Frostbite Without the Freeze

Hospitals are evil things. Doctors are forces of blackness and evil: The higher their learning, the more profound their dark intent. For, the higher their learning, the farther from humanity they fly: the patient becomes mere man-meat, with no humanity attached it him or her at all.

Take a toe. A little toe. The tiniest toe: the "wee-wee-wee all the way home" toe. Give it the tiniest of infections and place it on an inpatient ward of a hospital: Everyone will ignore it. Everyone will assume its benign nature. And, in a week or two, it will be rotting into its own hell; making life intolerable for its owner, and buckling under the immunosuppressant chemotherapy it is subjected to until it looks like frostbite.

I remember frostbite: I had seen it in Alaska in the dead of winter: Folks subjected to long hours of winter's cold; their extremities with flesh turning black from lack of fluid nutrients.

That's the color flesh I saw in Steve's small toe ("wee-wee-wee") on Monday morning, before I went to my chiropractor's appointment. It was the color we saw after me appointment with a new client at 2 p.m. It was the color the ER physicians saw when we drove to Long Beach to have his foot checked because, having seen frostbite before, I knew that if we didn't get him to a physician, he might lose his foot.

I hate hospitals. They cure but they make their patients insane. I hate leaving the husband I love at the mercy of those hellish healers. My last words to him upon leaving: Be an asshole. Complain about everything. Ring them 10 times an hour. Be such a pain in the ass that they will want nothing more than to cure you and get you the hell out of their sight.

On an outpatient basis, they are my heroes. On an inpatient basis, they are the medicinal incubi and succubi of The Test and Numbers and Values: as for their inpatients' souls, the data say the word is spelled incorrectly, and they are located on the bottom of the foot. It's a pity they paid so little attention to these extremities the last time they had him in their clutches.

Thank God for the spiritual healers we have on our side for this fight, or all would be lost: Joy, meet Robin; Robin, meet Joy.