It's Not Tundra

The next three days made me re-think my opposition to euthanasia as I lay, alternately on the couch, the bed or the floor [1] while my temperature went up to around a hundred-three at least once and was surely over normal most of the time. And every morning I’d wonder if Ingo was going to call and interrupt my fevered delirium and what I would do about it, surely too weak to drive myself anywhere. Would he just bring them into the house and tell them to ignore the sweaty, smelly two hundred pound guy on the couch and try to picture it with their Alsatian hound there instead? For two weeks I didn’t really have the energy to change the channel, let alone get the house ready to show. I have never been that sick before in my life. [2] One day, about a week in, I struggled to the bathroom [3] for a, thankfully, normal moment and in washing my hands I looked into the mirror and experience one of those Universal Horror Movie What Have I Become moments where a different, pale, gaunt, unsh

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! [1] And we were off to the hospital. Which luckily was right around the corner. Except… There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full. Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room. [2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem. Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance. But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away