Murray's Weblog

Nightmares du Jour (du soir?)

I had two doozys last night—back to back.

Nightmare #1

In the first nightmare I'm visiting a hospital where my friend Carole works as some sort of a technician or assistant. I'm here to lend moral support to some other friend who is having her health checked. (There's some medical concern, but I can't remember what it is.)

Now I don't remember the details, but it comes up that I've been having some sort of discomfort or pains in my side, so the attending doctor decides to take a "scan" of me. (It's much faster than an X-ray, but just pretend it was an X-ray.) He puts the image up on a board and shows me this super-close-up of my heart. Specifically I'm looking at the blood vessels around the surface of the heart. Some of them look normal but many of them are clogged up which these black things that look like filaments or worms.

The doctor explains to me that he thinks something my stomach is doing wrong is causing these filaments to form, blocking the vessels. If I don't do something quickly I could have heart failure within a couple weeks.

Then comes the really bad news (oddly, I'm not too upset about my own mortality here) that I'm uninsured so everything will have to come out of my pocket. The doctor tells me that he knows a specialist who should run some fancy test just to confirm that the diagnosis is right, but the test will cost $2000, and I'm trying to figure out where I would come up with that money.

Nightmare #2

(This is less of a situational nightmare and more of the "being chased by the boogy-man" type. Strange how each evokes a different type of clenching in the stomach.)

Mom and I are back in the old house (the family house I grew up in that she sold about two years ago) in the living room. We're sitting on the sofa, reading or something like that. Suddenly we are aware that there's a rattlesnake in the room.

We're actually not panicking whatsoever. It's on the floor, we're on the sofa. We talk to each other about how the poor thing is just scared and it'll dash off as soon as it feels it has the chance. I think I take a cushion and push it away. The little guy is rattling its rattle, coiled up, but eventually it squirms, turns around and starts slithering away.

Unfortunately, the living room is "sunken" in the old house design and the snake doesn't seem to notice it needs to climb some steps, so it's just circling around the perimeter of the room again and again. Again, Mom and I aren't reacting badly. We just decide that we need to "time" our exit and we'll leave the living room, and the poor snake will be caught in its loop for a while.

Here's where things start to go wrong.

We wait for the snake to pass us and we start up the stairs. But unlike its normal, expected behavior, the thing comes up the stairs and starts heading right for us! I run to the telephone and dial 911 and immediately someone is on the other end. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to talk because the phone isn't cordless and the snake is almost upon me. I throw some things at it, but realize I'm getting trapped so I yell into the phone "I have a rattlesnake in the house!" and drop the phone and run. I know the 911 people can trace the call immediately and the operator will probably understand what has happened.

A bit later (I forget what happened immediately following) the snake isn't chasing me so I grab the phone and continue talking to the operator. Then I see that Mom is lying on the ground. I go over to her and ask if she's alright. She says "no". I ask if she got bitten and she tells me yes, it bit her twice and then... I can't quite understand but I infer it hit her a second pair of times.

I tell the operator "My Mom's been bitten four times. She's 70 years old." The lady on the phone mutters "Oh my God." which I don't consider very encouraging! I roll mom over gently and I see two of the bites. Mom breathing is very labored and I just kneel over her, wondering when the emergency people will arrive, how they will deal with the snake, wherever it is. Whether that will create more of a delay getting her to the hospital, etc.

Posted by Murray Todd Williams at October 21, 2004 04:48 AM