Day Fifty-Eight

    ****NAMES CHANGED TO PROTECT PORTLAND'S STREET KIDS*****

I wake up with a swollen finger and an ear ache. To top it off it's Saturday so there's nothing open until 1pm. We aren't sure what to do with ourselves but in the end we go to Day Program #2 to see if they'll let us in early as we are both really miserable.

The staff guy won't let us in. It's obvious he's having a bad day and taking it out on us as usually he's a really cool guy. Kitten Lady hits a bowl someone else lights. The staff guy asks what it is. She blows it in his face and says, "That's what it is." This gets us excluded for the rest of the day. Just great.

I want to nap and watch television so I request a cab to take us to the hospital to have my yellow, swollen finger looked at. The guy agrees only to get rid of us and gets a taxi to take us to the Legacy hospital. They take us back pretty fast but into a regular doctor's office rather than a room with a bed and a television. The doctor barely glances at my finger and says my ear ache is a swollen lymph-node  worsened by an abundance of wax in my ear. When he leaves the room I barely touch my finger nail and a stream of pus shoots out of it. It startles me so much I scream. I run to show KL the pus and it squirts again hitting her in the shoulder and Tweak in the face. I feel like Spider Man.

"This beats pepper spray, no one would fuck with us outside," I say.

KL demands I tell the doctor what's going on. I yell and the nurse comes in and says what I already know, the release of pus is a good thing and will mean less pressure when I try to write or crochet. I am not satisfied with this doctor.  I'm sorry but I want some more exciting information when my finger shoots pus out of the nail.

We leave the hospital and since we are on one of the sides of town I love but never get to go to I drag KL to one of the hippie stores I really like. KL sleeps on a bench while I browse the Tarot decks they have for sale. I'm not huge on reading cards but I have a love of the art on the cards and how different artists interpret them. I find a deck that seems promising but I obviously don't have money so I slip them in KL's oversized purse before helping her hobble out. We're both starving so we split a sandwich from Subway before calling a cab to take us to OHSU.

OHSU is once again packed so for the second time in two days we are put on the pediatrics side. The doctor actually examines my nail and other areas of my skin that don't look so good right now. She says I have a lot of extra wax in my ear she can try to get out of my ear. She first tries with some sort of pokey stick to pull the wax out but it's too dry. She tells us if we're patient enough she can irrigate them later.

Seeing as the main reason we came in was to watch television and take a nap we are certainly patient enough and I'm ready and waiting to milk it for all it's worth. It takes hours for them to have the time to do it but this is of course okay with us. It's nice to have somewhere semi-private to hang out for once.

They don't give us food or spoil us like the previous nurses but we really don't mind despite our growling stomachs. (Okay, I'll speak for myself I really didn't care.) They put drops in my ear to soften the wax before they try to irrigate them and then send me to the pharmacy to get antibiotics. KL decides to step out for a cigarette while I do the drug run.

I beat her back to the room. When she tries to wheel herself back in she is cornered by an old mean lady who tells her to put the cat outside. I mouth to her to just put Tweak in my backpack then come back in. She goes out to do this and then doesn't come back in.

The nursing student starts to irrigate my ear and while it's not my favorite sensation it doesn't hurt. The mean old lady takes the syringe and digs it so deep in my ear that I start screaming. I'm jumping off the table as she pushes me down so hard I can feel the pain all the way down to my stomach. I'm screaming for her to stop.

The original doctor hears the commotion and comes back in to put an end to this Chinese water torture. She says the wax has been pushed farther back and is now resting on my ear drum. I'm in tears it hurts so bad. She gives me some Ibuprofen and Tylenol and sends me on my way. I walk out without even signing the release paper work.

I find KL sitting in the waiting room. She says the mean old lady told her I didn't want her to come back into the room which we all know is a lie. I wail and scream, "They stuck it so deep in my ear. It hurts and I can't hear anything now." KL is torn between wanting to laugh at my pathetic face and feeling I look so pathetic she can't. (She is commenting and said I should put, "or smacking the lady in the face").

"What do you even mean? They stuck what in your ear too deep?"

I scream, telling her what happened. I can't hear myself talk but I'm pretty sure the rest of Portland can. When I calm down we're laughing and crying about the mean old lady shoving shit in my ear.

"Only we could come into the hospital faking and leave injured," we laugh.

KL hates crutches and we're both not too happy with the hospital. Obviously, the only logical thing to do is to highjack a wheelchair. The regular ones you can wheel yourself all have giant metal bars sticking up off of them, "I just realized those have a purpose," KL says about them, "They're so people can't take them."

She's a smart one isn't she?

This means we must resort to stealing a really heavy blue one that can only be pushed from behind. We aren't quite sure if we can pull this one off. To push it you have to hold a bar closed and the chair is bigger than both of us put together. Pushing her is damn near impossible as the chair itself weighs about a thousand pounds and Tweak is a fat ass. We get her on the bus though neither of us have any idea how we pulled it off.

We head back downtown where we have just enough time to get a free slice of pizza from a local joint. (Given not stolen). Then we get ice cream from another grocery store (stolen not given) and go to shelter.

Getting KL and her wheel chair up the stairs to shelter is a task but once completed I'm finally able to go upstairs and get some much needed sleep.

--mm