Kinda surreal: My trip to the emergency room yesterday

     Have you ever sleepwalked through a dream?  One that made little or no sense?  Salvador Dali comes to mind, especially that scene with the clock.

10:00 am:  I'm feeling sort of fishy.  My back hurts a little.  I just got back from New York and Los Angeles.  Paranoia sets in.  Maybe I've got COVID?  https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/05/01/covid-why-sweden-has-already-won-the-debate-on-covid-19-lockdown-policy/

12:00 noon:  I walk over to the emergency room at the local hospital.  They've moved the intake area outside to a tent.  Someone takes my temperature, checks me for weapons and waves me through.  I walk over to sit on a folding chair in the hospital's driveway.  Only two other patients are there.

     One patient had caught her index finger in a blender while making a smoothie.  "You're probably gonna lose that nail -- but it will grow back," I say.  She nods sheepishly.

     The other patient has back trouble too.  "Have you ever read Revelations?" he asks.  "This here is The Rapture."  Then he rambles on and on about his unhappy childhood in some podunk town in the Central Valley, how he drinks four Dr. Peppers each evening and then has trouble sleeping.  "But never touch alcohol...."  I try to politely change chairs.

1:30 pm:  Finally a really nice doctor sees me inside another white tent.  "We will need a blood panel and a urine sample.  Here, take this cup...."

2:30 pm:  I've just finished drinking four cups of water, each cup the size of a Starbucks latte grande.  Still can't pee.  Back to the folding chair.  EMTs bring in an elderly man on a gurney.  COVID?  I'm afraid to ask.

4:00 pm:  This is starting to get annoying.  I had thought that I'd just be in and out with a quick diagnosis and some pills -- but no.  I'm still stuck in the bathroom trying to come up with a urine sample.

5:15 pm:  I did it!  Two more grande-sized cups of water later, I come up with a few drops.  But then I accidentally drop the freaking sample cup into the sink.  Crap.  Too much performance anxiety. 

     Now all I want to do is go home, take some vitamin C and call myself in the morning.  This has gone on far too long.  I've been here for over five hours.  "Now we are going to have to admit you."  Wha?  Nothing's all that wrong with me -- but I'm now the only patient they've got.  I start thinking about that old U. Utah Phillips song, "They will keep you and they'll never let you go...."  https://no1lyrics.com/song/green-rolling-hills-713294

5:45 pm:  Here I am, in a hospital bed, strapped to a machine that measures my oxygen levels.  A warning beeper starts going off.  Having nothing else to do, I count the beeps (finally giving up after the 948th beep) and go back to reading Lee Goldberg's latest murder mystery, Killer Thriller.  I've read 103 pages here so far.

     They've got me in a hospital gown by now.  A really nice nurse comes in, accompanied by a student.  "And this is where we draw the blood," she says, pointing to the vein in my left arm.  "Now you try it...." 

6:30 pm:  Everyone has disappeared.  I've finally managed to pee into the sample cup but no one seems interested in taking it away to the lab.  Haven't eaten since breakfast.

6:45 pm:  Finally another really nice nurse comes in.  "I'm hungry," I say.  "What if I starve to death!" I joke. 

     "It takes four days to starve to death," she replies.  Good to know.

7:00 pm:  I've finally had enough!  Now I'm even starting to worry about catching some iatrogenic disease or even COVID itself and being stuck here forever, perpetually sick.  I pull off the wires, get dressed and start to leave.  "You can't do that!" says another nurse.  Then she threatens to write the dread "AMA" in my chart!  "Leaving against medical advice."  https://consentfactory.org/2020/05/04/virus-of-mass-destruction/

     At this point I start to pass out.  Has it been four days yet?  They plop me into a wheelchair, put me back into the bed, wire me up again and hand me a stale turkey sandwich.  I gulp it down without even washing my hands first.

7:15 pm:  Finally the doctor comes in.  "Have you seen a lot of COVID patients here," I ask him out of curiosity.  https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-reinfections-were-false-positives.html

     "Not that many."  He shrugs.  And then he finally tells me what is wrong with me.  "You have low sodium levels."  Oh.  Okay.

7:30 pm:  As I leave the hospital ER, I notice that there was another separate indoor waiting room where four or five sad-looking older men sit resignedly.  Might this be a specially-designated COVID waiting room?  I will never know -- because I'm too hungry to stop and find out.

7:55 pm:  I stagger into the nearby Whole Foods minutes before it closes, grab the first food I see off the shelf and gulp that down too, ending a very surreal day.

PS:  I have a friend who is an ER doctor.  "I'm beginning to think that all this COVID thing is just a myth dreamed up so that the Federal Reserve can steal our economy," I told her this morning.  "Just look at me.  Since mid-March I've been to San Diego, Tijuana, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles (on essential business) and spent seven hours a freaking emergency room -- and don't even have so much as a cough."   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-jBdU2vQA

     "Oh, no.  It's real," she replied.  "There are doctors and nurses who are dying of COVID."  And I finally believe her because I trust her -- even though it's almost impossible to believe even a single word that the mainstream media tells us (remember Iraq's phony WMDs, the shockingly spuriously false charges that Syria used chemical weapons, the Gulf of Tonkin fabrications and all those Kuwait incubator baby lies?)  http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/sustainability-education-responsible-truthfulness-and-hypnotic-phenomena_2020_04/ 

     Anyway, here's my latest theory about COVID-19, combining both personal experience, that chat with my ER doctor friend and the latest scientific data:  That there are two different strains of COVID.  One is totally deadly, a microbial Freddie Kruger, lurking around to assassinate our doctors, nurses and most vulnerable.  And then there are some milder strains of COVID that even Mary Poppins could cure.  https://plandemicmovie.com/

     Wait, what?  New information just came in:  According to a German virologist, the more someone is exposed to the virus, the more severe their case.  So that might explain why doctors, nurses and rest home residents are getting so sick.  Wow.  Send them all to the beach, Governor Newsom!
https://unherd.com/thepost/german-virologist-finds-covid-fatality-rate-of-0-24-0-36/

      Plus there is also the issue of how best to actually deal with the COVID epidemic.  To paraphrase Hamlet, "To lock-down or not to lock-down?"  And it's becoming increasingly clear that America's "lock 'em up" attitude is simply bad science.   https://thecritic.co.uk/is-the-lockdown-killing-people/ 

      By locking us up, we are apparently giving the deadly strains more chances to act like Jason in Friday the 13th around our doctors and nurses -- while giving the more benign strains less chance to give us herd immunity (and also giving the Federal Reserve mafia even more chances to steal all our money).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD-jBdU2vQA
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