The Bloody Doors Off

Tendonitis. Nerve pain. My right foot is, for lack of a better medical term, fucked up.

Okay, it is getting better. I can walk without the cane without tendonitis pain (but I still have nerve pain in my right foot). My balance is still shit (I nearly fell over leaning back against a wall while getting undressed for the scan), so the cane goes where I go.

And earlier this morning (after midnight — has anyone watched that show? I kinda like it; it’s got potential. They tweaked the format a bit last week. I don’t like #Hashtag Wars as the elimination game) I managed to snag an MRI appointment at Michael Garron Hospital (MGH).

Marlo wasn’t available to drive me, so I Ubered. While in transit, I told the driver to drop me off at the Sammon Street entrance, and not Coxwell Avenue.

Naturally, he pulled in front of the non-emergency entrance on Coxwell. I needed to be at the entrance to K-Wing 1. Which I was told could be found on Sammon Avenue. So I shlepped south and made a right at the corner. The main entrance is quite wide; you can’t miss it.*

*What you can miss, is the second entrance less than 100 metres east, just past the underground parking. And it’s inset from the street so you could easily miss it in the midnight sky. There is also a sign on the sidewalk informing all that this is the entrance for the MRI. No. Really.

Naturally, I went in the first entrance. It was familiar. It had overhead signs to guide me to the MRI department, which took me into a labyrinth that even a minotaur could get lost in.

And I did.

I spent 20 minutes going in every direction. This made no sense. The booking agent told me that there was a phone after I got through the front doors, and dialing a four digit number would alert a security guard to let me in.

I’ll say it again. 20 minutes. And when I finally arrived at the Diagnostic Imaging reception, and followed the sign directing me to the MRI.

I was greeted by a curtained off hallway and the sound of construction.

Fuck. This is not good. Understatement.

After completing a circle back to the construction, I found my way back to the Sammon entrance.

I stepped out into the cool obsidian night and looked around. I even walked east until I hit the ramp to the underground parking. I wondered briefly about their being a door ahead of me, and discounted the notion at the speed of a fart. (This analogy does not play into the title of this blog post. Wait your turn.)

There were other, well-lit doors closer to Coxwell Avenue, but they only opened out.

By now I was getting shocked with nerve pain in my foot. I gave silent thanks for the cane, which kept me upright and mobile. I turned north at Coxwell, to the entrance the Uber driver had taken me to. The door lead me into a general reception/waiting area which twigged memories from 2013. (It hadn’t changed at all. And this time I wasn’t heading up five floors to H Wing.).

It felt. Wrong. And then this happened. I saw a sign. O, blessed message, delivered on the wings of Hermes (or a laser printer, which I suppose was the answer to Occam’s Razor. And it read:

“For access to the MRI department, use the Emergency entrance and call security.”

Goddammit.

And off I go, dragging my ass up to Mortimer and then east again, to Emerg. I spoke to the night shift intake worker. She confirmed my appointment in the computer database, but couldn’t give me clear directions. Thankfully, she consulted a security officer, who approached and began giving directions through another labyrinthian quest that Gary Gygax himself would have included in a module set in a medieval abandoned hospital**.

**Yes, I know hospitals don’t exist in Dungeons and Dragons. Fun fact: the first campaign I ever joined was in a high school club. As I had no clue about generating a character sheet, let alone a cool-sounding name, I leaned heavily on the DM for assistance. He dubbed my chaotic neural elf thief ‘Scrotum’. No, I didn’t clue in until half-way through the starting point. And so, I pulled a Leroy Jenkins and went feral on their asses. It was my first — and possibly best — presence attack in an RPG. (Though playing a superhero who fires a laser beam through a car’s hood before getting drop-kicked into a random family’s seventh floor apartment, and within a beat I told the trio watching television, “Don’t get up” before jumping out where a wall used to be.) A corridor was filling with water, perhaps 3 feet at this moment (the DM hated metric; he said “They didn’t use metric in medieval times, so we’re not using it here“). As the group entered the hall, I leapt from under water with a very sharp knife at the ready. It was a very short-lived campaign.

I was done with directions.

I asked him (very nicely) to take me there.

Off we went.

The first turn was promising.

The second seemed… familiar.

He was taking me the exact route I’d traversed 15 minutes before.

And it was getting perilously close to my appointment time, and I didn’t know — given they take appointments 24 hours a day — when the next person was scheduled and if I’d miss mine.

Yup, this hallway was familiar. So was the Diagnostic Imaging check-in that I’d recently passed.

And, on cue, was the curtained off section of hallway, echoing the sounds of construction equipment and chatter between the night shift. My security guard slipped past the white drapery and began a conversation. They would allow the security guard through, they said, but not me because I was a patient and not staff.

After I reiterated the problem of finding the proper entrance, a construction worker appeared and agreed to take both myself and the security guard the rest of the way. Which almost included a half-level stairway down (which made no sense, so I’m glad he realized the mistake immediately). And two minutes later, I was in K-Wing 1.

One hundred fucking metres. I walked over half an hour, when all I needed was to take a 30 second jog to my right.

Which brings me back to the title of this post.

I was feet to torso in the beast. The technician provided earplugs and sound cancelling headphones, and still that fucker was loud. I was embedded for 40 minutes. and of course you can’t have any metal, so the hopes of a television to distract me was out of the question.***

***At least my dental hygienist let me watch Animal Planet on Monday.****

****And she gave my a lolly for being a brave boy.

I spent the downtime running strange scenarios in my head, mostly What If stories that would make Stan Lee blush. Soon enough, we were done and I was instructed to sit up.

It’d been building, you see. And the plan was to get back to the dressing room before.

Best laid plans.

At least it was just one little fart.*****

*****That’s for Marlo. (No, not the fart itself. It’s an inside joke.) Happy date-iversary, honey.

And, thankfully, I wasn’t ass-deep in the tunnel when it ripped.