Life Lesson #28: I’ll take a case of Pyelonephritis, please.

“Excuse me, Miss?”

Jesus Christ, please don’t be talking to me. Please.

“Excuse me, MISS!”

Fuck. He’s totally talking to me. I was barely standing, holding my own orange-hued urine in a plastic cup, and the most-certainly mentally challenged teenager in a wheel chair was trying to get me attention.

“MISS!”

I slowly turned around. His chair was totally pointed in my direction.

“Miss! I just got one question.”

“Uh, yea?” I barely whispered. I could see my mom out of the corner of my eye, bent over in laughter.

“Do you need a man?” he slurred.

If there was one moment in life in which I wanted to be struck by lightening, it was definitely Wednesday morning at the emergency room of White Plains Hospital. As I stood on the administration line in a cold sweat from a raging fever that had once again just broke for about the tenth time in the last sixty or so hours, I just wanted it all to end.

Before I could respond, or throw the plastic cup straight at his (or my mom’s) head, the grace of someone up above was momentarily bestowed upon me.

“Penny?” an authoritative woman’s voice called out.

I spun around in the opposite direction to face a nurse holding my chart. Her laminated nametag claimed her to be Patricia, Registered Nurse.

“Yes! That’s me!” I practically yelled.

“OK sweetie, come this way. Oh, you still haven’t passed your sample along? Okay, I’ll just take it.”

I could hear my mom gathering her stuff behind me but waited to pass the first security doors before turning around.

“Are you serious? Did he just ask me if I needed a man?!” I asked her in horror.

Tears were streaming down her face.

“Yep, he sure did. And while you were peeing in the cup, he asked someone to write down the number for some Trim Spa product. The commercial on television had some guy saying he lost sixty pounds and his sex drive had never been better. He yelled out ‘I need to get that!’” she responded through laughter.

“Only me. This shit only happens to me,” I muttered.

We followed Patricia into a room with two beds and a curtain.

“Ok. Here’s a bag for your belongings. I need you to take everything off and put this gown on. Backwards.” She said as she handed me a clear plastic bag.

I began stripping, psyched to get out of my now completed drenched clothes.

“Oh, wait sweetie! Let me pull the curtain closed,” Patricia said.

“Sorry,” I said, not really caring whom the hell saw me I was so freaking hot at this point.

“Now, tell me why you’re here.”

The long version, or the short? I went through the past few weeks as quickly as I could. What I thought was a popped rib or muscle spasm. Which turned out to be traces of pneumonia. Which then turned out to not be pneumonia. Which turned into me getting a wicked fever Sunday evening, followed by vomiting, breaking into a sweat that could fill a bucket, violent shaking and cramping, and moments of completely insanity. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Give or take one or two of the above. The icing on the cake, what I like to call The Four AM Fire Alarm: when I feverishly stumbled into the bathroom to find that my urine had suddenly become a fountain of Tang.

“So, here I am. I figured someone here can figure out what the hell is wrong with me,” I finished.

“Oh sweetie, that sounds awful. Okay, let’s get you on this bed. Mom, if you don’t mind, please step out of the room for a few moments. Standard procedure. And I’m going to need to take her temperature rectally. It’s more accurate than the machine they use when first checking in,” Patricia said.

Oh great. Let the games begin.

I huddled over into the fetal position and squeezed my eyes shut. This is definitely going to make it into my Top Five Shittiest Days in Your Life List.

“So, just a few typical questions. What do you do for a living?”

“Um, I’m actually unemployed at the moment.”

“Okay. Drink?”

“Yes.”

“Smoke?”

“Nope…”

“Drugs?”

“No.”

“What about sex? Are you sexually active?”

“Yes.”

“Do you practice safe sex?”

“Yes?”

Now, actually, is when I’d like that lightening bolt, please.

“Okay, great. Now I’m going to stick this into your rectum, but it will only be for a few seconds.”

“Great.”

No, I’m sorry. NOW. Right now, I’d like that bolt.

“Okay, great job. Wow, we’ve got 103.2. Good thing you came in sweetie. You can lay on your back now. Get comfy. The doctor will be in shortly. He’s young. And single," she added with a wink.

Try as I might, I just had a thermometer up my butt. Comfort was going to be a little difficult to achieve.

My mom came back in.

“Hey Penny, how you feeling?” she asked as she moved my plastered hair from my forehead.

“Violated. She just stuck a thermometer up my butt. That hasn’t happened since I was like five!” I cried.

“Yea, I have a feeling you’re going to have all sorts of unpleasant things happen over the next few hours. I’m sorry. But hopefully we’ll walk out of here knowing what’s wrong with you.”

Which, fortunately, I did. After being there for about eight hours. Turns out I have a horrible kidney infection. Something my body had been throwing out all sorts of crazy signs to warn me, but until the Tang Flag, no one thought to look for. But I sure did have an eventful day before anyone would step up to the plate and confirm my diagnosis. Let me humor you with just a glimpse of the day's events.

Incident 1: A fight outside my curtained bed between a roughly four hundred pound man, his three hundred pound son, and the nurse on call.

“I wanna go home!” four hundred pound man yells.

“Sir, you can’t go home,” the nurse yells back.

“Listen to the lady, pops. Just take it easy,” three hundred pound son says.

“NO! I wanna go HOME.”

“You cannot go home. You have massive quantities of PCP in your body,” the nurse replies.

“What?”

“You took drugs. Close to the amount to be considered an overdose.”

”I didn’t take no drugs.”

“Well, this is what your chart reads.”

“Nope. Not my chart. I did no drugs.”

Incident 2: Being molested (medically, of course), as well as humiliated by the same questions asked by Patricia, by my painfully skinny, very dorky, slightly stuttering Greek doctor. Patricia, I know I’m a sweaty, unemployed young woman who likes to drink and engage in protected sex, but really? Are you serious? You thought I’d hit it off with Revenge of the Nerds over here? My life is truly in shambles.

Incident 3: Not one, but two cat scans. Because the first one showed what might be a lump on my kidney. (“Good thing we accidentally had you drink that barium, sweetie. Otherwise this wouldn’t have shown up.”) Yea, no lump. Thanks people. For sending my mom and I into mild cardiac arrest though. I’m going to go throw up this chalk now.

Incident 4: More anal probing. To get another temperature read. And then, for the best of all. A Tylenol suppository. Glorious.

Life Lesson #28: With all their fancy tools and hard to understand language, I’ve learned that the medical industry is still a little shaky. They might diagnosis you seven ways to heaven, and still are completely wrong. And sometimes, they’re going to revert to the most rudimentary ways to find out what’s going on inside, like poking a mercury stick up your butt and hitting you in the back a few times to find out where it hurts. If you’re lucky, they’ll eventually figure out what’s wrong with you, then hit you with a nice antibiotic that puts you out of commission for two weeks and a pain killer that wakes you up in the middle of the night with terrifying nightmares. Keep your fingers crossed – it worked for me!