Who doesn't feel a wash of contempt for these powerless chumps, these quasi-militia?
I’m back! It’s been an exciting week in Roryland, what I thought was going to be a relatively simple surgery to remove an infection in my shoulder was instead an object lesson in the utter hell that is hospitalization.
Sitting in bed all day pumped to the gills full of assorted opiates sounds like fun, but it gets old really fucking fast. Especially when you’re getting hourly blood draws and aren’t allowed to leave the hospital floor.
But I’m free now and the future looks bright. Another six weeks of pumping antibiotics into my bloodstream twice daily via the PICC line inserted in my right arm, running through a vein into my heart, but time continues to pass and it’ll be over before I know it.
I think I’m relatively easy to deal with as a patient. I’m friendly, more than a little stoic, and I follow medical direction.
Usually.
Want me to take pills, hold still while you cut on me, or shoot stuff into my body all day long? Whatever, let’s do this. Tell me I’m a prisoner who’s confined to a small area because I’m all doped up and might fall down and sue the hospital? That’s gonna be a problem. I can handle my drugs, and I’m going batshit stir crazy. The best thing for all involved is to cover your ass by telling me the rules, then pretend you don’t see me dragging an IV tree down the hall in a stupor on my way to the cafeteria to buy a root beer.
The nurses understood, the security guards did not.
I’ve got a real problem with security guards. It doesn’t take a whole lot of insight to understand why, growing up skateboarding and being hassled by the type of wannabe authority figure that embraces his position as a powerless enforcer of pointless rules has instilled in me an utter contempt for the job. To the point where I welcome any chance to engage with them. Go ahead and tell me what to do, I’m just going to ignore you.
Press the issue and I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself. Because I know the secret: they can’t actually do anything. Their entire job is built around the idea that most people will do what they’re told by a person in a uniform. But not everyone plays by those rules.
Which eventually escalated into an overweight little man telling me he was going to have me declared absent against medical advice, or something similar, meaning I would be forcibly removed from the hospital, treatment discontinued, if he saw me outside my room again.
The problem with bluffs is that people can call ’em. I’d, eventually, die a pretty horrible death without treatment, and I had in no way checked myself out. For this guy to assert that he had the power to basically kill me because I wouldn’t listen to him didn’t sound very true. Because, of course, it was not.
It became a bright point of my stay, making his job more difficult. But, really, it was his fault. If he wasn’t so wrapped up in his ridiculous pseudo authority we might’ve got along fine.
