Prostate with Grief

First, if the title applies to you, eat some tomato soup! Now, on to the goods.

Spent the entire afternoon in the emergency room after a frantic call from J: "You need to come home and take me to the hospital. I passed out at work." Apparently, he was discussing Thanksgiving with a friend during lunch, began to feel lightheaded, and the next thing he knew he was lying on the floor, his friend shaking him and yelling in his face.

So off to the ER we trekked. J was strapped onto a gurney, hooked up to various monitors, placed in a large plastic neck cuff, and given a barrage of tests...he's fine, but he WILL be eating breakfast from now on. Right, J? I hung out with him in his wired & semi-bionic state waiting for the results. To add insult to injury, I tuned the TV in our room to Wife Swap. It proved dysfunctional enough to distract him from the regular auto-inflating of the blood pressure cuff on his arm, painful enough to make him wince each time the compressor kicked in. "Listen to that," he'd say, a whiff of panic in his voice as the cuff squeezed his bicep, "You can hear the VELCRO ripping it's so tight!!! If they put this on old people, it'd turn their bones to DUST!"

The doctor whizzed in, pulled off the neck brace and poked his neck a bit, then said, "Okay, let's get your hickey protector back on." And J was again uncomfortably bound in the massive plastic brace for another two hours.

"This is SO uncomfortable," he'd say, staring at the ceiling. "It feels like someone is picking me up and dangling me by the head. I feel like I'm choking!" To distract him, I made jokes about the unfortunately named "Cavi-wipes" sitting on the counter. Only one step up from "Cadave-wipes."

The doctor said I had to give hourly neck massages and eliminate the "honey do" list for a week. Pffft! On our way out five hours later we each had to pee so bad we went in separate directions to find the nearest restrooms. When I came out of the bathroom, I got lost in the ER and wandered around a bit. A nurse had to show me the way out.

I remember all of this because I jotted the best parts on a receipt I found in my purse. On it was an old note I wrote to myself in early October, meant either for a future blog entry or bit part in a novel: "You could tell just by looking at him that his balls were funky."

The end.