More Drama Than a VH-1 Reality Show

Two weeks ago on a Sunday night, before 10pm.

I had just returned to my bedroom from the shower where I find my husband laying on my side of the bed and playing on my laptop.

“What are you doing laying on my side?” I ask. He doesn’t answer and I begin to flick him with my towel. J begins flail and rolls away from me.

He rolls himself off the bed.

“Oh, oh, owwwwwww!” he screams. I just stare at him.

“OWWWWWWW!” he screams louder.

“What’s wrong?”

“My foot, my foot!” I peer over to his side of the edge and see some blood on the floor. J was holding his foot up, his hands clamped around it and blood was seeping through.

“What happened?” my voice was without concern but I was still completely interested.

“My foot hit the prongs of that plug,” he whimpered. “I’m bleeding, don’t you see I’m bleeding?”

“Let me look at—”

“No, I’m bleeding!”

“But I need to see –”

“I’m bleeding! Go get me a paper towel!”

“We are out of paper towels.”

“Get someTHING!”

I leave the room and go to the linen closet. After a couple of minutes I grab the oldest washcloth I can find in the dimly lit hall and head back to the room.

I hand it to him and again beseech him to allow me to examine his foot.

“No, I’m bleeding! What is this a towel?” I try to grab him under his arms and pull him up on the bed. I ask him to work with me but he will not be moved. “This is not enough get me something bigger!”

“Get you what? Let me look at it .”

“GET ME SOMETHING BIGGER! We have string downstairs, bring me the string.”

I go to the kitchen to look for the string but it was missing, probably taken by my husband for some other project he wanted to work on. So I go back to the linen closet and assess what clean sheets or towels we have in there that I might rip up for a large bandage.

I grab another washcloth and go back into the room.

He is now sitting on the bed with a belt around his foot keeping the towel in place. He informs me that I will have to drive him to the hospital. I look at him with raised eyebrow. I don’t think he needs to go to the emergency room; this is his third emergency room freak out since we got together. I forget what the other two were but they were minor and they didn’t draw blood so I was able to diffuse the situation.

My calmness wasn’t working this time.

“Are you going to let me look at your foot?” I ask as I hand him the washcloth to rip.

He tells me no, he’s bleeding to death so we have to leave, ASAP, before he passes out.

“Crazy ass Korean,” I mutter under my breath. I slowly get dressed. J is halfway down the steps, yelling that if it was a real emergency he’d be dead by now.

I go into my daughter’s room and tell her I’m taking her stepfather to the emergency room.

“I’ll call you when we get there. Check in on J2 and make sure he isn’t hysterical.”

Cricket lazily looks up at me from her laptop and gives me the look that says she’s above all the insanity that happens in the household; she’s just biding her time until fall so she can ditch this loony bin.

“Yeah.. right.” she says.

I go downstairs where my husband is telling his son he needs to listen to the book on cd before he falls asleep. J2 is like yeah, okay. He wanders back into the kitchen to get something to drink.

“Are you ready?” J asks me.

“Yeah, but, on a scale from 1-5 with one being the least and five being the highest, where is your pain?”

“It’s five, okay? Five! Now come on!” J instructs me to go get the car and pull up close to the curb so he doesn’t have to walk in the snow. I do as he asks only to find him jumping into the car beside me.

“I had to walk in the snow anyway, so I decided to just get in.”

In the car, about 10:20-10:30

Being a mother all these 17, nearly 18 years I have learned a thing or two about First Aid and protocol. The first thing I learned is when you have insurance you don’t run off willy nilly to the emergency room first thing. Insurance companies don’t like that, they seemed irked by it really.

“So, J, you have your insurance card, right?” I asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Does this hospital take your insurance?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I think we need to call your doctor first. Call your doctor before we get to the emergency room.”

“Why?”

“Because that is how it goes. You call the doctor and then he refers you to the emergency room.”

“I don’t have to.”

I scoff at him. Where the hell has he been living. “Yes you do. Everyone does. Call your doctor.”

“He’s not in right now. The office is closed.”

“I know, but I’m sure they have emergency services. Someone is on call.”

“I don’t have the number.”

“Look him up on your phone.”

“I don’t have it. I don’t remember his name.”

I look at him quizzically. “You don’t remember your doctor’s name?”

“No,” he begins playing with his phone. He asks someone on the other end if they take his insurance. “Okay, we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

i decided to ask him again what is his level of pain. “On a scale of 1 to 10, with one being a papercut and ten being aww damn, my limb is falling off what level of pain are you at?”

“Ten,” he says quickly.

“Are you sure?” I ask him again.

“Yessss,” he then looks at me. “I’m not going to tell them how you kicked me off the bed.”

“Huh?”

“You know you kicked me off the bed.”

“What. You know I didn’t get anywhere near you.”

“Yes you did and that is spousal abuse.” J is 50 or so pounds heavier than me and is built like an ex-football player. One of his joys in life is baiting me to wrestle and the other day I was pinned underneath just one arm. I highly doubted anyone would suspect me of beating him, no mater how much I wanted to.

“Please tell on me. They’ll give me a restraining order I’ll gladly abide by.”

Arrival at the hospital, 10:45-10:50

I drop J off in the front of the hospital and then park the car down at the bottom of a creepy garage. When I come back to the front, where I dropped him off at I find that the door is locked. A cute young hispanic guy is standing outside holding a large blanket and we both look perplexed about how to get. Inside I see J wandering around, hobbling around an empty area in search of the emergency room. He looks over at me and I wave but he turns around and heads down the hall.

“How the hell is a hospital gonna lock you out?” I say to the guy. I see another guy walking towards the door and I think he will let us in. Instead he turns left and heads down a long corridor and enters out a couple of yards away from the main entrance.

The hispanic guy and I figure it out and go over to the door. He is my new best friend, we have bonded over the the troubles of trying to enter a hospital late on Sunday night.

A few feet into the hospital cute young hispanic guy and I part ways. He valiantly goes off to present the blanket to his girlfriend and I head off in the direction I say J headed. Along the walls are signs with arrows pointing out the emergency room.

Check In and Checked Out 11:00-12:15

I finally catch up to J two floors below me and he grumbling about how hard it was to find the emergency room. Two other people are ahead of us in line to see receptionist. Finally its our turn and J explains how he hurt his foot (sans embellishment). I ask the guy how much is the copay.

“It’s one hundred dollars. Do you want to pay for it now?”

Heck no. Man, with the way gas prices are now we burned up 100 dollars just to get there one way. After 20 minutes of waiting and a quick interview we finally leave the waiting room and are shown into the small examining room.

“J, how is the pain?” I ask. I gave him the scale speech and again he says it’s a 10, it feels like it’s going to fall off. Oh, my God, the pain, the pain.

“Can I see your foot now?” I ask him. He doesn’t want to pull his foot out of his shoe because he’s sure there is a pool of blood in there.

We wait 15 more minutes and a doctor finally enters.

“How are you doing this evening?” she asks.

“Oh, I’m fine,” inside I’m yelling WTF?! He then calmly explains how he hurt his foot and how the electrical plug went in about a fourth of an inch. He had told me he thought he hit the bone.

“Well, lets see,” she said. He takes his foot out of his shoe and unwraps the towels. There’s a few drops of blood in his shoe, although the towels are considerably saturated with blood.

The doctor looks at his foot and touches around it. J barely flinches. She then tells him that with a foot injury like this they don’t give stitches. She wants to see exactly how deep it is and she takes out what looks like a small stick and tells him she wants to put it in to gauge how deep it is. After pulling it out she tells J his guesstimate is right, it’s about 1cm deep. She tells him they will clean it and then wrap it up. For 10 bucks I could have cleaned it and wrapped it up for him. Hell for free I could have cleaned it and wrapped it up.

“When is the last time you had a tetanus shot?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll get you one. And you are probably going to need a pain killer. What do you think you will need? Ibuprofen, advil or something stronger.”

“Oh, I just need an advil.” James said.

“No, no something stronger,” I interject. I wanted something that could knock him out instantly.

“Is his pain that bad?” she asked.

“No, it’s for my pain,” I said deadpan. The doctor scrutinized me. I bet she thought I was a drug addict, waiting to take his pills.

“I just need advil,” J said again. He gave me a look and I gave him a look right back. I hope the needle was big, to go along with that big bill. That’ll cure him from freaking out and going to the emergency room for craziness.

After he got his tetanus shot and we were left alone for a while J complains about feeling woozy.

“You’re a hypochondriac,” I tell him.

“I was going to need a shot anyway,” J said. “They’ll probably call Dr. Alexander tomorrow and it’ll get updated.”

“That’s not how it works,” I told him. And then it dawned on me. “You remember your doctor’s name?”

“I just remembered.”

“But that is the doctor teh kids go to. You couldn’t remember that you go to the same doctor that the kids see?”

“I just remembered.” I wish they’d come in and prick him again. with the needle.

Finally they came in and wrapped his foot. And then the doctor came in and didn’t like the way it was wrapped so she re-wrapped it again. He would have a little pain, she told him. But he will be fine in a day or two.

She asked him how he felt again and he said he felt fine. As we were headed to the car he told me his foot hurt like hell. He was not going to get spoiled tonight.

Arrive at home 12:45

I knock on my daughter’s door and asked her how she was. I couldn’t call her from the hospital because the line was jammed.

“Was J2 okay?” I asked. He was in bed when I came in.

“He didn’t care,” Cricket said. “After you guys left he ate some more dinner and hung out in his room texting on his phone. He wasn’t worried. So is J okay? How many stitches did he get.”

“None.”

“What? I thought he had a hole four inches deep in his foot.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear him as he went down the stairs?” My daughter then began to effect a Napoleon Dynamite voice whenever she mimic James. “God, I have a four inch hole deep in my foot. It’s bleeding everywhere.”

I shake my head. Her mimicry was wrong but he would say something that off the wall; I just tuned him out.

Bedtime1:10

I head back to bed and find J lying on my side of the bed. Again. I don’t have my towel to pop him again. J begins to snore. It’s his fake snore. I bend down and kiss him.

“Stop, you’re molesting me,” J says and then rolls over slowly to his side of the bed. I climb into bed and J looks over at me and then turns back away. “My foot hurts,” he said. It’s code for, I need attention. I scoot over closer and put my arm around him. I kiss him on the back of his neck.

“I love you J”

“I love you, too. I guess I won’t tell the authorities that you kicked me off the bed.”