Bushwhacked by Da Bug

The way we felt, I’m pretty sure the bug that decided to inhabit our bodies looked exactly like this one. This all started out on Saturday night, March 24. We decided to go to downtown Portland for dinner. Most of the local restaurants join together and offer a three course dinner for $35.00 each, hoping you will like your experience and become a regular. The only way you will get me to go to Portland is to offer some sort on incentive, I think the City of Portland is horrible. The streets are narrow, and because they hate cars, they have taken almost all of the available roadways for cars and turned them into mass transit, or bike lanes. Trying to go there via private automobile is a joke.

So, we made reservations at this strange looking restaurant that inhabits a space in an old building that has been sort of renovated to be a restaurant. We were lucky that we got a table right up front with a view of the street, so we could overlook the homeless campers.

My wife and I decided to order different types of meals thinking that we could experience a broader variety in a sharing exercise. When they brought the first course I knew this wasn’t going to be good. They gave me a plate with some sort of greens that I never was able to identify, and gave her a big clump of green leafy stuff that looked like the crap I spray with Round-up that grows around my fence. They had this stuff covered in garlic and other unidentified spices. It was gross.

When the second course arrived it was equally as bizarre. I ordered a pork shoulder. What I got was a chunk of pork on a plate laying in a pool of sauce. No veggies, no potatoes, just a piece of pork that was tough and at least 30 percent fat. My wife had a piece of salmon that was prepared in a similar fashion. We looked at each other with that unmistakable expression of ” what the hell”?

But just when you thought it couldn’t get worse they brought out the dessert. There is simply no way to describe this crap. One dish had a two small containers of what they called ice cream with a single little brown wafer. These two ice cream flavors were definitely overlooked By Baskin-Robbins. I had a plate with something that looked like corn bread with more indescribable bits and pieces.

After analyzing the food we paid almost $100.00 for, the only explanation that I could come up with was that they must have teamed up with Ms. Anderson’s sixth grade class from the local elementary school to throw some shit together for some sort of fund raiser. Because there is no possible way, real honest to goodness professional cooks could have possibly created that crap.

But wait, the story gets worse, a lot worse. While dining in that shithole, we contracted the flu. Not just any flu, it was the flu from hell. By Tuesday, my wife and I are really sick and my pee looked like grape Kool Aid. This crap caused my kidneys to shut down and I was hospitalized for the next four days on IV to flush the infection out of my kidneys. Meanwhile my poor wife is left at home to fend for herself.

This flu not only made us gravely ill, but neither of us could stand the thought of eating. Just the smell of food made us sick. The folks in the hospital put me on a renal diet for my kidneys. If you’ve ever been on a renal diet you understand the food sucks. Couple that with the fact that it’s hospital food, and I thought I was going to starve to death.

Now, you would think being in the hospital you would be able to get medicine for whatever symptoms you were experiencing. Wrong!! This flu bug made my sinus cavities feel like they were on fire, the tears were flowing from my eyes uncontrollably. When I was practically begging for antihistamines they said they would interfere with my kidney medication. In other words, man up! Listen, when my sinuses are on fire and my eyes are watering uncontrollably I know exactly how a person feels just prior to committing murder. You do not want to confront me in that condition, ever.

So, being pumped full of fluids to flush my kidneys, I had to pee a lot. They show you a plastic pee bottle and tell you not to pee in the toilet, pee in the bottle so they can see it. They don’t leave this thing by your bed where it would make sense, they leave it in the bathroom. So, every time you have to get up to pee, you have to unplug the IV pump, and drag it to the bathroom with you. This is not good at 3:00 AM when you’re half asleep, your friggin’ bladder is about to burst, and you have to find the damn bottle and take the lid off of it, while dancing around the floor like a lunatic. Then you have to stagger back to bed, plug the machine back in. Then, you just doze off and they show up to take your blood and vitals. The only choice you have after that is lay there and try to find something you could use to commit suicide.

Besides all of that, they give you two hard wired devices to keep in bed with you. A device that operates the lights, TV, and calls the nurse, and a phone. Every time you get out of bed to try to find your way to the bathroom, you knock both of these devices on the floor. When you roll over in bed you knock these devices onto the floor. The only way to prevent knocking them out of bed is to put the wire under your back and put them on the left side of the bed. Now you no longer knock them out of bed but they are pretty much useless because the wire is too short. If all of this wasn’t bad enough, there is no possible way to make that damn bed comfortable. It has dozens of possible positions but none of them suitable to the human body. They give you a pillow that is totally worthless. I’m not sure what the content of that pillow is, but I’m pretty sure it could be used as a bullet proof vest.

So, maybe you wondered why I wasn’t writing lately. I wasn’t in the mood, OK?

VERITAS VINCIT   ~   LIVE FREE OR DIE