Ice Cream Truck

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
― Hunter S. Thompson

The paramedics let me walk into the hospital which I did not appreciate, and they left me in the dark and empty waiting room. The nurse told me the doc would come soon and left too.

While sitting there all I wanted to do was to lay down and suffer in silence. A loud tick of the clock informed me it was 6:41 am. The hospital looked like it was built in war times which makes sense, since the hospital was founded in 1692 (1695 men’s wing; 1704 women’s wing). Plenty of time to install a good clock with white numbers on black background. What the hell was I doing there all alone? I was tired and in pain so I closed my eyes and tried to avoid thinking about what little air could get through my throat.

The doctor offered me a seat on one of those horror-movie chairs: yellowy with brown fake leather or vegan leather as we now call it. She went on looking into my mouth with what looked like a bike wrench. That was the moment I realised I couldn’t properly open my mouth anymore. Shen then got an endoscope which brought up a lot of memories of blurry videos of colonoscopies, warned me about impendent pain and showed it into my nose like Egyptians used to do; however, she went down into my throat under my tonsils, looking for Santa. Not sure what she meant with the warning; it was very pleasant compared to the pain I already had.

They gave me a room and some papers to sign. Not long ago I was sitting on a chair begging for a bed; now I was sitting a bed that felt foreign and cold, feeling out of place. The other woman in the room had what looked like a bloody tampon string stuck to the outside of her nose. At first, I thought her nose was split in the middle. She wanted to talk but talking wasn’t really in my repertoire. I sat there, filled out the forms while spitting into a cardboard bowl and enjoying the second infusion. Finally. Almost free of pain.

They picked me up for the CT in a monstrously big white chair – I bet it belonged to a crazy German scientist during the war – and pushed me into an ice cream truck.

As soon as we arrived at another building, the doctor injected me with a metallic tasting dye and made me lay down on a small stretcher, my head on an extra piece like a geisha. And like a geisha I wasn’t supposed to move. The machine drew me in, telling me when to breathe in or out or hold my breath. I would like to thank the person who thought about making parts of the machine see-through, revealing the glowing alien inside, therefore distracting me from the feeling of being slowly eaten up by a giant plastic donut.

We were done after 5 minutes. I got back on horror chair number two and into the ice truck. The guy was really nice. He attempted to talk to me but stopped as soon as he noticed I couldn’t bring much to the conversation, bad for him, it would have been his time to shine and tell me all his secrets.

As he pushed me around, I felt the need to tell them I could walk. But could I? I don’t even think I was capable of using my brain at that point.

I got called in to the doctor soon after. A different one. She checked my throat again and showed me the results of the CT scan. There it was a big grey Jackson Pollock painting of my skull from the frog perspective. A mix of dots in various forms and sizes. In the middle of it all a small black hole resembling Rubin’s vase. The left tonsil a grey blob with black pupil. Puss. The right one a little smaller. Looks like we have to operate ASAP She went on explaining all the risks of the procedure and how they were going to cut out my tonsils with an ice cream spoon. Luckily there were two other operations on Sunday, so I got to wait till two pm.

The operation before mine took longer than expected so by the time they picked me up – and no, nobody told me anything about the delay – I was spitting blood.