Contest, rants and excerpts...oh, boy

Okay, to make up for my ranting and raving, as well as to celebrate the last week of school, I’m going to offer a contest. I will put the names of everyone who responds to my blog this week into a hat and draw. I’ll give the winner a copy of Seeing Me and a deck of the Ellora’s Cave Silver Screen playing cards. I'll announce the winner on Saturday.

Now on to the ranting…

I hate hospitals.

I have the highest regard for doctors, nurses, aides and all the people who work in our health care industry. But I hate hospitals.

I just got out of one. I spent the last couple of days in the local hospital for things that really don’t bear going in to. I’ve spoken openly on my website about having a disorder that causes me to have strokes and TIA’s. Luckily I haven’t had a full blown stroke in many years, but do continue to have TIA’s which are like mini-strokes that don’t leave lasting effects. I had five of them Friday night and so went to the hospital Saturday.

I was less than impressed with the quality of care that I received. I was put in an er room, the curtain shut and no one bothered to check on me for an hour despite the fact that my blood pressure machine was beeping its little heart out because I had pulled off the cuff after it started in inflate and didn’t stop. I have a lovely bruise as a result.

When someone finally came in, it was the doctor who looked at me blankly and said I needed a CT-scan. No shit? Ya think? He left and I went another hour with no one checking on me. I had a sixth TIA there in the ER, not that anyone noticed.

I was finally admitted after a wonderful attempt to put in an IV which would have been easier if the phlebotomist would simply have accepted that I do know my body a bit better than she did. But no, she had to try to put the IV where I told her it wouldn’t work. It didn’t and I had a lump like a golf ball the entire next day.

I am not a good patient. I am not the worst patient. I don’t demand help from nurses and aides for everything (like my roommate who seemed to think they were actually room service staff.) But when I’ve given you my standing at home prescriptions and I tell you I have a migraine starting I expect you to give me my meds not bring me two Tylenol. I was told we had to start with the Tylenol. Twenty minutes later I’m in a ball on the bed sobbing with a migraine and then the nurse says she’ll call and ask the doctor about the meds. I got my meds after forty minutes of hell while my roommate had all the lights on and proceeded to argue with her husband and anyone who called on the phone. Could I have moved she’d have needed surgery to remove her cell phone from her arse and television control from her throat.

Oh, and not to mention that the hospital couldn’t figure out how to give my the meds I normally take for my OCD, meaning I’d been without them for two days and was going through nasty withdrawals.

I ended up doing a very unadvisable thing. I signed myself out AMA. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I came in feeling perfectly fine but with the TIA. By Saturday night I had a case of cold sweats so bad I literally looked like I was standing in the rain. It was running off me in rivulets. I was vomiting. My head throbbed. All of which miraculously cleared up after I got off my IV and home. I took my meds and I’m fine.

Now for a little of the more adult stuff:

EXCERPT FROM SEEING ME

“And then you come…”Cara jerked her head up at the sound of the words. He gave a short harsh cough, took a sip of water and continued. “Sorry, and then you come to the pivotal moment in the story and if you aren’t focused you can ruin what needs to be the payoff for the viewer.” He cleared his throat again, “That’s why it’s important to me to be able to commit myself to one project at a time. It makes having a personal life of any kind hard, but there are often sacrifices you have to make.”

Looking down she realized she’d actually sketched the body of the nude male, no face, but his hands were definitely…

She felt the heat wash over her cheeks and lowered her head letting her hair fall across her face. She flipped the page over on the table and continued her list. She should choose a safer topic, but right now she doubted her mind could focus on anything else.
The questions continued from the audience and she thought she noticed Him grow a bit uncomfortable. True ninety-nine percent of the questions were for him, but that was something she was actually grateful for. God help her if someone asked her a question right now.

She was up to twenty on her new list, having just added the delightfully archaic “deflowering,” when she heard the voice of the angry writer from earlier denounce the idea of film representation of his books as a bastardization of the art, as selling out for the money. “No screenwriter, no director, no actor can do justice to a well written story or character without cheapening it, without robbing it of some essential element that a given reader holds dear,” he’d practically sneered. “So there’s no chance I’d ever sell one of my stories to the commercial Hollywood machine.”

“Are you crazy?” The words were out of her mouth before she realized she had spoken them. “You’d sell your left testicle if someone wanted to make a movie from one of your books with that kind of budget.” She waved her hand at the actor and author who were being criticized.

There was an undercurrent of laughter and she suddenly realized everyone in the room was looking at her. He was looking at her and wearing that wickedly seductive smile that had put him in the pages of many a magazine. Her face flushed hotly and she looked down at her hands. I can’t believe I said that, she moaned silently. The moderator quickly swung the conversation back on track. A quick glance down the table saw that indeed, the offended writer was glaring at her in disgust. Great, just great, she thought. He’s got a twenty times my sales, we share the same agent and I go and piss him off. Well, it was nice while it lasted. My agent is going to kill me.


And so on and so forth…..

If you want a really good blog, go check out some of the folks on the left. They are much better at this than I am.