Cardiac Arrest
Well, nurse Ratched at the Cardiac Rehabilition Unit wasn’t so bad. A sweet, trim and fit blond and two other young ladies met me as I wandered into the door.
“Mr. Armor!”
Turns out that nurse Ratched’s name is Morgan, and she is my Exercise Physiologist. Arrayed around us was a plethora of geezers chained to recumbent bikes and treadmills, all with a pink and sweaty faces. It was a bit like slave galley’s on Viking ships. I suppose that the machines were hooked up to generate power for the hospital.
“Do you know why you are here, Mr Armor?”
“Because I have been a bad boy?” Maybe the cardiologist did write “LAZY” on the assessment.
“No. Not at all. Lots of people need a bit of help after surgery. You have quite a history, Mr. Armor.”
“It was a set up. I wasn’t in those states when it went down”
Blank look. Well, so much for my Broderick Crawford routine. These well-scrubbed sprites have never heard of Broderick Crawford, nor of his award winning performance of On the Waterfront.
“We will be doing a lot of testing these next few days. You will have 38 sessions, most of which will require a little exertion. If you cannot make an appointment, call us, and we will reschedule it. You won’t lose a session, we will just pick up from where you canceled.”
“You really aren’t going to let me out of this, are you.”
“No. As we go through each test, we will ask you what your Borg is.”
“Will I be assimilated?”
I saw from the looks of the three young women that they had no clue, so they sort of tittered, and tried to not give the geezer a blank look.
“You’ve never seen Star Trek, have you.”
One said: “I watched a couple of them at my aunt’s house. I don’t remember any one asking what their Borg was, though.”
“Never mind.”
“Borg lets us know how you are feeling on a scale of 6 through 20. If you are feeling uncomfortable, we want to know. Do you carry Nitro tablets with you?”
“Will I need them?”
“We just like to have them here with you, even though our resident Cardiologists are just down the hall and we can get you up to the Cardiac unit very quickly.”
“I feel very comforted by that.”
“Good! Let’s get you wired up, and we are going to do a six minute walk to bet a benchmark.”
“I haven’t left a mark on a bench since high school.”
They pretended they didn’t hear that.
Anyway, I did ok with the walk, and they sent me home, chirping: “See you Monday!”.
“… and Wednesday and Friday” I mumbled as I stumbled out the door …
Rusty's Armory 