye infection. Eye drops from the cupboard. It gets worse. Ointment from the night pharmacy. It gets worse. By Monday I’m willing to perform a diy head transplant. Right now, please ! (No donors or takers found). Doctor prescribes stronger drops. It gets worse. Can’t really drive anymore, can’t read, can’t watch TV. Seppuku looks more and more appealing by the hour, if I didn’t already knew how that felt from last week, and I’m not even allowed to drink my two sips of sake. Doctor now looks really worried, and sends me off to the hospital with an emergency appointment in 10 minutes. The hospital is 15 minutes away. If you know the way. And you can at least see. Not my safest trip. Once in the hospital, I get the “pick your number and stand in line” treatment. My number is 609. After 6 other people and now half an hour too late, they start on number 610. I politely approach the receptionist - ready for that impromptu head transplant - she only got away because hers looked so horribly empty. I finally get sent off into the caverns of the hospital. The sadist architect of course enjoyed hiding the opthamologist 6 corners, 3 turns and 5 doors away from the entrance. All well indicated for people with excellent eye-sight, no doubt.
The opthamologist (a gem - she possesses this rude directness that Flemish people love from each other, but fail to grasp why others are offended by it) drips a few things in the eye, scratches it with something that looks to my other eye like a 20cm needle, then calls in her assistant to marvel at the unique sight of a well developed tree-shaped infection. Immediately stop the eye drops, now go get a gel… . Come back in the evening for a pressure pad on the eye. I perform the reverse journey home mainly by following my own tear drop scent trail. I suddenly wonder why we make heroes out of healthy athletes ? Anyone dealing with a serious handicap (no, not my chicken shit) faces way tougher battles. The pressure pad feels like somebody called Cassius applies pressure on your wounded eye. And I get to stay home for 3 more days, because clearly I’m exhausted, otherwise all these infections wouldn’t show up, I’m told… .
In the morning, I decide this justifies recording for posterity. Hence the patch pic. It only took me 22 tries to get it fairly sharp in the mirror, aiming the camera from below. Thanks, my eye is getting better - I managed a whole day of work today ! Which my boss saw as the perfect moment to give my job to someone else. But by now I can take the elbow pills again, so with a bit of luck I may still survive till Topo’s next wedding party !
June 18th, 2009 at
NO NO NO NO! Hansosan! So sorry about your luck! (But the photo does rock and belongs in Rolling Stone mag.)