The Bug -- Part 4

It followed me around.

Well, not right away.

Explanation: MJ figured out pretty quick I was probably suffering a bad case of food poisoning. (The doctors apparently had no idea what I had as they put me in the TB ward for a night). But MJ deduced that I had caught something from the last thing I had eaten: that egg roll. You see, she had eaten everything else that I had eaten that night except the egg roll. And so, she figured that if she gave the egg roll to the doctor, they'd be able to look at it under the microscope and say: "Yeah. That's where he caught the bug. Thanks, MJ."

They didn't do that.

Yeah, MJ brought the half-eaten egg roll to the hospital. And yeah, the nurses had said they would give it to the doctor.

They didn't do that.

Instead they put the white plastic bag with a Styrofoam box inside filled with mutant egg roll in the hospital room's closet. Right next to my street clothes.

Let me tell you something. As I laid there for the next five days eating out of a bag (drip method) and spending lonely nights watching Scorsese's 'The Blues' series on PBS on the hospital TV (a high point of the ordeal... especially the Farka piece), the meal began to rot. And rot. And rot.

And despite my pleas, the nurses just couldn't "figure out" why the room smelled so bad.

Here's a few reasons:

1) You had me give "samples" to a bucket in the bathroom you never bothered to collect.

2) I didn't take a bath for a week as the toxins sweat themselves out of my body.

3) A genetically-altered egg roll was growing a beard in the closet of my room.

American health care. Alas.

(and tomorrow the conclusion...)