Entries this day: After_party Janette

After party

8:37am CDT Saturday 14 September 2002

I'm pretty much still sleeping since the party. I have slept while floating on the pool, sitting in the hottub, sleeping on my back inside.

10:43am

At Denny's now with Joey 80 cents on the tollway to get here. We're both glad that we don't live on a tollway ourselves. The rest of the group (from Jackie's Party) will be coming shortly.

11:01am

Joey points out that this engagement has been a lot like a rally:

Silent Football Mafia Dance with strobelight Limited sleep Denny's More than one UU (8: Joey, Jackie (Judy, Janice, Jackie the Sackie on Yackie, Jackie the RE Board Liaison on Yac, Jack the Sac on Yac (SF name))), Jack the Sac on Yac, Aaron Ryan, Danny Seigal, Ryan McC, Rob, Janet (friend of Jackie's) (Dave points out that more than 1/2 of the group now at Denny's is UU)

Some things made it unlike a rally:

Two per blanket Pool / Hot tub Billiards No talent show No workshops Jackie Purdy's birthday Katy with a Y's birthday No worship Aged out UUs (2: Ryan, Danny) smoking (out front of the house only) only one night

12:03pm

Nathie has several talents: drumming (in a band), scuba diving (he argues that it's not a talent, but we argue that he could have drowned), Etch-A-Sketch drawing (he's apparently really good), and MS Paint drawing (Katy says he's pretty good at MS Paint, but she sees it as a bunch of lines and squiggles. He'll have to show her some of his better ones, he says.)

12:26pm

Playing Ceiling Wall Floor now. Most people don't know how to play. Good stuff.

Janette

5:34pm CDT Saturday 14 September 2002

Janette and I are in the emergency room. We went down to Turtle Creek and explored down a big drain tube that drains water from a lake thing that I'm not going to try and describe yet.

Inside the tube the bottom was curved and slick with slime and she slipped and I heard her head CONK on the concrete. Ow ow ow oh shit. I hugged her head and held the back of it. Blood drizzled down my hand and her hair and shirt and eww. Doh, this wasn't the plan at all.

"Okay," I said, trying to remain calm yet assuring, "we need to go to the hospital." I showed her, "there's blood, see?"

"Oh, I don't need to do that; I'll just take a shower."

"Joey is going to fire me if she finds out that I didn't make you go to an ER."

Put a blanket over the seat, checked her eyes for dialation (Janette jokingly crossed her eyes while I looked) and got ice on the way home, which spilled lots of cubes and was pretty funny if not for the blood and guts. Okay no guts, but blood.

Janette's a brave girl.

6:09pm

Watched an episode of the Simpsons (Homer = Billionaire for a day) and the ice we had originally all melted, so I flirted with the girl who registered Janette and got some new crushed ice out of a machine somewhere. Awesome.

- - - -

Background info:

At 4:30pm, we left a note for Joey that we're going for a walk down at Turtle Creek.

Drove there; it's not too far, and I told Janette all about my joys and concerns from the past weeks and past few days. Was awestruck by a chasm in the middle of the creek, where water was perfectly calm at the top and just cascasding gently into a cylinder about 25 feet in diameter and deep enough that we couldn't see the bottom. Wow! wow! wow!

How incredibly cool to just see the water falling into some mystery aberation in the otherwise perfectly still water. Niagra falls on a miniature scale, but still pretty big.

Walked across a street and I noticed a tunnel down in the ravine. "There's our entrance to the hole!"

So we climbed down into the ravine and walked down this large tunnel that got darker and darker as we progressed. About a hundred + feet into it, the tunnel curved and presto, we were looking into the chasm from below. Magic and amazing.

I slipped a bit, but caught myself, and we were all good and about to leave when Janette was walking her way down the slope and I thought about helping her when SHWOOop CONK oh fuck that sucks.

Held her, then walked her back through the tunnel and out to the car.

- - - -

6:39pm

Proof that Janette is cool and tough:

"We could get the whole room to play The Jackie Purdy Game. Everyone could sing a song about their injury."

7:19pm

The guy across this part of the waiting area has football pants and pads on and his arm in a sling. I asked him how long he's been here.

Since 3:30. He has a deep(?) would between the tarsals(?) / metatarsals (?) of his hand; he got it hitting the face mask on another player's helmet.

Ow. They've been here for 4 hours. Poop.

8:44pm

Decided to try our luck elsewhere and took Janette off the list at the ER and drove to the Quack Shack near her house. But it was closed. It closed at 5pm, so we might have barely made it if we had gone there first. Oh I think we would not have since we left a note for Joey at 4:30 for our original walk.

Went to a drive-thru for vanilla shake (me) and chocolate malt (she) and then to her house to look up another 24 hour emergency room that's not so backed up, since when I called 411 on my phone they were unable to help me if I didn't have the name of the place. It's not like we need to call 911, but seems like there's a market in Dallas for 24 hour care centers given that mofos in here are waiting 5+ hours to be seen. That shit is fucked up.

Thankfuly, the nurse was willing to put Janette's paperwork back in line in the same order it had been before she left. I'm glad about that; she didn't have to do this for us.

But seriously, five fuckin' hours? What a fucked up system.

9:03pm

Hehehe, a woman just queried me about my computer. I like it a lot.

Oh, and for the record, this is the first time in a long time (since Arwen twisted her knee???) that I've been in an ER and not been the reason I was there.

10:24pm

Just now we are back in the ER. The nurse has done a preliminary look and guesses that she'll be able to get stitches. She'll definitely get a tetanus shot. Saw our football guy who had already gotten stitches in his hand. It was split about 1/2 an inch into his hand betwen two of his fingers. I think pointer and middle finger.

10:51pm

Courtney the nurse has shaved a 1.5 x 2 inch section on the back of Janette's head with strokes that made me go "eeek! not so hard!" in my mind as Janette squeezed my hand and I squeezed back while watching Courtney reveal a dark red split over the lump with lilly white skin and super short hairs growing all around, and little pink rivulets of blood easing their way down into the hair below. If I had my camera, I would take a picture and I promise I would put it online.

Janette has just left for the restroom to try seeing the injury.

- - - -

The cat to our right is snoring inconsistently with lots of starts and stops.

The cat to our left said he pushed a bottle too hard into a trashcan and it broke, slicing up his hand. They just took X-rays of his hand with a portable X-ray machine to see if he has glass embedded that must be removed before stitching it up.

I'm thinking he had to push pretty hard to break a glass bottle.

11:21pm

Oh man Janette and I are laughing laughing, as we wonder if Joey is going to ground us and not let me hang with Janette anymore. Just called Joey, but she's not home, probably is spending the night somewhere. We left a note that included, "don't listen to the answering machine message, it's a surprise and sorta funny. Remember Pandora's Box!" So we know that she probably hasn't listened to the message and has no idea about what's going on and that her mom is about to get staples in her head in the emergency room, etc blah blah blah.

So we were joking about catching up with Joey wherever she is and being all, "hey Jo, .. look!!" as Janette twists around to reveal a bloody gash on the back of her head. "Here, I'll put some matted bloody hair on your stuffed bear so you can keep it."

"Mommy loves you, go back to sleep now."

11:51pm

Man, how long will it take for the doctor to get here to staple her head?

12:07am

Nurse just breezed through and saw Janette's head and breezed out. Maybe something will happen soon.

12:15am

We are just dumbfounded by the string of medications the nurse next to us with the inconsistent snoring guy just rattled off. All the stuff he is taking from morpheine to brain medication to heart medication to nicotine patches and all kinds of shit. He's had difficulty moving his arm and fingers and obviously difficulty breathing. His saline level in his blood is low and he doesn't drink a lot of water but does drink some tea. I'm guessing more like Lipton than Japanese Green Tea.

"That's Western medicine at its finest," I say.

12:24am

Nurse breezed through again, "the doctor is on the phone right now with a patient, but I'm sure she'll be with you in a second."

12:28am

The hand guy just told the nurse that he pressed an aquarium too hard and it broke.

Down the hall we can hear a woman crying after some cat in her family came in with gunshot wounds.

12:44am

Kirk is back and swabbing her head now.

12:55am

Kirk just gave Janette and the bottle/aquarium guy each a tetnus shot.

2:49am

Done. I passed out almost. Watched some of the staples as they were put in, and the clicking of the stapler got to me I think. And it kept misfiring and the doc had to pull some out of her head.

The first time the stapler didn't work correctly, the doctor started to whistle as if to assure us, everything is fine, don't worry about a thing as I rip these staples out and throw them onto the floor. Janette was wincing hard with pain, even though the doctor had novacained or lidocained her injury (causing a lot of wincing as well (and a lot of bleeding, which he said was a good thing since it means the cut will heal quite effectively)).

As I felt myself passing out, I put my head down to get blood back into it but that didn't help as I could still hear the gun clicking its evil springy misfirings and the doctor whistling his soothing tune.

Once Janette was done, I lay down on the stretcher until I was fully un-passed out.

3:40am

Went to the pharmacy now instead of in the day because I believed it would be a lot less crowded now than during the day. I was right, but the pharmacist said we were lucky; it can get crowded any time of the day or night.