Ha blah blah
Ha blah blah.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Ha blah blah.
To my approximation, those are, roughly, the sounds a human being makes when he abruptly awakes coughing up his own blood.
After my embarrassing stint at the Ice House — I’m sure the staff still refers to me as ‘oh, the cokehead’(see previous blog), I spent the rest of the night with my nose ensconced in ice (IRONY ALERT!) watching bad late night infomercials. In my red bull/vodka/blood depleted stupor, I became utterly convinced I needed both a Shamwow and Snuggie. I even ordered a set of 3 magical Shamwows on the phone. I fell asleep on my couch feeling Shamwonderful.
I woke up 2 and 1/2 hours later violently spitting up my plasma.
Ha blah blah.
Irrational thoughts race through one’s head when waking up in this fashion: the first of which being that I must, at all costs, avoid getting red on my new beige Craigslist couch, which was a freakin’ steal at $100! With this impetus, I jumped up – naked and hunched over like an imp – and raced to the bathroom, where I could bleed on some more forgiving tile. In the bathroom, I was able to examine the mess of my face. The Dexter-style blood splatter combined with bedhead… or couchhead, rather… wasn’t a good look. To make matters worse, the blood kept flowing. I decided, with my limited amount of medical expertise, to basically shove everything in the bathroom up my nose. Unfortunately, the source of the geyser had a different avenue to go down as well. As I leaned over the sink, I felt a tickle in the back of my gullet and…
Ha blah blah.
If you’re wondering about the phonetics, yes, I did sound a lot like a cartoon Count Chocula. In this case, “Ha” represents a futile inhale blocked at the throat by a stream of blood and “blah blah” is the quasi-concious physiological response of expelling blood out of the mouth.
And yes, I realize that lacking a dolby-surround-sound Blu Ray quality audio/visual with lustrous red blood framed by soft moonlight creeping through the canyons off Kirkwood and quick racked frame focus, the actual horror of ‘ha blah blah’ is lost. I swear to God I was spiraling into sheer terror, convinced I was going to bleed to death in my studio apartment.
Ha blah blah.
I was coughing more blood. Now it was on the sink, walls, and mirror. ‘Damn, I need Windex no streak!’ Again, weird trivial thoughts seemed to overshadow the logic of the event. The Scotty Tissues I jammed up my nostrils couldn’t seem to stem the tide. I grabbed a white beach towel and pinched my nose shut with it, instantly relegating said towel to a life of blood cleanup until its untimely demise. Any dream this fluffy IKEA towel had of beaches and the salt of biki-clad women lying down on it was DONE.
Within seconds, the hablahblah was soaking through this enormous wad of beach towel, rivulets following the course and twisting fibers of it until it started looking like a dye job. I tilted my head back, which just allowed physics and gravity to do their thing and send the blood quicker into my digestive tract. Yum. Probably not part of the South Beach Diet, I thought.
I ran to the deck. More ha blah blah. I needed to get to the ER. I imp-ran out of the house covered in blood, towel on my face. In my panic, I only managed to get boxer briefs and car keys. Naked, bloody, and running – it looked like a bad episode of ‘COPS.’ Slamming the door on my Honday hoopty, I peeled out, flooring it down the winding canyon roads, seatbelt seatbelt seatbelt warning annoying me as I ran lights like OJ.
I can only imagine how scary I looked when I stormed into the ER with my beach towel and Hanes based on the reaction from the nurses and other patients in the waiting room. Even the guys with axes in their skulls were like ‘Let this dude go first.’
After I got placed in a room, a calm gay nurse put some Afrin-soaked, rolled up cotton balls up my nostrils. Although it seemed to slow the flow, I was still periodically coughing up blood when the Resident strolled in very dude-like.
“What’s up, bro?” he said. He was a young UCLA resident, Jewish, and clearly too green to realize that you should never ever call your patient ‘bro.’
“I’m bleeding and it won’t stop for some reason.”
“Let me take a look…. Shit dude, it’s still bleeding. I can’t tell if you’re bleeding from your nose or, like…
He hesitated as if unclear what to say.
“….from your brain, bro.”
From your brain, bro? Silence ensued as I contemplated kicking him square in the balls. UCLA med school needs an etiquette 101 class apparently. He looked at me and twisted his lips comically as he thought about his next expert step.
“I’m going to get the attending, dude. Sit tight.”
Where was I going to go, dumbass? I was bleeding in my underwear!… Hmmm, it was West Hollywood, guess I might fit in at some of the clubs here….
Twenty minutes later (hey, no rush – it’s only a potential cerebral cortex hemhorrhage!), the attending physician marched in, much older and possibly even more Jewish. With little gab and zero ‘bro’s’, he efficiently and swiftly inserted nasal tampons into both of my nostrils. If you’re confused about what a nasal tampon is, let me explain: it’s a tampon that you shove up a nostril. Get it? It even had a string. It sucked. I have new sympathies for vaginas.
The attending told me to wait an hour to “see if it would stop.” If, after the hour, I had “blood on my tongue” and or “down my throat,” he told me it could mean something “very serious.”
Translation: you might be bleeding from the brain, bro.
Tick tock. Tick tock. What ensued was the longest hour of my life.
I watched Judge Judy on the teeny TV hanging off the robot arm above me, even though the TV had no volume. Another Shamwow commercial came on. If I had a 20 times more absorbent Shamwow at home, I thought, maybe I never would have had to come here. I contemplated my silly life and laughed at how much it meant to me. Stupid mortality.
The nature of my death would make an interesting caveat to my life. I would get the ultimate tombstone engraving for a comic: “Here lies Bill Dawes RIP. Died of a bloody nose. No joke.”
I survived the hour with sardonic and grim solitude as Judge Judy silently hollered at white trash.
In the end, it was just a bloody nose. I breathed a sigh of relief as I was discharged. The gay nurse gave me shorts and a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt from the lost and found. He wanted me to be able to get home with some dignity.
Well, at least with as much dignity as I could muster with two tampons hanging out of my nostrils.
The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
Huh? Not one mention of the ‘concerned girlfriend’ in this one. Where was she?
‘Imp-ran’ was the funniest thing you’ve written on here so far, Bill – it created a tremendous visual in my laughing unsympathetic mind – loved it, simply LOVED IT!!! The “from your brain bro” line and picturing you watching Judge Judy without the volume was comical – I realised I was still lacking in empathy towards your plight by this point when I was secretly hoping you were still lobster coloured as you sat in your underwear! Sorry!
Don’t worry though, I did feel some sympathy for you by the end of your tale but I think this maybe because I’m female and it’s nearly that time of the month…. ha! Thanks for the laughs!
I would bet my life the concerned girlfriend was there being concerned. (but she probably hopes you think she was hiding his stash of imaginary cocaine in an imaginary place the whole imaginary time just for laughs)
Some of us even don’t realize the importance of this information. What a pity.
Gut!