Wake up momma, turn
your lamp down low…
What a night.
I was in Macon, Georgia attending a Newspaper Columnist Conference when my
friend Joanie fell. She had been dancing to the sound of … who else but the
Allman Bros Band. I drove her to the ER where we spent the equivalent of
several lifetimes.
The black-hearted reception
nurse glanced at the papers Joanie had filled out while in horrible pain, but was too busy arguing with a chicken wing delivery
guy about the price he charged to pay Joanie the attention she needed
While she
writhed in pain, I morphed into my Nancy Grace mode. "Enough with the
chicken, Nurse Wretched,” I barked. “Can’t you see this woman is in pain? You
get her some help right now or I’m calling 911."
Ten minutes
later after threatening the entire hospital staff with Obamacare, Joanie was
wheeled into what they actually called the fast lane. Seriously. Three hours
later, a sleepy intern proclaimed that Joanie’s wrist was broken.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “there will not be an orthopod available until
Tuesday.” Unfortunately? Joanie lives in Illinois and had been planning to
travel on to Fairhope, Alabama after the conference for a few days of
R&R.
“Nuh uh,” said
the ER vampires. “She absolutely must have her wrist set no later than
Tuesday.” While Joanie and I were trying to figure out what kind of drugs the
intern was on, he presented her with a sling and a prescription for dope. I
was dismissed and told to go to the waiting room until someone could dismiss
Joanie.
Meanwhile back
in the ER waiting room where Chicken Little and the delivery boy were still
arguing, three policemen hauled in two barefoot prisoners in dire need of
treatment for something. I have no idea what. The prisoners were not
overjoyed and I was not thrilled to see them either.
Soon after
that, a middle-aged man, a throwback to the Sixties, rushed in with a catfish
fang stuck in his right hand. He was bleeding all over the floor but they
wheeled him to the other side, not the fast lane. Go figure.
Just when I
thought I had seen more ER drama than I ever wanted to see, a morbidly obese
woman with splotchy purple legs the size of a barker lounger waddled in. Her
hips looked like huge scallops and when she sat down her behind hung over the
sides of two chairs. No fast lane for her, either.
When my friend
Joanie was finally paroled from the treatment room, she was clutching a
prescription for pain meds and honestly? She looked like she had aged twenty
years since dancing earlier that night to the Allman Brothers,
“Southbound,” like nobody was watching.
She looked up
at me from the wheelchair and said, “I want to be Northbound, like ASAP.”
The hospital’s
pharmacy was closed, of course, so we drove around Macon in search of a
Walgreen's. The search was made more difficult because the Macon police had
set up roadblocks throughout the city. I figured they were looking for the
gang going around inserting catfish fangs into over-the-hill hippies.
It was July
and my friend Joanie and I felt like strangers set adrift in Macon, Georgia,
the hottest little town on the planet.
By and by,
Joanie couldn’t find her reading glasses and suggested that she had left them
at the hospital, so after an hour or so of looking and finally finding a
Walgreen's, we returned to the ER to look for her glasses. That hospital was
batting a thousand. No Joanie’s glasses, no orthopod, no pharmacy and
probably no chicken wings for Nurse Wretched.
What the
hospital did have plenty of when we arrived was a driveway stacked with four
ambulances, two of which sailed past my car. The catfish gang was super busy
that night.
Finally back
at the hotel, I searched around my car for Joanie’s lost glasses since she
can't see squat without them. Then she about scared me to death when she let
out a shout that sounded profane. I thought she had fallen again. Nope. She
had simply discovered that her glasses were hanging around her neck on one of
those old lady chains.
I parked my
car and when I got out, the hotel sprinklers popped up to baptize me. I
didn’t move. I just stood still and let the water drench my clothes and cool
my heels. On a Saturday night in Macon when the temperature is a thousand
degrees, that's not a bad thing to do.
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Wednesday, October 7, 2015
The Macon Blues
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