I hate the hospital because nobody listens to you. This time, because I mentioned having some nausea and vomiting in the previous weeks they somehow pinned that to this visit and wouldn't let me have any food or water. I was screaming that I was starving and thirsty, the smug nurse practitioner signed off on that. They finally let me have ice chips at1 in the morning.
I stayed there a while trying to eat massive quantities of hospital food when they explained that I would be better served in what they delicately call a "skilled nursing facility"
So this is why I found myself strapped to wheelchair in the back of the van headed to what I like to call Sunny Acres. Sunny acres the kind place you would put your mom if you really hated her. They put me in a dingy room kind of like a hospital room, but worse. My roommate grunted at me and went back to watching a TV show where people were actually beating each other up and pulling out their hair extensions. I came to learn that would be every day's entertainment in the afternoon.
Then came the questions. I don't know dozens of them hundreds of them? All of the same information that got screwed up at the hospital was transferred here, still screwed up. You know they really should invented a machine where someone can type all your stuff in and it can follow you around wherever you go Maybe they could even have a barcode that they put on your wristband and the nurse is that the new place would just have to scan it. Nah...that's just Star Wars stuff. What do they think this is, the 21st-century?
Then it was time to eat dinner so they rolled me into the dining room. The dining room was a nice room with a gazebo shaped birdcage which kind of made me sad because it wasn't like they had a parrot in there...Just ordinary New Mexico birds.
There was an open seat at a table with three men so I asked to be put there.I quickly learned that this sort of thing wasn't done at Sunny Acres. Men sit with men and women sit with women. I tried to make conversation by asking where everyone was from. One man could neither hear or talk. The second, once I told him my name was Karen, said "I had a farm in Africa" to which I answered "at the foot of the Ngong hills. I smiled and said a literary person.But if we have a moment it was just the one, because at that point the third man at the table chimed in or I should say boomed in because he was extremely loud (double hearing aids will do that). I used it to live in Detroit, that is until all the damn colored people forced me to sell my house. Had to move to the other side of 8 mile and live with the damn Jews.
Just then our server came around with the soup cart. I asked what kind of soup it was and she said she didn't know. One taste told me it was cream of boiled water. Yum, I would come to learn that this was a popular selection here. The entree was called beef burgundy and was a few pieces of beef on a plate of mushy noodles. Since I'm supposed to eat protein first I picked out the beef and left the noodles. Then there was desert. Every meal came with a mystery piece of something sweet that we called yellow pie, white pie etc. It was all too sweet for me,
I flagged down one of the nurse's assistants to push me back to the room. My roommate was in her bed finishing her dinner. She took all of her meals in bed. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing her get out of bed except to go to therapy or to the bathroom. Then she would hoist herself into her double-wide wheelchair and complain that my wheelchair was blocking her way.
I watched Monday Night Baseball which was how I knew I'd come in on a Monday. I wished I had a crayon to mark an X on the wall to keep track of my time here. I was here for 20 days.
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