So How Are You Doing? (Redux -The Noon Edition)

walk right in without knocking.


Believe it or not, the writing of yesterday's post was interrupted in EXACTLY the way I was describing at that very moment. The new Chaplain came in WHILE I was typing that last sentence. No knock, no invitation. So I couldn't finish my thought. I CAN NEVER FINISH MY THOUGHT.

As, I was saying - if the nurse isn't watching, people just...come in. Now, you can be a jerk and yell at them and tell them to get out. But it's not like shooing a salesman off your porch. You're going to see this guy in the halls about three times a week as long as you live in this house. Do you really want to yell and be a jerk to everyone who barges into the room? Maybe you should, but there are social repercussions. It doesn't take long to develop a reputations as being grumpy, ill-tempered, "stressed out," or "that guy with all the signs on his door." So you have to just deal with it, sorry. Make sure you wear clean underwear because you literally don't ever know who's going to see it.

The worst of these types of incidents are what I call the "finger people." Imagine that while you're sitting in your room, you're waiting on something. In my case a heart. But maybe for you, it's the callback for your dream job, or the phone call confirming your pregnancy. Maybe a loved one has been missing and you're waiting to hear from the police. Or the answer to a marriage proposal. Fill in the blank with the thing that would stress you out the most - how about the call to tell you whether or not the cancer was benign or not? Except you won't get this news by phone. It will be delivered personally to your room, probably by someone you don't know and have never met. So you're in a constant state of anticipation.

Without a knock, the door swings open. There stands someone you don't recognize, and they seem very hurried and excited. Is this it? Is the the moment you've been waiting for? Could it finally be happening? The wait has been agonizing (in my case, four years), but maybe today is the day. All these thoughts flash through your mind as the person holds up a wait-a-second finger so they can hear someone talking to them. You can't see who it is, but it just might be that Big Thing you've been waiting for.

The person walks away, but leaves the door open, because they're coming back. Of course they're coming back. They have big news to tell you and it's urgent, so they've just left the door open for a second while they make sure they have the details of your Big News right. You continue to stare at the doorway, imagining all the phone calls you need to make to share your Big Moment with those closest to you, so they in turn can pass it on to all those who have been waiting with you, hoping and praying for you for so long, that you'll get the News you want, that you need, in order to get on with your life.

And you wait.

And you wait.

5 minutes. The suspense is killing you.

10 minutes. You can't take it anymore.

You step into the hall to find


(Hang on a minute. someone just came in to clean your room, and even though you're hanging by your toenails waiting for this Person to come back - or maybe you're just trying to read a blog post and the author keeps interrupting himself - the cleaning person insists on making small talk about the weather, your (now cold) food, the television show they watched last night, or whatever. This goes on for about 10 minutes)

So you step into the hall and the person isn't there. You ask around and find out that no, they really didn't need you for anything, they just had the wrong room. (This has happened to me three



Hang on - nurse is here to get vitals again.



times now with the X-Ray team). So you sit back down, try to eat your cold food, and you keep waiting. And waiting. I hate finger people. I want to break their finger.

Time for lunch  - wait for your escort, then off to the kitchen again. Remember to eat healthy!

Today's choices:

Cheese steak with what looks like Oscar Meyer beef slices, canned Nacho cheese, raw onions, and a cold hoagie bun.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken, greasy "creole" cabbage (there is no seasoning on this cabbage and adding a rich adjective doesn't make it so. It's unseasoned, steamed cabbage), BLT pasta salad - Oo! Look at all that bacon!

Ground "Beef" BBQ (actual beef doesn't smell like toejam. What is this stuff?), with baked beans, and cold (well, warm) slaw (you're allergic to mayo, so no slaw for you. Pick another veggie).

Curry (curry sauce from a can, enough salt to kill an entire continent) with fatty chicken, overcooked shrimp, or flavorless basmati rice (the people behind the counter couldn't pick ginger out of a spice line-up, even if you made them snort it).

Sushi! A healthy alternative! And it actually looks good! But you can't get that - you're not allowed to use your $10 meal ticket on the sushi. You actually thought they were actually going to make healthy food available to eat? Joke's on you. Move along.

Pizza, slathered in greasy pepperoni or sausage, and high-salt mozzarella cheese. You'll need a pair of tongs to retrieve a slice from the grease pond it's floating in.

Look - there's a whole counter with healthy choices like couscous, low-carb pasta salads, and veggie mixes. You can get something from there, or buy a drink to go with your meal. But you can't do both. Upon closer inspection, the sodium content of most of these is at least 580mg per serving. Same for both of today's soups.

How about a sandwich? Which fatty, sodium laden, Oscar Meyer lunchmeat would you like on it? Or a salad - wait, you can't eat a lot of green leafy veggies because it affects your blood coagulation too much and could do harm. Skip the salad.

Don't even think about trying to get a full meal, a drink, and a piece of fruit or a cookie for your $10 voucher, or you'll have to go out of pocket every meal.

Get a drink - would you like a soda, a chemically enhanced diet soda, skim milk, or sugary fruit juice? Or there's weird stuff like Basil flavored Coconut Water, or lab-created "energy" drinks (I tried one of these a few weeks ago and thought I was going to need a gastric bypass. Avoid). You can drink water, of course. For every meal. Three times a day. For months on end. They also have milkshakes. But watch your blood sugar level!

Okay, did you pick something? Great! Follow your escort back to your room. Your food is cold again so hopefully you didn't get anything that won't microwave.

Or maybe you didn't pick anything. Maybe your spouse brought up some food to your small refrigerator in the other bedroom. Or maybe you yourself made something and put it there. It's way healthier and tastier than anything in your kitchen, and you made enough to last for the week, for situations just like this.

You go to retrieve that food. But alas, it's not there. The food policeman who lives in your house with you threw it away. Why? Because it was more than three days old. Didn't you know that all food, no matter what it is, spoils after three days? You didn't need the containers the food was in did you? Hope not, because they're gone too. Maybe you should have just gotten the fried chicken.

Screw it - you call Dominos or the chinese place from your room and have it delivered. By this time, your stomach has started eating itself. The food arrives. It's hot, it's fresh, it's full of preservatives and sodium, but no more so than the food in your kitchen you decided not to eat.

You lift a bite to your mouth.

The door opens. It's a dietician. An illiterate dietician. She slipped past your escort, just like the Chaplain. The staff has been so kind as to ask them to come talk to you about your food choices. She informs you that at each meal, you should try to eat:

1) A card-deck sized portion of lean meat (I'm assuming in this case that would be the overcooked shrimp from the curry that you didn't get because you don't even like Indian food - unless that "beef" was actually hedgehog or mongoose, in which case you should have went with the BBQ. At least I think hedgehog and mongoose are considered "lean").

2) A vegetable - did you pick the flavorless cabbage (assuming you like cabbage), one of the many starches posing as veggies, the mayo-based coleslaw from a can? No? Well, you could just eat a salad, she says. The ones you really need to not eat much because you'll die? Yeah. Those salads.

3) A starch - those are plentiful, in fact they comprise about 75% of the food in your kitchen. You never realized there were 476 ways to prepare a potato, but someone in your kitchen does!

After a quasi-scolding about your food choices, you choke down your cold pizza. Wait - where are you going? Uh-uh. You're staying in your room all day. You *might* be able to get your escort to take you to another room or even outside later, but it's raining outside. It's always raining. It's like living in Seattle or London. But crappier.

Next: on the afternoon edition of "So, How Are You Doing? (Redux)," you're going to try to write an e-mail, or a heartfelt letter to a loved one, or watch a 44 minute television episode. This will require a few uninterrupted thoughts and a bit of concentration. Brace yourself.