I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) Read Online Free PDF

it together.
    That’s very important in those kinds of situations, I would add. It’s almost necessary to have a certain amount of decorum and not scream and bawl like a ninny; that only makes things more painful. In fact, when I see people moaning, crying, and complaining on TV that they’re hurt, it almost makes me want to laugh at them or possibly even hurt them myself for being such insolents. When you are in pain, you have to be strong; I should know. When I was in sixth grade, I was jumping rope when I fell and the cartilage in my knee tore completely, and instead of crying, I picked myself off the playground proudly and hobbled to the nurse.
    Alone.
    And in pain.
    Without a sound.
    Thirty minutes previous, that most assuredly would have been my answer. But now, as I gasped, reaching out to grapple at any pair of legs in teal green that walked within my reach and shrieking like a demon being doused with holy water, beaten with a crucifix, and pelted with Communion wafers, I clearly understood that pain had been a stranger to me. Until now.
    Thirty minutes before, I had been standing in my kitchen when I felt something sharp stab me in my right side. It sucked the breath right out of me, and before I had time to recover, another stab hit in the same spot. In a moment, I was down for the count, screaming and writhing in pain.
    Now, let me explain a little something about the sort of physical discomfort I was experiencing. It was a kind of pain that far surpassed anything I had ever felt before or documented on my ‘Laurie’s Random Pain Pangs’ chart. This sensation made my “Cancer of the Upper Asshole” stab feel like the gentle, playful tickle of a peacock feather in comparison. In fact, it had my mind spinning, trying to decide whether it was possible that I was about to give birth to a pony via my belly button or had unkowingly been impaled by something, fearing that if I looked down I would see a pitchfork or perhaps a telephone pole protruding from my abdomen. Should you have been, at one time, ripped apart limb by limb by wild vicious dogs, a rather hungry lion, or the pack of women crowded in between the size seven-and-a-half racks at a Nordstrom shoe sale—while experiencing a charley horse cramp strong enough to cripple a nation—
and
you survived to tell the tale, you’d know a little something of the displeasure that was currently conducting itself in my body.
    When my husband found me, I had somehow made it to the couch and was rolling from side to side as if I were on fire. Luckily, we live a block away from a hospital, so somehow, he got me to the car and within minutes we were in the hospital parking lot.
    Now, even I, in my incredible state of agony, noticed the word EMERGENCY painted clear as day in huge block letters across the automatic sliding doors as we entered the hospital. However, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who saw it, because despite the definition of the word “emergency,” I’ve had shorter waits in the return line at Home Depot the morning after Father’s Day. Truthfully, if we were to call a spade a spade and really be honest about what went on behind those doors, the word painted across them would not read EMERGENCY but REMEMBER: YOU’RE THE ONE IN AGONY, NOT US or HOPE YOU BROUGHT A GOOD BOOK, SOME SNACKS, AND YOUR OWN PILLOW.
    It was going to be a bit of a wait.
    There, sitting randomly in chairs across the crammed waiting room, was someone covering an eye as his remaining good eyeball stared blankly toward a wall, a girl in a cropped top holding her head between her knees as she rocked back and forth and moaned, and a wrinkled little man in a cowboy hat and a thin mustache holding a towel-wrapped bundle that looked suspiciously like a limb.
    They had obviously been there for a while.
    See, in my book, the word “emergency” kind of constitutes a sense of urgency, as in end-of-the-line urgency. It rarely ever gets more urgent than in the word “emergency.”