Charles approached the looming ancient brick building built like a small cathedral at the end of the sidewalk. He could feel people moving all around – coming towards him and up from behind. He felt like he was in the way. He was sweating, had an intense headache and a sour stomach. It must’ve been that club sandwich and fries he ate for lunch. He hadn’t had much of an appetite, but he was taught to clean his plate, so he did. He stopped his slow meander at the bottom of the old buildings’ stairs. His face was contorted from the intensity of his upset stomach. His throat was extremely dry. Probably from all the salty lunch meat and the greasy fries. He felt incredibly uneasy and slowly approached the thin metal handrail that steeply shot down the ten or so stairs up to the second floor of the building. He couldn’t get over how many people were going up and down the stairs with such effortless abandon. He supposed that they didn’t all feel intensely hungover. The thing was that he wasn’t hungover either. He simply felt like it. He fondly remembered back a year or more to his teenage years when he could consume the most diabolical foods and never get an upset stomach. He grabbed onto the handrail firmly and used it to pull himself up the first few steps before stopping to rest.
“Hey there Charells, what’s shakin’?” he heard Senndee from behind. He looked to his left, and spotted her. First her feet, her slender legs, and then that blank expression staring at her uplifted phone.
“Heya Dee,” he mumbled back, leaving behind the notion of asking her why not two D’s in her name. Senndee was always looking at her phone, but she had zero presence on any social media. She never responded to texts, so he also wondered what she was doing. Like with the spelling of her name, he likely would never ask.
“You look sus Chucky D.” Senndee was wearing a white hoodie with the hood pulled over her hair. Only two strands of brunette hair spiraled out from the hood and traced the outline of her face like two limp antennae. Her hoodie reflected the bright, but overcast sky. The white light bothered Charles’ eyes, so he focused his attention back to the stairs. “You coming out later?”
“Yeah, prolly,” he auto responded. Senndee was already off up the stairs and into the building.
Charles shifted his body back to the
task at hand of climbing the stairs. His
knuckles were sore from gripping the railing so tight. He lifted his right leg, which felt heavy like
he was wearing a weighted SCUBA flipper.
Once he got his foot on the next step up, he pulled his body up to that
level using all of his strength. His
left foot reluctantly followed. He
continued this method until he reached the top of the stairs and the entrance
to the building. He felt like Batman climbing up the side of a
building from the goofy old TV show his grandpa used to make him watch. His grandpa watched the weirdest shows and
would laugh and laugh. Charles never got
it.
Once the handrail ended, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He looked around reluctantly and slowly eased one foot out. It took all of his concentration to stay upright. His steps were small and deliberate. He felt like he had to fight from flopping over to his right. Fortunately, the lecture was in the first room on the left. Charles leaned against the door jamb to stabilize his balance before sliding into the first open chair by the doorway.
Charles felt awful. He was sweating, nauseous, and dizzy on top
of having a stabbing headache. He was
struggling to focus his eyes on anything and all the noise and movement around
him felt alarming. He wondered what was
going on. He focused as hard as he could
toward the clock on the wall at the front of the room. The lecture had begun, but he was completely
lost in worry. He had never felt like
this before. How was he going to treat
this? How was he going to get back to
his room? Lying down would help. He just needed to get back to his room.
+++
Charles curled up into a fetal
position. His clothes and shoes remained
on. He pulled a blanket up over his
shoulder. He had stopped by the little
market to buy some Alka-Seltzer
tablets in order to ease his burning stomach.
He hadn’t used it since he was a kid, and despite remembering not liking
to drink the bubbling salty fizz, he also remembered that it took his stomach
ache away within about fifteen minutes.
His only other experience with stomach ache medicines had been Pepto Bismol. He vowed to never try that again. The only time his mom funneled that gross
pink slop down his throat, it wound up multiplying and eventually bubbling up
and back out of his nose and throat in violent vomit thrusts. If that had been the end of it, perhaps his
reticence may have been less, but he had to endure that pink ooze expulsion
several times. He wasn’t sure then if he
was sick from stomach issues, or because he had ingested the Pepto.
Other than occasionally getting up to
stumble to the bathroom, or to guzzle some more Alka Seltzer, Charles spent
about 24 hours lying on top of his bed curled up – worried with unease about
what mystery ailment he had developed, but also relieved because at least he
felt a little better immobile.
+++
“What’s going on with you, Charlie?” Senndee deadpanned, as she placed herself directly in front of Charles’ position sitting on the brick ledge of the planters that make up the small public square.
Charles looked up at her with squinted eyes and groaned an almost unintelligible “I don’t know.” He hadn’t spoken in a long time. He was surprised at the effort it took. “I just feel awful.”
“You look awful,” Senndee smiled at this, because it was an inside joke between them about how awful he generally looked and how many people felt comfortable voicing this observation to him. She liked to reinforce that notion, because it seemed so absurd, yet she had observed it several times. “You never showed up last night. I got worried,” she said flatly showing no sign of concern.
“I can’t walk straight and I feel like I’m going to throw up!” Charles exclaimed, trying as hard as he could not to sound like he was complaining, even though he was complaining. He put his face in his hands and began pressing hard on his forehead with his fingertips. Doing this offered momentary relief.
Senndee tapped rapidly at her phone, bent over at her waist, locked her right hand around one of Charles’s wrists and tugged at it – pulling it away from his face. “C’Mon, I’m taking you to the ER.”
Charles got to his feet, but felt
stuck to the ground – his feet weren’t cooperating. He did not understand what was going on. “I don’t need to go to Emergency! This will go away, he protested,” but allowed
her to pull him into the direction of the student parking lot – his feet
slapping the sidewalk awkwardly as he struggled to keep up and upright.
+++
Senndee led Charles to the center of the north parking lot, as an old beat up blue two door sports car rumbled into place in front of them. It creakily lurched into position and after a loud slap of the seatbelt hitting the door, a guy wearing a tuxedo t-shirt emerged and leaned his forearms onto the roof pf the car.
“Heya Steve,” this guy needs to get to the ER stat,” Senndee stated with uncharacteristic urgency. “Can you get him there?”
“Yes, of course! It’s only about a mile,” he replied, before asking Senndee if she was be having lunch on the campus later.
Senndee directed Charles into the
passenger seat of the old car. “Uh yeah,
probably,” she hesitated. “Thanks for
doing this!”
Moments later, Steve roughly shifted into third gear and turned onto Main Street, which would get them to the hospital. Charles was pretty certain that he had seen Steve around campus a few times, and with his unkempt scruffy facial hair, pony tail and glasses, and had reminded him of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. This was not unusual however, because Charles thought this an apt description of a lot of guys – likely a hazard of being a lot like comic book guy himself, and not wanting to embrace that identity and look down his nose at people that don’t know useless trivia about superfluous stuff, so he looked down his nose at other comic book guys. “Thanks for doing this. I’m not sure I need this, but Senndee insisted.”
“No problem,” Steve waived him off,
“I’ll do anything for Senndee.” Steve
pulled into the parking lot and approached the ER entrance, “do you need help
getting in?” Steve offered, but Charles could tell that he didn’t want to get
out again.
“No, that’s okay, thanks again,” Charles hurriedly climbed out and steadied himself for the thirty or so foot walk to the admitting desk inside the entrance. He tilted his head to the left to offset the feeling that he was about to fall to the right and stumbled his way through the automatic doorway all the way to the front desk like he was trying to get across a slippery sheet of ice.
“Can I help you?” he heard, as he glanced around the room. Struggling to focus.
“I think I need help. I’m having difficulty walking and I’m
seriously sick to my stomach.”
+++
“Charles?” A voice called out his name – startling him. Light was waning from what he could see outside. He had been in the ER waiting area for what seemed like hours. He had turned off his phone a few days prior – not wanting to be tempted to look up his symptoms and freak out even more than he already was. He had already decided that this awful feeling was now how he would always feel going forward. This notion was daunting enough.
He handed the clipboard full of forms to the woman wearing light blue scrubs who had called his name. He dropped the pen and quickly dipped his head on his way to retrieve it and promptly fell over. Aside from his broken pride, he felt nothing other than a disorientation like he had never experienced before. His eyes were still seeing the waiting area from a standing position, but his body was instructing him that he was on a dirty threadbare floor.
“That’s alright, I’ll get the pen,” she instructed as she bent over and easily grabbed the pen. Charles continued to thrash around on the floor trying to get his bearings. She looped her arm around one of his, leaned into him with her hip, placed her other arm around his torso and easily lifted him back to his feet.
“Wow! Thanks! That was amazing!” He blurted out with an enthusiasm that brought stares from everyone in the waiting area – including the security guards.
The nurse in scrubs kept her arm around his waist and guided Charles down a dimly lit hallway that was framed by heavy plastic curtains instead of walls. He surmised that these curtains were partitions for temporary exam rooms in an effort to meet increased demand for emergency care. They stopped and with her other arm she pulled at a curtain opening up a gap to create an entrance into one of these rooms. Charles could hear hushed voices all around him. “Go ahead and sit on the bed,” she indicated as she wheeled over a pole with a blood pressure cuff dangling from it.
“How has your day been?” Charles tried to make small talk, as she finished her preliminary examination.
“Busy,” she responded quickly, before instructing him to take off his clothes and put on the gown folded on the bed next to him. “The doctor will be in shortly,” and with that the curtain was pulled shut and he was alone – sort of.
He struggled putting the gown on over his shoulders. His hands were not cooperating as he tried to tie the two sets of strands of the open back of the hospital gown. He noticed that he was breathing incredibly hard, so he focused on slowing down his breath before re-addressing his efforts to tie the gown in place. He reminded himself that there was clearly no hurry. Once he managed to get the gown in place, he laid back on the gurney and closed his eyes.
Despite only being separated by curtains, and being fully aware that there were people all around him, he noticed a hush envelop him, as well as a strange calm. The calm would be interrupted occasionally by beeping IV’s, moaning patients, and the voices of passing medical professionals moving amongst the exam maze.
The initial relaxation melted away as
time dragged on. Charles could feel his
patience wearing thin the longer he lay there wondering if they had forgotten
him. Every time he heard voices approaching
he steadied himself for the entrance of an actual doctor, or simply an
acknowledgement of his existence, but those voices would pass by and fade away.
Finally, a pair voices from a man and a woman stopped on the other side of the curtain. He could clearly hear them. “He’s all checked in” the female voice stated and Charles could hear a shuffling of papers. “Oh, great, some guy with tummy issues,” the male voice trailed off. Charles closed his eyes as the curtain opened.
