This, my friends, is the amazing story of the recent (as in last night recent) trip my roommate and I took to the Emergency Room last night. It is a tale full of excitement, fast cars, work romances, and attractive EMT's. It's great, let me tell you.
Anyway, our wonderful little adventure begins last night around 9:30 at night, as I was speaking with my mother on the phone. It was a normal night, nothing to suggest that anything exciting would happen. Except that it wasn't a normal night. I got a text message while I was on the phone and saw to my alarm a text from my roommate, Stephanie, which read, "Can you help me up? I got stuck on the floor." Now, I cannot pretend that I knew what was going on at this moment. I mean, all I could think about was those commercials for the old people that say, "Help, I've fallen and I can't get up." But, I went upstairs anyway to check on my roommate. And she was indeed stuck on the floor. In the process of sitting up on the floor something in her back had popped. Not a good sign, folks. After a (not-so) quick call to the Nurse Hotline to see if that was normal and a phone call to her parents, I managed to help her up and she managed to walk down the stairs of our apartment (which are so steep I usually fall up them at least once a day) and to the car. To the Emergency Room at UMC we rushed. We were quickly followed by dear friends (whose names I will not mention because if I do, I will owe one of them $50) who came to Stephanie's aid with their amazing Priesthood power to give her a blessing.
The boys waited with us for an hour and a half before it became apparent that we wouldn't be getting out of there soon. Knowing they had work and class to go to the next day, we sent them home, bravely facing the dangers of an ER after midnight alone, with nothing but the memory of the laughs we had shared to sustain us. Finally, after what felt like years, we were moved to the hallway, where Stephanie was seen by a nurse and a doctor, who told her that an X-Ray was necessary. So, while she was sent off, I was left in the hallway with a very sleepy crazy man (who really wanted to stand up even though he couldn't even remember his own name) and two nurses who were obviously deep in the thralls of an inter-office romance that was quite distracting to me. Even though all I was trying to do was read Catcher in the Rye. Seriously, they had some definite chemistry going on in that hallway. At least, that's what I thought until the nurse who had seen my roommate left and her supposed boyfriend moved on to the very next nurse who walked into the hallway. And let me tell you, that nurse, so not a catch. I mean seriously, I have no idea how he managed to convince two nurses who were clearly out of his league to be so into him. It was unbelievable. And then came the female paramedic. Who was also under his powers. I'm thinking he uses a magic love potion or something. Plus, I totally didn't like the shifty-ness of his eyes.
Anyway, back to my roommate. After she came back from her X-Ray the nurse came back and brought her some Percocet. Which is when things got incredibly interesting. It only took about twenty minutes for that stuff to kick in and Stephanie found everything around her incredibly humorous. Except the crazy man who was still in the hallway and now very much awake and wanting to share his pain with everyone. Him she didn't like so much. In fact, as we were (finally!) being moved to a room, she looked back at him and said, "That guy has a broken brain." Now, just imagine if you will, that last sentence being said with the most disgust in the planet and you'll understand how my roommate was feeling about that guy from the hallway. Still, though, I hadn't realized the drugs had actually kicked in until we got to the room and turned on the TV. What happened next can only be understood if you have seen the Pringles commercial that involves to guys sitting outside, looking at the moon, and ends in them breaking a chip that causes the entire moon to burst into millions of little cheese pieces. Well, as soon as my roommate saw that commercial, it took her fifteen minutes to stop laughing. And then she started up again when the Doctor asked her how the Percocet was doing.
By the time we made it home, everything was funny. It was around 3:30 in the morning when we left the ER and since we'd been there for six hours, we were hungry. Only, McDonald's employees aren't very nice at 3:30 in the morning and they won't make you anything with bacon in it before 4 am. Which is stupid. Because we were literally fifteen minutes to 4 when they refused to give us the bacon. After making it very clear how she felt about this and getting our breakfast, Stephanie went back to laughing at everything. Some very memorable quotes from the night include these lovely tidbits.
As we drove by a very bright sign. "This sign is too bright. Can we shoot it?"
About the lovely effects of Percocet on the human brain. "You know, Percocet really shows you what a person is really like. I think we should give it to all of our first dates. Like, just a half of a half of one." When I asked her if she thought that was actually a good idea she just said, "This stuff is really fun."
On where she should be getting her drugs. "I think I should go to Mexico. Prescriptions from Mexico are better."
About how much she loves Percocet. "I'm really funny on Percocet!"
It was quite an eventful evening, let me tell you. And now we have a thank you dinner to plan for our friends, a list of movies to watch while Stephanie is under the influence of painkillers and exhaustion. But we learned a lot. Mostly, that an actual emergency room is way not as exciting as any medical show ever created. And definitely not as entertaining as say, Scrubs or Grey's Anatomy or even the show ER. Never trust television, people. Hollywood lies to us.
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