Let me give you a run-down of the last few weeks of my life. Obviously it has been a while since I put anything here, so I feel I at least owe you a few laughs.
About three weeks ago, I started feeling sick. Two days later, I was vomiting in the Emergency Waiting Room at Barnes-Jewish. After five hours, two x-rays, and a cat scan, a team of very interested doctors told me I had a punctured colon and an infection called diverticulitis, which usually only happens to late middle-aged and elderly patients. They admitted me.
“How long am I going to be here?” I asked. “I have to be somewhere on Tuesday.”
“What do you do for a living?” asked one of the doctors, with his pen and clipboard ready.
“Um. I’m unemployed.”
“Well,” he said, with a diagnostic air, “You should be able to get back to being unemployed almost right away.”
Obviously that was supposed to have been funny. Maybe if I hadn’t had a punctured, infected intestine, it would have been funny. Maybe if I had some kind of clue about how the hell I was going to pay for a hospital visit when I am uninsured and unemployed, it could potentially have been funny. Because I recognize that there are certain situations in which that could have been funny, I gave him a sympathy cackle. After all, I like to be encouraging.
