My mouth tasted like the vomit the woman in the bed next to me was spouting out of her mouth into a blue emesis bag. She would apologize in between retching. I told her it was fine because she was perfectly drowning out the sound of Dr. Oz on the television. He was discussing the dangers of American tourists drinking tainted alcohol in Mexico.
“Is Dr. Oz even a real doctor?” the woman asked me, wiping flecks of vomit from her mouth with the back of her hand.
An elderly man on the other side of me screamed, “He’s not a doctor he’s a glorified jack off!”
One of the nurses shouted, “Harold! Language!”
The woman started vomiting again.
As time passed I had become transfixed by one of the nurses eating green bell pepper rings at the nurse’s station. It was almost like she unhinged her jaw to wrangle the pepper in its entirety into her her mouth. She then would audibly swallow after very little chewing. I imagined what it’d be like if she were to swallow me whole like a boa constrictor. I could hang out in her stomach and use the pepper rings as hula hoops to pass the time waiting for my CT scan. When my name was called they’d have to pull me out of her throat by the ankles. I looked at the empty chair next to my bed and felt incredibly lonely.
Three sets of double doors and two left turns separated me from the emergency room where I had left my family. When I was being taken to radiology I had heard my mom asking the doctor if she could use the otoscope tool on my dad to look in his ears. When the doctor told her no, she suggested the tool be moved out of reach of the public then, as to rid them of the temptation. The doctor told her he’d let the appropriate parties know. My dad sighed heavily.
Eric smiled at me as I went by, but then I caught the reflection of his face in the television on the wall once I had passed him. It had changed and on it was a type of fear I had never seen on his face before. I couldn’t tell if it was a fear for my life or a fear for his, as I was just about to leave him alone with my parents in the emergency room. I tried to reach for him before they wheeled me out the door but the IV tubing caught around the railing of the bed and my arm was useless. I looked down at the IV hanging out of my arm and wondered where all the blood would end up that they took from me.
“You got a bottom lip the size of four regular sized lips,” the elderly man next to me shouted in my direction.
I looked over and saw a smile creep across his face.
“HAR-OLD!” a nurse shouted from the nurse’s station.
“At least I don’t got a body like a freshly popped canister of Pillsbury biscuits Harold,” I said.
Harold started laughing so hard he was brought to coughing fits that sounded like the engine of a car struggling to turn over in the winter. The woman on the other side of me was laughing and vomiting intermittently. The nurses were watching the three of us from the station with puzzled expressions, the one with a piece of bell pepper ring hanging from the corner of her mouth. I started laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. It brought on a curious sense of happiness I hadn’t really expected from the situation. I looked at all the people around me and I was contented just existing in the mess of it. I realized I can’t control the uncontrollable, but I can find the humor in it, and as long as I’m laughing I’m doing just fine.
