Harshbarger Memorial Hospital
Discharged on October 17, 2010.
This week was filled with contrasts: Ups and downs, lefts and rights, hospitals and cat-canning plants.
On Tuesday, when Tuesday finally rolled around and reared its corpulent, putrescent head, my old friend and new primary care syphilographer, Dr. Unterguggenburgerheimer, Ph.D., M.D., J.D., S.T.D., finally authorized my discharge from Ollanthorpe Memorial Hospital.
Moments after the paperwork was signed, a cannon was wheeled into my hospital room, and I was summarily discharged at high velocity directly from the window, along a graceful ballistic curve into the hard, hard earth below. As usual, landing proved to be about as terrifying, painful, and injurious as one could readily imagine; immediately upon contact with the ground, I was picked up by another ambulance (driven by none other than cat-canning tycoon Mr. Wilson) and transported post-haste to the other hospital in my sprawling town: The Thaddeus C.L. Harshbarger Memorial Hospital at the corner of Crunkner Boulevard and Van der Donk Street.
That they name all of these hospitals after dead people I found most troubling; however, being paralyzed from the nipples down, I could do little to insist that they bring me instead to the Alyssa Milano Medical Center over on Frummwich Drive. As I gibbered flibbously to myself about Alyssa’s bare-naked feet and delectable toes, partially in a daze (but mostly delirious), I gathered from the look on the faces of these “medical professionals” surrounding me in the ambulance that if I did make mention of the AMMC, I would end up going back to a padded cell instead of a hospital bed.
So onward I went to the hospital named after a man who died in a horsebuttock riding accident. As the ambulance wended its way through the sprawling metropolis that was my tiny little town, I slipped in and out of consciousness and sanity… remembering well that day that I went to the Harshbarger funeral and had that hilarious run-in with Thaddeus’ sister, Beatrice I.T. Carparker-Harshbarger. Poor old Thaddeus. Poor, poor old Thaddeus and his aptly-initialed sister…
The ambulance came to a screeching halt in front of the hospital. The gurney I was on was immediately ejected out the rear doors of the vehicle. Down the sloping sidewalk it sailed, gaining speed as it went, for Harshbarger Memorial Hospital is built atop the fourteenth highest hill in town.
“Pwee, pwee, pwee-wee-wee!!” I shouted, half in elation and half in terror, the first because I was free of the clutch of evil quacks that staffed this particular hospital, and the last because I was far from free of the straps holding me onto the gurney. And at the bottom of Harshbarger Hospital Hill was a precipice that dropped 54 smoots (and one ear) into the surging Thattagawatchee River below.
Over the cliff I went…
…Sailing through the air, careening and screaming…
Wow, I never knew gurneys were so aerodynamic—