What is Your Emergency?

 (I'm fine).

Monday was Family Day in Ontario, so schools were closed and I didn't have work, which is fortunate, because halfway through the day the queasiness I thought was a normal stomach bug escalated into screaming, crippling, unrelenting abdominal pain that my pharmacist sister said needed to be checked out. I couldn't stand up to get in the car so Matt called 911 and paramedics came. The 911 operator could hear me and asked if I had asthma and needed an inhaler and Matt said "um, she has an inhaler", and I said I just can't BREATHE because of the PAIN. I had managed to put on pajama pants and a t-shirt (rather than the pajama shorts and tank top I was wearing), tried to put on a bra but couldn't, and I realized how much pain I was in when I didn't manage to feel self-conscious about all the prodding and EKG stickering and shirt-lifting. My chief concern (beyond feeling like I was dying) was that they wouldn't be able to give me any pain meds while they didn't know what was going on. They did, though, give me fentanyl and morphine (which made me barf, they always do) which didn't kill the pain, but made it so I could form sentences.

The paramedics were funny, and thought I was funny, which clearly meant that they were very intelligent. The rookie asked me some questions and then looked me seriously in the face and said "how young are you?" and I said "oh, fuck off" and they laughed. One said "I heard your husband got it wrong on the call" and I said "yeah, but he went younger so he's good.". 

One guy apologized for investigating my bookshelves, and (between hyperventilating and snotting  prodigiously) I said I didn't fully trust anyone who didn't. He asked how Yellowface was. I told him I was done and he could take it, but he demurred, even though Matt said "no, she means it."

They described fentanyl and morphine and I acted like I had never heard of them (does everyone do that? I didn't know what to do, say "oh no, heavy painkillers and I go WAY back"?). They injected the fentanyl and asked me something and I answered in oddly specific detail and then said "oh, now I'm doing that thing where I'm talking as if I've just had a beer or two, like you said, is that what's happening?" and one laughed and said he felt like we should go out for actual beers some time. Then I barfed because I always do when I have IV painkillers, and that was less amusing.

I had some morphine and they started talking about extraction and I started giggling because it made me sound like a foreign asset. While they were loading me in the ambulance Eve tried to Facetime me and Matt answered and told her I just had a stomach bug and couldn't talk, and when she found out later she was like "oh my God, that makes it so much worse that I just kept talking" and "I guess he did sound a little weird, in retrospect." 

In the ambulance they said it looked like I was still in a high level of pain, so they gave me more morphine, which meant I barfed again, but managed not to pee myself at the same time, so I had that going for me. 

At the hospital we were parked in the hallway waiting for the triage nurse and being weird some more, and they took my blood pressure with the Life Pack again and then one of them (I only know one name, Trevor, and I don't know which one he was) said "imagine if we could just do all this by voice commands" and I said that sounded like the beginning of a Black Mirror episode, and then they ended up saying things like "Life Pack, you're my only friend" and "Sorry Life Pack, I only like you as a friend" and I said "have you guys been awake a really long time?" and they looked sheepish and said they had actually just started. I mean, no judgment, it's a tough job. They guessed that I was a teacher, and said school librarian was close enough. 

Anyway, I am fine now, just tired and crampy and headachey and still don't really know what was happening, but I haven't blogged in days and I just wanted to take a stab at making an ER visit funny. How did I do, out of 10?