My mom and I took him to the vet against my dads wishes cuz he didn’t want to get stuck with a $150 bill for a dog that’s just on his way to die. I agreed, but cast the deciding vote to go anyway since maybe we’d learn something that would at least ease his pain or make him more useful since he’s no good to me just laying there and occasionally eating. That’s what girlfriends are for.

Vet said he has phenomena and filled a small bottle with pills from a giant ass bottle that looked like it came from Costco. Good thing for my dads sake that it didn’t cost the $150 he complained about and we skated by with a total bill of only $260. awesome.

While waiting for a blood test to see if he had AIDS or whatever, I was looking around the room and took a few minutes to figure out wtf this sign next to the synchronized swimming bulldogs meant.

FOR YOUR SAFETY Please do not ask to restrain your animal? Why the hell would people be coming into a vet and asking to hold their wild ass attack dogs down and the vet being all “oh no no, we don’t want your own animal to bite you, so please let us be the ones to force it into submission thnx”.

Whatever. Buddy’s not breathing so hard anymore already and its easier for him to get up n stuff. Still an obese blog of gross, but when I’m not here visiting, my mom needs something to feed and nurture, so that’s not gonna change any time ever. He’ll die overweight and old. but not this week.

So great was the psychotic pounding queasy pain and so fearful that death was doing a slow-motion electric-slide into harvesting my soul was I under the torment of a 7 hour torture freakout horrorshow yet it all ended with a 15 minute nap that left me waking up feeling fine…

The culprit, I’ve only now figured out to be was the dreaded V: I was suffering side effects from the Vicodin knock-off I had taken…

I’m sick with some nasty flu-type shit and have an infection in my left ear which was making my head feel like a car-lifting magnet swinging through a junkyward of old throwing darts and hospital needles, so I turned to my mom for help. Naturally, she guided me toward taking old heavy duty prescription medication, prescribed to someone else.

“Naturally” is comedy gold here cuz my mom is a wheat and granola anti-drug type who would more likely tell me to chew some organic herb than take an Aspirin, let alone be all “oh, your father has some prescription pain killers here in the pantry still. why don’t you try one of those?”

The large white pills were Hydrocodone/APAP’s, said in small print underneath to be “substituted for Vicodin tablets”. Okay, I’ve heard of Vicodin. only in context of people taking them recreationally, so I figure the worst that could happen is that I get a little high and an awesome nights sleep.

Early morning August 6th I went back to bed with my Facebook status announcing:

It’s been 4 hours since I had a Vicodin to calm the raging pain in my ear, so technically it should be safe to take this “flu or cold medicine” that the Vic label says not to take *with* it. id also like to take an aspirin but im petrified of Heath Ledgering myself so I’m sticking to just the NyQuil 4 hours post Vico. this should be safe… but if i wake up dead: let everyone know that it was a fucking accident…

cheers to a little of the old ultra-violence

I woke up still feeling sick as ze fuck (as the French say), but not throbbing in pain like I was before I popped the pills and downed the meds. So a little later when pain started to resurface, I took some aspirin, which may have been from the placebo bottle cuz it did nothing to help anything. Still afraid of Ledgering my young life short, I waited to take anything further, but planned on taking the Vicodin clone in a few hours. I did. and I guess, I shouldn’t have…

Few hours later and I’m burning. the fuck. up. I keep checking to see if my head is literally on in flames and am disappointed when its just my regular old head.

So I’m laying there with hard hurt and undying burn of a thousand suns and I’m also really weak and moving is a big chore. I get in a bath and try to fight fire with fire. It actually kindov works as the hot water balanced it all out and I felt better while it was running over me. I’m getting weaker though and nauseous as hell, so I make it only to my parents bed when exiting their bathroom. I get in it and stay there, drifting in and out of a pain coma that is getting worse with more emphasis on that constant about-to throw up feeling that lets you know its possible but its not on its way quite yet.

I’m moaning and having a terrible time, but I lay there for 3 hours from 2 to 5PM. Several times when banging on the wall behind the bed to get my moms attention (bitch didn’t have the courtesy to find a bell like I asked), I tell her I’m getting worse and will need to see a doctor. She never takes this plea seriously throughout this story. First I say doctor, then later I say emergency room, then later I say 911. She thinks I’m delirious but I’m fucking serious. I can’t make it to a car. I can’t lift my head anymore and am in constant pain and nausea, moving is difficult and opening my eyes is practically impossible. I feel like I’m shutting down. ie DYING.

I wanted medical professionals to lift and strap me to a gurney and wheel me away to professional and immediate care. Instead, my mom gets my dad to come help me up. Going vertical was like a roller coaster. I need to be walked by hand, taking extremely slow steps towards the door to go seek help. On my way out, my sister extends a bottle of water to me and pauses with it like “okay, why the fuck aren’t you taking it?” not realizing that I can’t frigging turn around. I blindly try to find it behind me with my hand and grab it but can’t hold on to it so my mom takes it and we get to the car.

As soon as the car door closes… I. start. BAWLING. uncontrollable and intense crying. like a baby in an onion chopping contest. My mom asks what? and with a slight laugh through the pouring tears, I say “I have no idea. I can’t control it”. I think it was my body trying to get oxygen because my breathing was getting more and more shallow and walking to the car was a huge and painful chore, so it sent signals to cry, which was acting like a super-yawn since it forced breaths in and out. It also could have been a distress signal since so many faculties were shutting down + pain = wtf else do you do but cry like a little bitch? I thought it was too interesting to try to subside so I just went with it and sobbed the whole way to the doctor, disappointed that I was unable to turn my head at stoplights to see and laugh at the reactions other cars must have had to me and also pissed that I did not grab my video camera before leaving so I could see what this ridiculous spectacle looked like.

After passing it, we turn around and finally find this clinic thing she looked up to take me to, which I’m already not happy about because I specifically ordered “emergency room hospital” and instead was given “chain-company Wal-Mart type medical clinic”. Walking in is just as slow, awkward, difficult and painful as walking to the car was, except there wasn’t a parking lot or waiting room full of people in my front yard to witness the sight of a young sprightly looking chap in a muscle shirt and basketball shorts moving slower than snot, stiff as a cripple, drenched in tears and taking grandma steps towards his destination. Luckily, I don’t get embarrassed by things I can’t control or had no involvement in doing, so I didn’t feel ashamed or anything but felt bad for everyone in the waiting room watching me since they clearly had to be embarrassed for me. I tried to shoot friendly “how do you do” smiles through the grimace of pain to set them at ease that everything is just standard fair and I’ll get through it.

It was negative 60 degrees in there, as it is in any medical facility/department store but they gave me a blanket and thank God I had brought a pillow from home to allow me to lean back in slightly less agonizing discomfort while I waited endlessly to be helped. We waited an entire hour before they called my fucking name – meanwhile I’m watching kids, teens, adults, all just stroll in with casual swaggers and skips in their step as they were called before me.

This is where an EMERGENCY room would have given me preference… But no, THESE people checked in ahead of time – you can even check in online, isn’t that nice – and that’s the only priority this shithole gives its customers, naturally. That hour of wait was a painful endless panic where I considered multiple times just getting up and walking out of the god damn place to force my mothers hand who would not listen when I started saying that we needed to leave, since after all, we had “already checked in” so of course we were required by law under penalty of execution to stay put. jerks.

At least when we were called in and put in the room it was mere seconds before a doctor rushed in to tend to my very visible suffering, diagnose me, give me the care I came for and get me on my way in a speedy and efficient fashion. – Just Kidding – I waited in that god damn torture chamber for another hour and 35 god damn minutes before someone saw me.

I got another blanket and tried hard to get at least 6% comfortable (i only achieved 3%) while writhing in what felt like an elevator on a slow descent to death. The sharp pain, fevered head and insanity inducing nausea were terrible, but the inability to open my eyes, the difficulty that was involved in breathing and what felt like dippings into blacking out that would curve back up right before actually going all-dark sent me over the top.

On the one hand I was sad that I wouldn’t be able to blog about this, but I was also really glad that dying at least meant unplugging the power to the pain machine. I was furious that I was not in an emergency room hospital, but I was comforted that at least the guilt of not doing so would haunt my mother years after my death. The pounding and striking pain in my ear made me fear that if I do escape this Inquisition alive, I might have lost my hearing to its ravages – but again I was comforted by at least having the guilt to forever remind dear mother with (“oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you wanted me to take that to the trash yesterday. did you ask when I was facing *this* way? cuz you know I’m deaf in that ear ever since you took me to that shitty clinic instead of the emergency room”).

FINALLY, a Medical Doctor enters the room and is ready to help and give me the care I need. – Just Kidding again – its a Doctors assistant who looks in my ear and confirms its infected, looks at my face and confirms I’m in mind splintering agony, and looks at her clipboard and confirms I don’t have insurance.

She offers me a list of prescriptions. I say yes to the antibody for my ear, pills for pain, and stuff for cough. She offers me an anti-biotic shot to get it in my system right away, but when she says it will cost $118, I tell her I would rather die. She laughs. I was serious.

We left the clinic after spending a total of 2 hours 45 minutes there, without ever seeing an actual doctor. The privileges to wait 2 and a half hours to see a doctors assistant who would assign me a piece of paper allowing me to purchase drugs for $90 cost me $200. $290 to wait in tortuously uncomfortable pain – made more tortuous that the Cuba Gooding Jr film Radio was playing on a god damn loop in both the waiting room and the doctors doctors assistants room – and receive permission to buy pills.

We stopped at Walgreens on the way home and they were closed. Wtf.

So we go home and I go to bed and finally sleep. I wake up when my mom has returned from a different drug store with my prescription and I feel fine now. I can get up and walk around and my pain and discomfort level is only at “a lot” and not “shit, i can’t handle this”.

I had 2 bites of steak and some black forest cake my sister made and went back to sleep.

The autopsy I did on what the shit exactly happened to me showed I was feeling the side effects of that second Vicodin (no idea why the first one went through just fine) which include panic, nausea, shortness of breath, and almost-fucking-dying.