Friday, March 9, 2007

A Contest!

I guess you'd think a person with cancer wouldn't be worried about being a hypochrondriac, but I was today. Worried. First of all I was tired of the drains and wanted to call to see if I could get them out. L offered to do that for me and left a message with the nurse. Later I noticed that one of them seemed to be sliding out from inside me. (Just a note: These are plastic tubes inserted in the incision so that blood, etc., can flow out instead of gathering on a bandage. There are bulbs at the end that I empty out. More details in earlier posts.) I was worried that it would fall out over the weekend. Then I noticed that I couldn't straighten my arm like I could the other day and thought there must be something wrong with the tubes. I called the nurse rather panicky and so in the afternoon I took a cab down to Fancy Hospital, all the while thinking that I was panicky and there was really nothing wrong. The nurse said the area looked infected. She took out the one sliding-down tube. There had been a good four inches of plastic inside me. She left in the other tube and got me a prescription for an antibiotic. All this is a buildup to the real excitement of the evening. I went to the Walgreens to fill the prescription and while I was waiting I heard a woman at the counter say to a female member of the pharmacy staff: ...so I won't take the vaginal one and put it on my face ever.

That is the exact quote. I wrote it down. It was 4:57 pm and the speaker was late-middle-aged with dyed blond hair. Apparently this was in response to some advice she had solicited. This is the contest: Send me, via comments section of this post, what you imagine or surmise the context of that conversation to have been. Deadline for entries is 4:57 pm on Monday, March 12. The winner will receive a book or a kitchen utensil.

As Nora Ephron once said, This is the gamey section.

But you knew that.

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