Confined to Quarters

I am lying on a bed, staring straight into the ceiling. There are two parallel rows of fluorescent bulbs, unlit, their fixtures butted against each other end to end to create a rectangular frame around my main field of vision. Two more bulbs resembling heat lamps glow with such faint luminosity that someone may have merely painted them a burnt orange rust color. They are positioned just inside the fluorescent bulbs, continuing the perfect symmetry of the ceiling fixtures and they form the top two markers of what is beginning to look like the five on a dice as I try to make sense of what I am seeing. The bottom of the five is an expensive looking smoke detector on the left and an Ethernet cable port on the right. The Ethernet port is too low to maintain the perfect symmetry pioneered by the heat lamps. The middle is an emergency sprinkler positioned so perfectly above my forehead that interrogators using Chinese water torture could not have put it in a better location, but it two is an maddening 4/7ths of the way across the ceiling when it should be right in the middle. There is a red sticker, the kind of garage sale pricing fame on the smoke detector with an upside down 93 Sharpie’d on it. It does not occur to me until much later that that may be an E6. There is an Ethernet cable arcing from the port through my field of vision and I wish I could remember what was behind my head because I cannot imagine what it is connecting to.
I would look around at other, certainly more interesting things, but my neck has been secured in a foam collar. My head is immobile, and my body is complaining every time I try to sit myself up to look around the Emergency Room that I checked myself into what must have been hours ago. It occurs to me, that the ceiling is an interesting analogy for patients in the hospital, because it is usually an abrupt disruption of the general symmetry that is the human body that brings people to the ER in the first place, where they work to restore symmetry, despite the evidence on the ceiling that they don’t seem have it down themselves. The fact that I can have thoughts of this sophistication while supposedly having suffered a head injury is reassuring. The clock mounted in my peripheral vision that seems to be skipping chunks of time is not.
My head is immobile despite the fact that my injury happened 23 miles into a 30-mile bike ride and that after my body decided that my head should hold it in the air for once, I rode the last seven miles to the car, stopping to swim once on the way. In fact it wasn’t until after the swim that the first thoughts of going to the hospital entered my head. Sure there was the initial panic after my helmet impacted with the ground before any of the rest of me and the obligatory 5 minutes of lying with my face in the dirt, breathing Central Oregon’s finest volcanic silt while I fished the floating fragments of enamel out of my mouth with my tongue and spit them on the ground, but going to a Doctor seemed like a bit of overkill for a crash with minimal blood and soft dirt for a landing pad. It wasn’t until I realized that we had taken a wrong trail and I had absolutely no idea how long we had been riding it that I started to think about medical attention, and it wasn’t until I took off my shirt to go swimming and discovered a searing pain in my collarbone that I made a final decision. On arrival at the ER I quickly made friends with the guy next to me with blood oozing out of his knee who was obviously a fellow biker. We swap stories. Like most serious biking injuries, he was on a road bike and had a run in with a car. We try to convince each other that the other person is more seriously hurt. “That cut looks deep, they’re probably going to need to operate.” I say to him, by which I mean they’ll need tweezers and some peroxide for the gravel embedded in his skin.
“Well they’ll probably have to keep you overnight for observation.” I don’t like the sound of this. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right, you’ve been calling me ‘Lance ’ ever since you figured out I ride road bikes.”
At this point I was called back to meet the second nurse of the night, the first having taken my information and typed it onto a wide pink bracelet that I wore to identify myself. Nurse 2 asked me more detailed questions than before, and as I describe the details of the landing, a burly man named Frank is summoned to collar me, as if I’m going to resist. He immobilizes my head with a flourish and asks me how it feels. “Uh, fine.” I say. “You don’t sound nearly gracious enough. I can get you a much less comfortable collar.” Apparently Frank takes a great deal of pride in his neck braces. I twist around to make eye contact, which takes a few seconds and a considerable amount of resolve on my part. “It’s comforting like a warm scarf on a cold day in the winter. Thank-You Frank.” I manage to pull this off sincerely, without any sarcasm or self-importance sneaking into my voice and Frank gives a happy giant-nurse smile. I feel like I’ve proved myself worthy to the guardian of the medicine and I get to go get the real treatment. Frank takes me back through the key-card protected door and hands me off to Nurse #3, a small woman with dirty blond hair who seems to have spent too much time in the sun. Frank motions her over but speaks loud enough for me to hear, “If he gives you any problems get me and I’ll put one of the yellow collars on him.” I am shown to my room, bigger than I expected but for the next ten minutes all I can think is, “Please don’t make me wear a gown, please not a gown, no gown please, no gown for me, I wish to remain gownless.” And thoughts of that nature.
I am cold and alone, but I would bet that I’m not dying. My short, shirt, and sandals remain on me but I’m beginning to wish I had that gown to use as a blanket. In the bottom of my field of vision there is a giant laser beam or a neutrino emitter pointing at me that I keep hoping will malfunction and give me super powers. Chances are that it is simply a very bright light.
My eyes are still in a staring contest with the instruments above me but my attention has been diverted to the sounds of the hospital. A woman is reading jokes to her husband in the room next to me. My concentration is not such that I can catch both the beginning and end of the joke, but hearing them laugh is comforting. An alarm chimes rhythmically, two notes, I’m guessing about a fifth apart, somewhere on the other side of the room or maybe behind a desk. Duh Da…. Duh Da… Duh Da…. Duh Da…. Duh Da… It is exercising, doing ten sets of five and then resting. I assume, based on footstep frequency and vocal inflection that there is a child on a tour of the hospital. “This is where Dr. ------ works, you remember him don’t you?” I can’t remember names, Frank being the exception, and I think I’ve been watching too much of the TV show Scrubs because as I think back through the three nurses I’ve met they all seem to be Nurse Espinosa. The Doctor would be Dr. Cox if she was not female, and she comes through with the line of the night as I’m making a concentrated effort on listening to every sound I can hear. She is on the phone just outside my curtain and I’m ignoring the details of the conversation until I hear, “Well you’ll just have to make someone sicker so they have to spend the night.”
Silence.
“Because if they get one more patient they can pull an extra nurse and that will lighten the load on everybody.”
It makes sense, but all I can think is “I do not volunteer, please not me. I want to sleep at home. Although.... an overnight stay will increase the likelihood of a super-powers granting laser-beam malfunction...”
Someone knocks on the curtain, and you have to work in an ER a long time before you figure out how to pull that off. I am wheeled over to cardiology for some CT scans. I never have to move for any of it, the nurse and the CT tech sliding me around on my little mattress pad like a kid on a raft. I am told to stay perfectly still so that the expensive equipment can shine lights at me and scan my C, and immediately afterwards my T is scanned as well, both of which are located in my head and neck if you were curious.
The CT tech is a considerably more confident driver of my bed and we make it back in record time. That clock is still skipping minutes and seconds. The sprinkler is now dripping on a spot just over the left side of my head. Now the thing directly above my forehead is a cut in the ceiling that I would not have seen if I hadn’t been moved. Sad how you only notice things in their relationship to your own current situation.
I wait in my room and my friends and fellow riders Jeff and Ben are allowed to come back one at a time to visit. There are no results to discuss but we do laugh a lot about the urine sample container and the different types of superpower providing accidents that could occur in a hospital.
The time ticks by and I am told that there is a problem with the clock and it has to catch up sometimes. Shortly after that the Radiologists stop playing cards long enough for one of them to glance at my scans and tell my Doc that they are negative for anything requiring my neck to be immobile. From there I am basically loaded into a cannon and shot outside with a shout of “You’re going to be in a lot of pain for two days but deal with it.” The relief of knowing that I’m going to be fine is almost enough for me to forget about the hunger of coming from a 30 mile ride to the hospital without eating anything, but not quite. We stop at Safeway for some Ibuprofen and string cheese, which is one of the only things I can eat with various parts of my teeth missing and no pain meds yet. The next day the dentist tells me there’s nothing I can do for my teeth, they were smashed together extremely hard on impact and that’s why they hurt, but there aren’t any fractures or damage other than the chips I previously spat onto the ground. I nod and thank him but he doesn’t notice as the muscles in my neck have tightened up so much that it takes the better part of a minute and a half to complete the movement. I am relegated back to bed and the several children’s books I have that I can follow the plot of. I am under orders to get a massage sometime in the next few days to help with mobility, and to stay off of my bike until I replace my cracked helmet. I am stuck inside on my beautiful days off of work, bored out of my mind without the mobility or attention span to entertain myself. My arm is in a sling. There is little food in the house and hummingbirds are taunting me about my confinement as they hover outside my window. I am extremely lucky.