Don’t ask me anything about whatever anime that is from. I just liked the thumbnail.

So I tried, and failed, to see the infectious disease specialist today. I really tried to get out of bed at the right time, but then I totally failed my saving throw versus sleep, in a manner of speaking.

Basically, after getting up out of bed and getting, then drinking, a glass of water, I still felt like a particularly disoriented mummy. So I figured, nerp, not today.

I will make a better attempt tomorrow.

Turns out his name is Doctor Kwok (must…. restrain…. urge to mock name… ) and I think I might have an actual appointment with him tomorrow at 8:30 am.

Or that’s just when he shows up. I’m not sure.

Because I didn’t go see the person with the authority to stop my IV antibiotic treatment, I had to go to my IV anti-biotic treatment. No big deal, Joe dropped me off.

And my treatment was uneventual. My nurse seemed a little green, but she did a fine job. I got more bandages for my leg demon.

Look, I’m getting really sick of calling it my “wound’ or my “infection” and “leg demon” sounds so much cooler.

One of the people with me was having a very bad day, though, and I felt bad for her. Apparently she had extreme arthritis pain in her shoulder,. worse than she’d ever had before, so she called the ambulance around noon and arrived at the hospital not that long after, say like 12:25 pm

And I can personally attest to the fact that she wasn’t seen by a doctor until 3:35 pm, leaving her in brutal fucking agony for over three hours.

And they only remembered her after she started voiciferously complaining.

And when I say “remembered her”, I mean she wasn’t even on the fucking board^[1] yet. Son of a bitch.

She said she was an RN, and that Richmond hospital was the worst one in the GVRD.

And I am thinking, a) Really? Have you been to Royal Columbian, the people who totally fucked up my gall bladder removal? But more importantly,

b) I forgive you because you are in terrible pain, but if you really are an RN, you know that technically, that’s not something you should say around us patients who are also currently depending on said hospital to save our fucking lives.

So I felt bad for her.

An ER can be a pretty rough place for an empath like myself. And yet, on another level, I kind of enjoy it.

Gets me out of my own head for a while, for one.

Saw one person admitted with no fewer than 16 members of their extended family along for moral support.

Boggles my mind. My family was so insular. Good for them, though.

Lois was there again. She told her nurse about how it took three people to get her current IV dongle in, so he’d better be careful with it.

I like her. And she seems healthier.

It’s things like my repeated visits to the hospital that get me thinking about my own quiet and passive nature because it reminds me of who I was before the Internet came along and gave me a way to expore and express myself, and who I still am more often than not when I am out there all along.

And that is a very quiet, passive person. Very unlike my usual persona, even in RL. I am quite shy RL, although less so than before and far less painfully so.

And I can totally see how someone like myself might become a stalker, with this whole imaginary relationship with a celebrity. When your emotional life is cut off from the world by your shyness and you are starved for social input, a sufficiently charismatic celebrity might well fill that massive void in your life.

I have never been much for celebrity worship myself. If I went crazy that way, it would be a lot more like One Hour Photo.

In the movie, Robin Williams plays a guy who runs a photo developing shop (remember those?) who develops this fixation on one of the families that comes in often. He is drawn to the emotional warmth and happiness represented in their pictures and starts to feel like he is part of the family.

I have never connected with a Robin Williams character more. I am drawn to the same things and desperately want to be part of a wholesome, strong, supportive family that takes care of one another and has a great time together.

As I kid, I would look into people’s windows at night^[2] and wonder what it would be like to be part of the warm, close-knit, everyday world of these people who seemed at the time like they lived in a kind of Heaven.

Of course, they probably would not have agreed. Their lives were ordinary, nothing special, and no doubt some of them had it far worse than I’ve ever had at and some of them were no doubt just as miserable as I was.

But from the street and through the lens of my lonely little heart, it looked…. perfect.

Relatedly, I realized just recently that one of the reasons I loved Halloween as a kid was that on that night, I felt…. normal.

After all, for once, I was doing exactly what all the other kids were doing. And people were opening their doors and smiling at me and giving me candy, so I was getting the positive human interaction that I needed so badly.

For one night a year, I was just another happy kid.

Equally sad is the revelation I had today that despite the nightmare currently attached to my left leg being largely a negative thing, it actually has had the effect of getting me out of my bedroom and out into the big wide world and in close proximity to normal people and normal life.

And that’s been quite good for me, actually. I might come out ahead in all this.

And that is, when all is said and done. truly and unutterably sad.

And that’s okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.