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Sunday, August 7th found me refusing to leave the Tahiti Village resort property despite my friends suggestions of “Pizza! At New York, New York” and “Shopping! At the outlets” and all sorts of other things that paled in comparison to the idea of floating around the lazy river with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade™ so we all parted ways to pursue our pleasures. I spent the afternoon in the sun and water, relaxed and happy. It would be the last time I felt that way, I’m not sure when I’ll feel that way again.

I was to be the first in our group to move on, I was schedule to fly to Seattle that night for work commitments and then on to Los Angeles after that. But, as I was packing after showering off the pool (and goodness knows what was in the pool…) I started to have, uhmm….symptoms. The nurse-in-training in our group, Nikki was called up from the pool and she insisted on an immediate trip to the emergency room. I wasn’t in any pain, just completely freaked out by…well, I won’t get into it. Let’s just say that things weren’t quite right.

All 5 of us hopped into the car. Stacy called her mother, a Las Vegas resident to ask what the best hospital in the area was. Her mom told us to go to Saint Rose, so we did. We walked in and it was clean and beautiful and bright and like a clinical version of heaven. But, we quickly found out they may not take my insurance and since I wasn’t in pain and wasn’t feeling bad, I made the call that we go to a hospital that was on the list of providers for my insurance company. Little did we know how much we would miss Saint Rose for the rest of the week….

The facility that I ended up in let’s call it…Desert Storm….because that is what we started calling it by day two. After 7 hours in the creepiest waiting room ever, a poke in the butt, an awful concoction I had to drink for the CT scan and 2 people detoxing, one dude bleeding all over the place and another poor soul yacking in a bucket he brought with him, I was admitted. My worst fear. I bid my friends good night at 3am and settled in to wait for a room assignment. And 12 hours later I got one.

I spent the night in the emergency room bay with a wide range of humanity in all states of illness and injury. Not feeling particularly bad, but near homicidal due to lack o sleep and the fact that the lights never go off in the emergency bay was one more reason why I missed the heavenly glow that was Saint Rose.

At about 7am I was near delirious and this led to a poor choice on my part. The gentleman in the bed/bay next to me was agitated and loud, had to be restrained and strapped to his bed and he was only consoled by watching westerns on high volume. Let’s review…the emergency bay has no walls, each bed is surrounded by a blue curtain so privacy, sleep and HIPPA laws be damned.

This gentleman was being relocated to Psych (per his conversation with the nurses) and he wondered loudly “how all these poor saps could sleep last night with all that racket” I chimed up with “We didn’t sleep, we were up all night listening to your westerns” and the nurse was like: “Ma’am, umm Ma’am you’re not helping”. So yeah, I was arguing with someone having a psychotic break. This would never have happened at Saint Rose.