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When I feel the plastic tube enter my vein I scream.  It’s impossible to hold it in.  The nurse looks at me startled as if pain was an exotic foreign concept.

I shake my head when he asks if I’ve ever had an IV before.  He looks at me knowingly. “It could be worse,” he explains.  Instead of this 18th century hospital with questionable hygeine, I could be in India, he says, where he had food poisoning during one of his missions.  His voice is soothing and calculating. I’d have thought him infantilizing otherwise.

This emergency room has peeling walls and not enough beds.  I’m propped up on this aging leather dentist’s chair.  When I have to vomit they give me this old carton like one of those egg crates you get at the grocery store.  Did they just find this on the ground somewhere?  Has somebody already used it?  They seem ill-prepared for somebody who is vomiting.  Are we in a hospital?  

The nurse wheels me over to an elderly lady who shouts in the middle of the night.  Bless her soul, she seems to be a regular in this place.  In her own world, her body is stuck in this one and she can’t escape.  

I’m seen by numerous doctors and among the blood drawing, pricking, and bodily fluids in plastic cups, I’m grateful each time someone says they know English because at this moment Portuguese makes me want to cry my eyes out.  Throughout the early morning hours, new people straggle in and others are moved in a sort of 3am game of zombie musical chairs.  There’s an inebriated girl on her study abroad program who fell on her head and doesn’t know where she is.  As she passes out next to me, the nurses poke fun at her, and I don’t need to understand the language to interpret “a nuisance to actual sick people in this place.”

Diabetes, food poisoning, pregnancy, 24-hour virus are among the suspicions of my ailments, and as the time passes, I really don’t care what’s going on because I feel the pain in my stomach fade away, and I fall asleep for maybe 5 minutes with the old lady angrily wailing next to me.  After the sun rises, I can sit up again (very slowly), and the jolly doctor who has the morning shift tells me to drink tea and come back if the nausea does, to which I respond “Thanks, but I think I’ll be going now.” I send weary thank yous to the nurses and hobble out of there too weak for a fist pump.  For the rest of the vacation, all I look at are tea bags.




11.1.13