At an Urgent Care walk-in clinic, for the fun experience of healthcare, I fell down a rabbit hole. A severe positional vertigo accompanied by tingling in arms & legs had brought me here. I wasn’t that concerned, but the nurse hooked me up to an EKG, then left & came back with a doctor. The 2 of them stared at the screen saying “that can’t be right.” The doctor used a stethoscope next, because old tech is the fallback I guess. They both exited. The nurse came back with “machine not functioning properly,” & the doctor returned & said I should go directly to the ER. “Do you want us to call an ambulance?” My response “No, thank you. I have a ride,” because those things are above my pay grade. Then I got dressed & reluctantly went to the hospital.

Five hours & counting in the ER waiting room I broke down & asked at the check-in desk why I was still here. I hadn’t been sleeping well & the long wait was making me cranky. Plus I was hungry, having not eaten since before I left home. The snacks in the vending machine were all cookies & chips & candy bars. If I had to live & eat here now, I’d succumb to diabetes & hypertension in no time. Am I in the Bardo?

The check-in woman said “We got slammed & triage determines who gets seen first.” I looked around. There weren’t people strewn about on stretchers, bloodied & moaning. There’d been only 5 or 6 people waiting when I’d arrived. It had filled with more in those 5 hours, but none seemed as if their lives were precipitously close to ending. The Urgent Care people led me to think I was cardiac-arrest-imminent, rushed me to the ER like a baby alien was about to burst from my chest. Apparently my impending heart attack was not as critical as the sniffles sitting next to me. I wondered what on earth I’d said to the triage nurse to make her think I was just stopping in for a howdy-do & a long rest in a hard chair.

Close to hour 6 I got called. Stripped & donned the nightie with no backside, put to bed with a pillow made from a sack of balled-up socks. They took my temp & bp (both of which have always been on the low end, so they took them again) & some vials of my blood. Then stuck my torso with a ridiculous amount of round stickers like it was a crate of organic apples. Put a plastic clothespin on my finger. Also a bag of icy fluid to drain into my arm, just in case I was still a little too comfy. Then they left me there.

Around 2.5 hours later I dozed off. My stomach was actively snarling. About 15 minutes into my nap an alarm went off on the monitor by my head, & woke me up. A nurse rushed in & poked at the machine. Once the alarm fell silent I asked “What was that about?” She replied “Oh, it’s nothing. The monitor said you weren’t breathing is all.”

The doctor eventually wandered in to interrogate me. Somewhere in the middle of recounting my saga I practically yelled “I’m SO hungry!” I had deduced these medical people saw me as a great find, an undead specimen they wished to study. The doctor stepped out & returned with a sandwich, then left again. When I was done eating he came back in. I asked “When can I leave?” He responded with “You want to go home?” like it was unexpected.

Then he started in. “Well, you weren’t dehydrated. You’re not anemic. There’s no arrhythmia. You’re not having a cardiac event…” I was afraid he was going to list the entirety of things I didn’t have, so I interrupted with “Why am I dizzy & my limbs all tingly?” To which he said “Some inner ear issue, probably due to hypoxia.” & that’s how I met Sleep Apnea.

My unconscious self is trying to kill me via suffocation. I suppose that’s better than knives or bludgeons. Maybe it doesn’t like my dreams. Maybe it craves brains. What I’ve discovered is people get all freaky when you fail to register on their devices. They rush you to the ER to sit around & slowly starve. They pump you full of unnecessary fluids, bleed you with glass leeches, & slap 2 dozen stickers all over your body which requires you to play a solo game of Twister to remove them all. Then they run down a litany of diseases you don’t have as though leisurely paging through Gray’s Anatomy. But they do give you a sandwich.