Medical update : nothing new to report. Joe dropped me off, I got the IV antibiotics, took the 407 bus home.

Two small things : I am quite proud that I managed to thank one of the nurses for helping me by name.

That’s a big deal for me. It took a pretty large dose of nerve for me to do so.

Because it meant leaving the shelter of passive anonymity and entering the world of interpersonal interaction, albeit in a very small way.

Basically, it meant I had to be a person, and that is very hard for me.

I feel like I am not really explaining it right, but it will have to do.

The other noteworthy thing was that when I was making my way from Registration to the ER and the door between them wouldn’t open.

I pushed again, no dice. Then some old fella jumps up, tells me not to push the bar and that I need a card to get back there.

I said the most logical thing I could think of at the time : “Since when??”

I had been through that door at least a dozen times before, and I had never needed a card. So what gives?

This threw me off enough that I asked my nurse about it. And she said that actially, that door has technically always required the card, but that the people in Registration are usually on the ball and push the button to let people through when they approach the door and Registration knows they belong back there.

Ergo, what made today different was that Registration dropped the ball.

And that’s…. weird. Not in an important way, just in a purely personal way. I had no idea this was happening… until it didn’t.

Other than that, my visit was uneventful….. for me.

But the emergency room waiting room has not one, not two, but three people who had been there more than three hours and were getting very frustrated at the lack of literally anything happening in their case.

And one of them had a legit broken leg. Like, they had done the X-rays and everything.

I mean, what the FUCK, people?

Being the sponge I am, I soaked up some of these peope’s frustration. And being a guy with a big heart and a super analytical brain that is fond of sytems, I had to figure out why these people were going through hospital hell when I had not.

Obviously it wasn’t their fault. They did everything right. Scratch that off the list.

So it had to be something about our cases. And after cogitating on that for a while, it hit me : the difference is that my case was very dramatic.

The hospital staff took one look at the septic nightmare on my knee and said ‘you know, that there looks like something we should take care of right away. “

And maybe they were right. I don’t know enough to say.

But I can’t help but wonder if there were people in a lot more pain and distress than I who didn’t make it to the top of the charts in triage simply because they had something boring and invisible like a broken leg or chest pains.

As to what the problem is in general, I do not know. Maybe treating people in the ER takes a lot longer than I would think. I dunno.

But the results are clearly unacceptable. People are pissed off and they have every right to be. Something has done terribly wrong.

I know the problem isn’t at Registration (aka Admitting). They are super damned efficient. I am very impressed.

The problem is clearly in Emergency. There is a distinct lack of urgency in the air. Now maybe that’s how it should be – after all, my main image of ERs comes from medical dramas, and they are always in a rush there, with gurneys being pushed through swinging doors while people deliver expositional medical babble.

“What do we have here?'”

“Reticular contusion of the medula clitora with a concurrent hemotoma on the third, fifth, and ninth vertebra, sir!”

“Dammit…. not another one. Get me 50 cc’s of hydropropolinoleum and prep the futon chamber for full fraffulence!”

That was fun as hell to write.

But without an understanding of how, exactly, things work in that ER, I can’t determine whether there is room for improvement.

Maybe this is legit as fast as things can go. I can’t prove otherwise.

I’d like to think there is room for improvement in any system, especially with me on the case, but that feeling is not, alas, evidence.

All I know is that if you ask the patients, things are fucked up and it’s not right.

Surely they can do better.

I’m going in circles. Time to change the subject.

---

Not gonna make it out to hang with Joe and Felicity today. Mostly because I have to be at the hospital at 8:30 am again tomorrow.

Apparently, Infectious Disease Specialists don’t do afternoons, period. My doctor is now Doctor Vortel, and he is only in the ER from 8:30 am to 10 am too.

Heaven forbid that a doctor show up according to what is good for the patient. That would violate everything they stand for doctors.

After all, they might have to play less golf that way. And all account of some peasant of a patient? Nonsense.

Not that I’m bitter.

I’m cranky. That’s totally different.

I don’t like having to get up that early. Granted, it’s a perfectly normal time for most people, you know, those people with like, jobs n’ shit.

But I am not most people.

I am a strange and unnatural creature. delicate and bizarre, shockingly unsuited for the tooth and claw world of the jungle but so charming and adorable that people are willing to protect me from the wild world out there.

But that’s not enough. I want so many things that are impossible for me to get while remaining the sad little puppy that I am.

I want to become strong enough to go out there and make it on my own. I want to grab and get all the things I have always needed or wanted but was never strong enough to seize for myself/.

I want to live, god dammit, and be a real person, legitimate, with my own identity and my own strengths and virtues and nothing to be ashamed of.

And some day, I swear, I will make it there.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I send mixed messages on many levels.

What can I say…. I’m a complicated man, and no one understands me.

And one of the biggest levels on which I send mixed messages I will call the ‘attract/repel level’, for lack of a better term.

On the surface, I am a friendly, affable, somewhat goofy fellow with a fair of unassuming charm and a small but vital amount of being completely frigging adorable. By all appearances, it seems like I am the sort of person who would welcome company and enjoy the approach of strangers.

That’s the person I pretend to be and the person I like to thing I am,.

But it’s a big ol’ lie.

Because underneath it all, I am a spiky, paranoid loner who doesn’t trust anyone due to massive social damage from his childhood and so at the same time part of me is being friendly and approachable, the other side of me wants people to go the fuck away so I can be alone and “safe” again.

And generally speaking, when I am around others, especially strangers, in a social setting, these two sides of me are at war.

It’s not a war I generally talk or even think about. I try hard to pretend that either I am only the friendly fuzzy Fru or, if pressed, that the dark side of the Fru exists but that it’s no big deal and I have it completely under control.

What a load of crap.

If that was true, I would have no problems at all. I would be a total extrovert and I would be out there charming the pants off the world and probably be a big success.

But that side of me, lovable as it is, is only a protective layer over all my paranoid issues. I am actually a-bristle with all kinds of antisocial issues.

I just hide it under my superficial friendliness.

And the thing is, without knowing this about myself, up to this point in my life I was almost as confused as those who deal with me. I was stuck kind of fumbling through lfie doing what I thought should work socially but it never really did.

And that was all the confirmation my social anxiety needed of how right it was.

So now I am dragging my dark side into the light and forcing myself to deal with it. I am not the person I pretend to be.

I am, in fact, so much more.

And I am not going to get very far in my recovery until I acknoledge, accept, and believe that. It is so tempting to go back to thinking I am just this harmless sweet fluffy dude.

It’s the social mask I wear, after all.

But under that mask is a lot of rage, hostility, and darkness, and I can no longer pretend that the dark stuff is not there or does not matter.

It’s what pushes people away from me. It’s the reason I have trouble getting along with most people. It’s a big part of what keeps me isolated and lonely.

And the only way to get over that is find some way to integrate my personality and end all this dualistic bullshit.

I might have two sides.

But I am only one person.

---

And I am back again.

This double barrelled approach is really growing on me. I think it’s because it feels like it is giving me more to do in a day,. even though it’s actually the same work divided.

But there is always a little twinge of sadness mixed in the with relief and pride and the sense of accomplisment when I finish a blog entry.

That’s because on a deep level, I know that I am happier when I am writing, and that finishing the blog entry used to mean it’s going to be 22-ish hours before I write again.

Now, it’s more like 18 hours for Part 1 and 6 hours til Part 2.

That’s a lot easier to deal with.

Of course, that’s just the system as it is now. For a long time now, I have been trying to overcome my laziness and fear in order to actually increase the amount I write in a day.

Because I know I can do a lot more. I did 2740 words a day for the Million Word Year, and when I have done National Novel Writing Month, I have done 2000/day.

Technically,. NaNoWriMo is 50K words in 30 days, and that amounts to 1667 words per day, not 2000.

But last time I did it, I just raised it to 60K words for 2000 words per day because it made the math easier.

In many ways, it would make sense for me to simply write all the time. I am happiest when writing, after all, and it would be a far more productive and healthy hobby than playing video games all the fucking time.

But I just can’t go there. Not yet, anyhow. At this point, I think it would require some kind of external motivator to get me to do that.

Like a freelance job, maybe. I remember those. Those made me happy.

But then Skyrim came along and ate my life.

I have been tempted to re-install it lately. But no. I can’t ever go there again. Last time, it took a lot out of me to finally escape its spell.

Never again. Not even on my fucking deathbed.

Oh right : medical update time!

Not a lot to say. It was nice that I got to have the wound care nurse work on my leg demon WHILE I was also getting my IV antibiotics this time.

Made me feel positively pampered. And oh, how I love that feeling.

Maria, the wound care nurse, was able to take a lot of dead stuff off. Not as much as we had hoped…. some of it looked dead but was not.

Found that out when pinching the area with the tweezers felt like someone was trying to saw my knee off.

She says she thinks it’s healing nicely,. but does not agree with my hypothesis that the infection itself is dead. Apparently, there’s some parts of the wound that still look infected to her.

Oh well. We have the thing on the ropes, anyhow.

On the way home, I got off the bus at Buswell (how apropos) so I could go to my pharmacy and pick up some Glyburide and Metformin.

My pharmacist always has a movie playing on the big screen TV in the pharmacy so people have something to watch while they wait.

So I got to see a few minutes of the new Shazam movie, and I have to say,. it looks pretty good to me. Very hip and fun.

Although there was one scene where some bullies pull up in their huge truck and actually slam into this kid on crutches, and that shocked and offended me so much that I said ‘Holy fuck!’ out loud and in the accent from back home.

For all my time away from the Island, when push comes to shove and in moments of acute distress, the Island in me still comes out.

Of course, then I had to explain to the pharmacist that I was not medical distress, I was reacting to the movie.

Which was a little embarrassing, but mostly, I was amused and pleased with myself for doing something so spontaneous and vocal.

Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.