Well Bottom Blues

Alone at the end by a service door, relaxing on the gurney bed listening to the bustle elsewhere They’ve taken the loud, homophobic Christian zealot in handcuffs somewhere else.  Two monitors beep just out of sync; waiting for them to meet again is not an ideal distraction. Just here for the stitches, thanks. Boredom. Shift change just before I’m seen. 

Much oohing and aahing over the 3×5 cm gash in my knee, kindly cleaned and bandaged by a passing Guardsman when I couldn’t find an EMS or first aid tent not in the madness of Bourbon Street Mardi Gras day. I tried to follow a friend on her last trip to the river down the rip rap at the Moon Walk and thankfully didn’t join her but still fell hard.

Swaddled like a diarrhea-afflicted infant by absorbent pads, my knee is baptized with saline and iodine as if it were the whole row waiting for the preacher by the river. Comically large horse syringe irrigation. The pads look like square yards of my partner’s makeup removal pads. Quick prick of lidocaine and then the forceps.

It takes a bit of digging and am I hurting you (no) before the PA whistles and says wow, holding up a black rock the size of a nickel. She wanders off and comes back with the sort of plastic cup atop cough syrup and deposits my moonwalk rock with a satisfying thwawk reflecting its heft. She takes it off for show and tell with the attending and the rest of the staff.

More irrigation and exploration as if I were a river in Gold Rush California. She goes for her headlamp for this mining expedition. Finally she lays the forceps aside with an exhale and sagging shoulders quickly followed by an AMA Approved smile. She says she’ll put a few stitches to encourage the wound to slowly close, leaving the open pit from which came the rock looking like the near center flesh of a peach.

At last my knee is  bandaged up like a Pharaoh at his going away party to keep the loose, fleshy edges from making smoochie lips when I move. I get an injection of antibiotics and I’m admonished to remember stitches must be done in 12 hours. I’m counseled against smoking with a wound like this and confess I’ve been sucking a nicotine lozenge the whole time.  I am given a referral to Wound Care which sounds a bit gruesome but then I’ve watched this whole process calmly.

I walk out like a child that’s just been given a lollipop by the dentist through the lobby of agony. Those heads-up give me gloomy looks from under their eyebrows while I think I’m the restaurant Big Boy advertising the excellence of care they might expect. I whoosh out the doors into Ash Wednesday with my own special memento mori entirely unrepentant and digging for my vape.