I ended up in the ER last week. I’m fine! It was simply a dramatic ending to the road trip of a lifetime. I pulled into Los Angeles after driving 9200 miles in three months, bundled Archie the dog and my bags into my fusty house, discarded a few giant cockroach carcasses, refilled the water in my toilet, and threw away everything I was wearing, bra and all. Then I collapsed onto my (freshly made before I left for the summer, like a good girl!) bed and zonked the eff out for 12 hours.
The next morning, I noticed a spot on my inner thigh that I’d thought was a bruise had gotten more tender. By midafternoon, it was positively painful, so I took myself to urgent care. An exceedingly nice doc sent me straight to the ER, where a series of exceedingly nice nurses and doctors and one kinda sexy ultrasound technician gave me the once-over to rule out deep vein thrombosis. What?! Yep, turns out sitting on your keister and driving for hundreds of hours is very bad for you, very good for blood clots.
I did not have deep vein thrombosis, I was relieved to learn — it was just an infection (sexy) brought on by a bug bite? an abrasion? a curse? The doctor did not know, but she assured me that I was not going to die from DVT, and promptly discharged me with a prescription for antibiotics.
Going to the hospital is never great, but that evening was the perfect capper to my trip, for a couple of reasons — the first of which was that, when I signed into the digital patient portal in the waiting room, my emergency contact popped up for me to confirm. It was my ex; my domestic partner, the app beamed at me. He was the only one I had listed as a contact. Good lord, I thought. He really had me going.
This was the guy who I had thought was my boyfriend for years, who I discovered post-split had been lying about being in a relationship with me, telling everyone he knew that we were just “coworkers and friends.” I won’t rehash the story here, but I wrote a fair bit about it this spring, when that betrayal felt like a Portuguese Man O’ War sting to my soul.
This summer’s road trip was partly inspired by a need to put physical distance between me and this fucking guy while I mended my heart, so it was cosmically hilarious that I ended up in the emergency room a day after I got back to LA with my belief that he’d been my person staring me in the face. I texted my friends: It’d be hilarious if I die, and they call HIM.
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