Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version

The Black Sticky Stuff That Band-Aids Leave Behind | Felix Lucero

It didn’t take long for us to arrive at the emergency room of Marin General Hospital, and under different circumstances, it might have been an enjoyable ride. My heart was beating fast again, maybe from the excitement of this adventurous trip, or maybe from being in a state of panic as if I were running from a knife-wielding maniac.

Before they pushed me into the emergency room, I thought of the television show, ER, and expected to see Dr. Ross operating on a person with a bomb attached to their kidney. However, we didn’t crash through the doors of the emergency room like I imagined and, once inside, I was the only excitement to be found.

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I remember, as a child, the circus once came to town. I knew this not from attending a performance, but from seeing a circus elephant walking down the street. At first glance, the elephant only appeared out of the corner of my eye, but as soon as the image registered, my head whipped around like a gazelle that had stopped a lion in the brush.

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Having people stare at you as if you were a circus animal isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there was something else in the stares of the people at the hospital, something that wasn’t clear to me at first.

While I waited in the ER, a nurse started to examine my IV. “Those damn nurses at the prison never put these in right,” she said. When she pulled out the tube attached to the IV, blood started to come out onto my arm. She quickly adjusted the needle and attached a new tube. The blood was already beginning to dry as the nurse walked away.

Finally, after three hours in the ER, I was moved up to cardiology on the third floor. As I was brought to my own private room, I noticed an older man—a patient, I assumed—standing a few feet away from the room’s entrance. The look in his eyes eerily resembled the expression of the people in the ER. I smiled, but his expression was etched in stone.

As I lay in bed decoding the expressions of these strangers in the hospital, a doctor walked in and explained that more bloodwork and some X-rays of my heart needed to be done before he could determine the cause of my irregular heartbeat. After he left, a nurse promptly walked in to take more of my blood. » next page »

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