After a while, when everyone was supposed to be asleep or trying, I went to the nurses station and requested Zofran, which I had a prescription for. They told me the pharmacy was closed, and when it was closed it was closed. End of discussion. But they would call the doctor and see what they could do.
About an hour later a nurse came by and said the doctor said it was OK for her to give me Tums. She gave me four of them. I took the first and hoped to fuck that would be good enough to keep my insides where they belonged.
In no time I went through the rest, and while it offered a slight respite my wretched guts turned on me. My mouth went dry no matter how much water I drank. I felt it at the back of my throat. It would happen very soon. I asked for permission to use the bathroom, which I was granted.
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| An exaggeration, but not by much. |
I held it back as long as I could to give the nurse time to walk back to the station. And then I puked as quietly as I could into the toilet. Which is very hard, by the way. When I puke, there is no mistaking it. I am a loud motherfucker. But I tried and succeeded.
That night I got no sleep because I spent it puking my guts out over and over again. I tried to make the intervals between puke sessions as long as possible so they might think I had diarrhea instead of what was really going on. But it kept going, and I skipped breakfast the next day. No one bothered me about it.
The puking continued through the morning until I finally became exhausted. My guts hurt like hell, but the sickness passed. The pain remained, like a goblin constantly jabbing me with a dagger. So I still might puke again, but probably not.
It was then that it dawned on me why I constantly went through this shit. It was because the fucking ER doctors lied to me. Or they were stupid and lazy and didn’t know what they were saying. Probably the latter now that I think on it. It was that moment that I realized that ER doctors rely on Occam’s Razor waaaaaaaaaaay too much. The sickness and pain I experience puzzles them at first. As soon as I say I drink more than the average bear, they have this AHA! moment. Of course it’s the alcohol. Alcohol’s bad for you, right? Obviously that’s why you’re sick.
As it turns out, they were fucking wrong. It wasn’t the alcohol. By this point I’d gone without alcohol for quite a while, and the Librium and Ativan helped get through the withdrawals. I probably could have gotten alcohol if I really needed it. Not everyone who works in these places is scrupulous. I used to bring a friend to her methadone clinic, where she would buy Xanax from the lady who cleans the bathrooms. I could probably have found that equivalent here. But I didn’t. So what caused me to experience this sickness that doctors always blame on my alcoholism?
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| Honestly, I fuckin' hate this movie, but I didn't want to post an actual erection here. For now. |
Let’s take a look at what happens whenever I get really fucking sick like this. Three things were universal up until this moment. The other two happened, though. The first sign is an overwhelming sense of horniness. When I’m at home I’ll crank it several times a day, and the porn hole I go down gets deeper and deeper. On the psych ward, I got horny, but I didn’t spank it. At least the gowns were big enough to cover any unseemly bulges. But how could getting a boner make me sick?
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| Yes, I'm a card-carrying member. |
The second sign, the one that was no longer universal, is drunkenness. I will be so fucking lit that I’d wake up drunk off my ass, and all day will be a fog, even if I take some hair of the dog, which would ordinarily clear things right the fuck up. But I was on the psych ward and not drunk. Otherwise, in the ER it seemed very reasonable that it was the booze. But now I knew different.
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| Yeah, Thinner hasn't aged well, but it's still decent. |
The fault lies with the third sign: lack of hunger. Usually, the last thing I ate tastes better than it ever has any right to be. And then I’m not hungry. It lasts a while, and I feel off. I feel queasy. And then some well-intentioned person says to me, “You gotta eat.” And because I hadn’t figured it out yet, whenever someone said that to me, I did. And I got sick because of it. It was the motherfucking food that did this to me. Every time I ate something when I wasn’t hungry. Every time someone told me, “You gotta eat.” It all leads up to a puking frenzy and lots of abdominal pain.
The morning passed, and no one had an update on my release. I was deathly afraid that someone had heard me puking over and over again and decided to report it. They probably wanted to hold onto me due to this illness. I still felt rough and pukey, but I was also tired. My sides ached from puking so much.
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| Only in my finest dreams . . . |
Then, out of the blue, Jerry stopped by my room. “Your ride’s here.”
Apparently it had been there for a half an hour, and no one thought it was important to tell anyone on my floor. There was a shit-ton I had to do in order to get discharged, and no one explained anything to me.
Well. Jerry explained it to me. Too late and with his usual angry tone. I had paperwork to rush through. Then they gave me my clothes back. Not the rest of my stuff. Not yet. I wasn’t free yet and thus could not be trusted with my stuff.
Jerry, as he gave me my clothes, said, “You’ve already stripped your bed down, right?”
Uh, what? No one told me to do that.
“You have to hurry! Your ride isn’t gonna wait for you forever!”
Frantically I went back to my room and before I removed a stitch of clothing I yanked everything I could off that bed. Only then did I close the door to save anyone from accidentally seeing me naked and therefore disgusting them. I had just enough time to get out of the psych ward outfit—the paper pants were split at the crotch, just like all the other pairs I’d worn there, because I’m too tall and these are made for short people—before the door opened, and a nurse stood there. I paused in my naked glory, and then I turned face forward, covering nothing. It had the desired effect.
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| Like that, but with more cock. |
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.” He closed the door again.
I got dressed and rolled all that shit up and went to the end of the corridor, where laundry was supposed to go, and I dropped it in the bin. I went back to my room and took the only things I wanted to take with me: the ER blanket (because I didn’t have a blanket at home), the composition notebook (which had Becoming Human folded into it) and Empire by Gore Vidal. Well, and the books I came in with, obviously.
By the time I presented myself at the nurses’ station, my ride had been waiting for nearly fifty minutes. “He’s probably gone by now,” Jerry said. The way he said it implied that I was somehow to blame. I thought briefly about punching that fat fuck in the face. Wouldn’t that be fucked up? I hit him at the 11th hour and wind up getting stuck here for longer? Low profile. To the very end.
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| This is the last time. Probably. |
Jerry escorted me down. The elevator was finished and looking much better. He took me through the lobby and to the front door. We saw my cab was starting to turn around in the parking lot.
“Hey!” Jerry yelled. He waved his hands. “Hey! You!”
The cabbie looked at us but decided Jerry was talking to someone else and started to pull away.
“STOP! YOU! YEAH YOU! I’M TALKING TO YOU! PULL OVER!”
I couldn’t wait to get Jerry out of my life. I didn’t know it, but my teeth were clenched hard enough to grind. I made myself stop.
The cabbie got the idea and pulled over to pick me up. Jerry practically shoved me into the back seat and then gave me my bag of stuff. He then shoved a bunch of paperwork into my hand and slammed the door. He turned around and went back inside. What, no goodbye?
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| Could have been his twin. |
The cabbie looked like an older Omar Sharif. See? I’m not even on the psych ward, and someone is reminding me of someone else. I told him to take me to Elmhurst’s ER.
He said, “First you must sign this.” He handed me a clipboard with a paper on it. It was to confirm that he did, indeed, pick me up and take me where I needed to go, and that I was not to be charged anything.
I signed it and handed it back. Only then did we begin our journey down Roosevelt Road. He cursed a lot under his breath. “You know, I could have gotten a couple of other customers in the time it took for you to get down here.”
“I’m sorry, man,” I said. “They didn’t tell me you were here, and by the time they did, they had a bunch of stuff for me to do before they could let me go.”
He reasonably accepted my explanation, but he wasn’t happy about it. He cursed out the people who didn’t tell me for most of the rest of the trip. Finally we crossed into Elmhurst and we pulled into the ER parking lot. I directed him to where my car was parked, and I apologized for the hassle of the whole thing. He waved a dismissive hand. I got my shit and got out of the cab. He drove away as I approached my own car, taking the first real free steps I’d taken in what felt like forever.
I unlocked my car and sat down. It was hot as fuck in there, and I immediately cranked the AC, but goddammit it felt great to be free. Even the sickness and pain in my guts had receded. I felt hungry, which is the first and only sign that I’m going to be OK.
I would soon sleep in my own bed. I no longer needed to ask for permission to use the bathroom. Oh, I forgot to mention. The showers in those bathrooms blew. There are two immovable nozzles, one above my head, and one at dick level. There is no way to adjust the temperature. It’s cold at first, but then it becomes hotter than the fucking sun. I learned to take very, very short showers. I would finally get to shower in my own bathroom soon.
And I could eat whatever the fuck I wanted to. Which I planned to do post-bloody-haste.
A few months later a friend told me that I needed to go to a 90-day rehab or I was going to die. I looked back at my time on the psych ward, and I promised that I would never allow myself to be put in such a situation ever again. The loss of freedom isn’t worth it, especially if most of the people looking after me have no real training. I still think about what would have happened if I hadn’t played by the rules. Would I still be there?
I fucking well hope not.
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| Sorry. Force of habit. This is the end. Really. |
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| Keeping a low profile is actually a pretty good way of getting through life. Try it. |
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