Medical Cage

It started at home but morphed into a ride on an ambulance gurney rushing an almost comatose me into the hospital.

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An antiseptic scent wafted all around me and a dozen hands grabbed at the sheets under the gurney that had brought me to this place and in one swift tug pulled me from the gurney to the waiting white plastic bed replete with pictures of two supine bodies with little arrows over them, one up, one down and a round red picture of a nurse. Then it happened.  One, two, three, and before I knew it I was entangled in a

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hospital cage.  The cage bars were all flexible, colored, and connected to several monitors that each had its own distinctive beep, buzz, or hum. Each monitor displaying colorful numbers one on top of the other and others that all flashed around on the monitors. 75/45, 37, 93, 15. Stretchy cloth tubes hugged around my calves and ankles then inflated and deflated with regimental regularity.  My current condition on display in orange, pink,and  blue, neon. A slender white stick was inserted under my tongue and a cheerful young girl called out 97.4. 

A tall handsome man with a manicured mustache held up a bag of clear liquid that he put on a stainless steel rod which contained several hooks, Then taking my left arm slowly, painlessly inserted a needle into a vein and said to the nurse next to him, “the I.V. is in,” Then the clear liquid bag began to dribble its saline contents into my body. Without missing a beat, a short, stocky nurse with a ring in her nose, started slapping nippled discs all over my body and then attaching leads to them to another machine next to my bed.  This machine produced a ribbon of tiny squares scratched with lines spiking up and down is a crazed, jagged pattern trying to find its way home. 

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This was my home for the next four days while doctors, nurses, my worried Ralph, and super worried Kristen all tried to determine why I tanked with low blood sugar, very low blood pulse, and too low blood pressure.  After almost every test known to man the mystery was slowly untangled, the machines disappeared, the bars of the cages curled up and put on hooks, the lights dimmed, the people left, and I was discharged. Diagnosis: Too much metoprolol for my heart. Don’t’ know how, don’t know why, but I got sprung from my medical cage and was sent home clutching a $15,000 bill.

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