My Point...And I Do Have One

Start from the beginning.”
    “I was hurting so much I couldn’t move,” I continued.
    The admitting nurse started laughing hysterically. “Oh yes. That’s great, it’s hilarious. Oooooo, I’ve got an idea. Tell the rest of it like you’re on the phone with God. That would make it really funny.”
    So after I made it past the admitting nurse, they had me sit on these extremely uncomfortable plastic chairs (they were rejected by Greyhound bus stations for being too painful) in the waiting area again until they could find someone to help me. Everybody else there was watching TV. They finally wheeled me in to see a doctor because my crying and screaming in pain was ruining people’s TV-viewing experience. “Keep it down, we’re trying to watch Jerry Springer!”
    They gave me a number of tests to try to figure out what was wrong: blood tests. X-rays, ultrasound, temperature, algebra. Some tests seemed valid; others seemed to serve no purpose at all. Like when one doctor had me siton a pony and whistle the theme song from
Mission Impossible
. “Why do I have to do this?” I said between whistles.
    “We just want to rule out whistling pony disease,” he replied, “and anyway, Dr. Jones brought the pony in so we figured we might as well use it.”
    What was really bad was when this guy tried to hook me up to an IV. He kept on missing my vein. He’d stab at me and miss; there was blood everywhere. I got really nervous when I looked down and saw his Seeing Eye dog.
    I told the nurse I didn’t think this guy knew what he was doing and I’d prefer it if she put in the IV. She looked at me surprised. “I’m sorry, I thought you wanted him to do it. I have no idea who this guy is.”
    The doctor came in later. He said that my blood looked good and that my urine was clear and looked good too. That calmed me, until I realized that I hadn’t even had a urine test. Either he had looked at somebody else’s urine or he found me attractive and this was one of his pick-up lines. Maybe I was supposed to tell him that his urine was clear and looked good also.
    I was tested until midnight. Everybody looked at me. At one point, a doctor’s neighbor’s nephew’s son was examining me. If that isn’t wacky, I don’t know what wacky is. Eventually, by doing an ultrasound, they discovered that I had a cyst that the doctor said was the size of a really, really big cyst.
    Finally, at midnight, I was wheeled into my hospital room. It was a little disappointing. No mint on the pillow, no view, no HBO. And believe me, this place wasn’t cheap either.
    Shortly afterward they brought me my first meal. Now the food in hospitals is the stuff that’s so bad that it doesn’t even make it onto airplanes. They brought me broth and Jell-O, which ironically is one of my favorite meals. If it’s fixed right, it’s great. I think it’s bad when broth and Jell-O taste exactly the same.
    Another thing that’s awful is the gown they make you wear. It doesn’t fit right, and it’s completely open in the back, leaving exposed an area of my body that I traditionally keep covered with clothes. You walk down the hall and it’s just flap, flap, flapping in the breeze—the gown, that is; the part of my body I traditionally keep covered wasn’t flap, flap, flapping. If it was, I’m sure I’d be one of the first people to know. All I’m saying is that the gown was humiliating. But, on the bright side, since the hospital is in Beverly Hills, my gown also had shoulder pads. So, it was slimming and degrading at the same time. I think Cher wore one to the Oscars last year.
    I was depressed when I woke up the next morning. Because besides being sick, it was my birthday. There’s nothing like spending your birthday hooked up to an IV and trying to keep your gown closed in the back to make you aware of the aging process, the inevitability of death and decay, and countless other happy, carefree thoughts.
    They did cheer me up, though, when they brought me my breakfast: broth and Jell-O. Somebody must have known it was my birthday because they put a candle in the broth.
    It wasn’t my worst birthday, though. That would have to be either the year I decided to eat my age in hard-boiled eggs, the year I thought I had gotten tickets to see the musical
Tommy
but instead ended up seeing a one-man show based on the life of Tom Bosley, or when I turned twelve and fell off my pony while whistling the theme from
Mission Impossible
.
    On the other