Spent Saturday night writhing on the floor (and other surfaces) of the emergency room in high comic style - clawing at the walls, mewling and moaning, tearing at my hair, and just generally making a spectacle of myself.
It was like nothing so much as a community theatre presentation of Altered States, and I was William Hurt in the big climax!
At one point I wept openly in front of a doctor and two nurses.
After being loaded up with Morphine and Tramadol, I was able to stop thrashing enough to speak in complete sentences and eventually I was sent home where I vomited for the fifth (a personal record) time that day.
Chiara was really great and didn't complain about sitting by me in the hospital room even once in all those hours. At one point I encouraged her to explore the building and report back to me if she found the morgue. She resisted even this seemingly irresistible opportunity so as not to miss a minute of my swearing, gnashing, clutching, wheezing, weeping, torsional performance as Jeff, Amateur Werewolf.
I'd like to think I did her proud, especially when, in my incessant and agonized contortions, I nearly twisted the hospital gown right off of me whilst the vaguely granola nurse took my blood pressure. Chiara did her best to keep the garment covering what all (her included) would rather not see.
If I had been a sentient creature at the time, I would have thanked her.
That night, at three thirty in the morning, when we finally crawled into bed, me in a percocet haze and still raw with pain and her bleary eyed and sore from a day working and then tending to her Gollum-like husband, I slept rather well.
She, on the other hand, had nightmare after nightmare. In the morning, she wouldn't tell me about those nightmares, but I knew what they were: dreams of unspeakable things - things like the brief glimpse of lint revealed in my navel as I arched on a hospital bed. Things like the sound made by a thirty year old man when he hiccups at the same time that he sobs and grunts in agony.
But then, these are the things every girl dreams of in a husband.
You're welcome, Chiara.
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