Friday, October 05, 2007

And now for something truly embarrassing

When I was in fourth grade I had a huge crush on this girl Robin Meyers. I really have no idea why I had a crush on her, but at the time it seemed like I needed to have a crush on someone, and she was cute, and there. At that age I was just fully coming in to my nerdiness, and about the size of large 4 year old. By contrast, Robin was probably the most popular girl in school, and would go on, years later, to be the prom queen of my high school, so my chances with this girl were about as good as Michael Richards giving the keynote speech at the next NAACP banquet.

I'm by no means "huge" now, but back then I was so short that I used to see a specialist just to make sure there wasn't something seriously wrong with me. To give you an idea, I remember getting "up to" 70 lbs. my freshman year in high school. The worst part of the specialist visit was a close inspection of my personal area(s), which would suck for anyone just going through the pre-teen years, but was especially troublesome for me because it always happened immediately after the exceptionally cute nurse had taken my vitals.

Eventually they decided they needed to do extensive blood work, and I was admitted to the hospital for an overnight stay. Over the course of 24 hours they would draw two vials of blood every 20 minutes. Needless to say I was none-to-thrilled with the concept, but then I found out they had an Atari (with Pitfall!) in the children's wing and decided maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Side note: Pitfall was a game where you had 20 minutes to explore a jungle in search of ancient treasures. You never got to the good treasures until about 18 minutes in, and it took me about 3 minutes to get from the place where they took my blood to the Atari, and 3 minutes to get back. I was one frustrated, low on blood, short nerd.

By night time they had started tying my arm up like a heroine addict, and were alternating arms just to get blood. I believe this is as close in my life as I've ever been to being drunk, and I spent most of the night half asleep, and completely out of it.

I woke up midway through the evening needing to use the restroom. They had told me that if I needed to get up I should call someone, but aside from a slight headache, I felt okay. And then I stood up.

The room started to blur, and the floor started tilting left and right. "No problem, just follow the wall" I thought as I leaned against it. I made it safely to the bathroom and went about my business. I was a smart kid, but in my drunken stupor it never occurred to me that sitting down might be the best way to tackle the problem presented to me. The problem being that there appeared to be either 2 or 4 toilets that also seemed to be moving.

A few minutes later I stumbled out, and as I headed for my bed, fell flat on my face.

Some time later I awoke, now even more out of it. My mother was at the foot of the bed talking to the nurse. Apparently the night shift of nurses was different, and the one that I was familiar with had been gone for a while.

"... he's in the 4th grade..." I pieced my mom's words together, "very smart... goes to school at..."
"Oh... odd coincidence... daughter... Robin... goes there too." the nurse responded.

I strained to concentrate and focus on this new nurse. Eventually after much effort the name tag came in to focus, "Nurse Meyers"

In my 4th grade mind she ran home immediately and told her daughter, "One of your school mates was in today... Yeah, the one who can't seem to grow. Well, he peed all over the place and guess who had to clean it up?"

1 comment:

  1. You know what's weird? Must have been a few years after you had this experience because I was in 5th grade and Nurse Myers told me about a tiny little kid who peed all over. Isn't that strange? Now I know.

    ReplyDelete

One

A black Jetta pulled up outside my house and I jumped in without a moment's hesitation. Hopping in a near stranger's car didn't...