Saturday, March 23, 2019

Big Laughs

The doctor took a look at my chart, or rather the computer screen that referenced what might at one time been paper on a clipboard, "You're a pretty healthy guy."
And at this moment I tasted bitter irony, or perhaps it was the lingering aftertaste of the breakfast I had yakked up earlier, part of the chain of events that brought me to this emergency room bed. That and the somewhat persistent vertigo that had brought on the trip to the hospital. 
Hospital? That's not where they keep the healthy people.
Nope. Instead, I found myself adrift on this gurney as a team of medical professionals poked and prodded me in hopes of discovering why this pretty healthy guy was lying here without his god given ability to move about without my head spinning and dropping to my hands and knees in a swoon. Once it was determined that what I had was a case of BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo), I was subjected to a number of exercises and manipulations designed to put my head right again. While I was being jostled about, I felt unwell once again, and was happy to find myself once again in the care of the aforementioned medical professionals. With newfangled barf bags to take my mind off the fact that I was sitting there on a hospital bed, until that moment passed and  I realized that my son was sitting next to me, taking it all in. 
This is the kid who had watched his dad flop about on the floor of the family bathroom due to a kidney stone, another blotch on my otherwise stellar health history. We laughed about that, eventually. Just like we got around to making light of the vertigo. Because that is what we do. We laugh when things get grody. When the going gets grody, we get giddy. We laughed about the barf bags. We snickered about the name of the gurney: the Stryker Zoom. We giggled about the way I was managing my time. 
A pretty healthy guy, according to a group of medical professionals, was laying around while others were doing my job. Which is about the time the laughing stopped. I wasn't at work. I was being poked and prodded by medical professionals. Because I couldn't stand up very well. Diagnosed by that group of medical professionals with a condition exacerbated by my age. Pretty good health for a man of my age. 
Very funny. 

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