I was gonna take a sick day yesterday because I get six a year at work, and I've only taken one so far this year. Turns out I actually needed a sick day because I got bit twice by a spider—I don't know what kind of spider, but after seeing the wound, one of my roommates swears it's a brown recluse bite—and though one of the bites is healing fine, the other one got infected. It was painful to begin with, but as it grew into an abscess the size of an egg under my skin, I thought I should probably go to the emergency room. Good thing I did, as I'm now told that the thing wouldn't have healed on its own. So now I'm all full of antibiotics and prescription strength Ibuprofen, this thing is leaking tons of bloody puss, and I can't sleep on my left side because it's so goddamn sensitive that I wake up every time the wound gets touched. I can't drink for the next two weeks, and I have a constant, loudly thumping headache. Boo-hoo, woe is me.
When I lived in Chico, I had to go to the emergency care center a couple of times, but it was one of those "doctors-on-duty" kind of places, and since they're ostensibly private practices, people who go there to be treated must have insurance (or a lot of cash on hand) to be looked at, insuring a clientele that is generally of the professional and familial classes.
In the three years I've been living in San Francisco, this is the second time I've been to the emergency room (at St. Luke's, not SF General—they're too busy taking care of gunshot wounds to deal with infected spider bites at SF General), and because hospitals have to treat people regardless of whether they have insurance or not, there's usually a fascinating cross section of humanity on display in the hospital ER waiting room.
Yesterday, I shared the triage waiting room and, later, the pre-exam waiting room with a woman who was obviously a crackhead or a junkie—rail thin, gaunt, sunken eyes, missing teeth, not much hair. She was in the place with her father, and she was fucked up—moaning in pain, crying, complaining about not being able to piss, and not wanting to drink anymore, bent over and rocking back and forth while rubbing her thigh. It was a real show. The ER staff finally moved her into a private waiting room.
After my time with the doctor, they asked me to hang around the place for a half-hour or so, to make sure that the antibiotics shot they gave me didn't have any adverse effects. So I ended up back in the waiting room, reading the paper and watching Judge Judy or some shit, with two construction workers, a quiet family, a couple of Mexican laborers, two old ladies, a big black dude and his two young sons, and a woman with her groceries. I thought it was weird for her to have brought her groceries to the ER waiting room, but things got even weirder when she dug into one of the grocery bags and came out with a can of sardines. She walked over to the garbage can in the waiting room, opened the sardine can over it, and drained all the liquid into the garbage can. She sat back down, went back into the bag and came out with a big bottle of Asian hot sauce—the stuff with the yellow rooster on the bottle. She doused the sardines with the hot sauce, pulled a fork out of her coat pocket, and ate the can clean. Goddamn it was disgusting…
In The 40 Oz Show news…the July 19th show was lost due to technical error, and will not be posted for download. There's no word yet on this past week's broadcast (07.26.06), but I'll have posted here as soon I can…
