It all started innocently enough.  A dance rehearsal for "Debbie Does Dallas" (Winston-Salem Journal preview article here).  A cramp in the calf. 

Damn.  I should’ve stretched before starting.  I’m not in my twenties anymore.  (I keep on forgetting that.)

"It could be a blood clot," says Gray, looking at the swelling and bruising on my calf.  "You should get it checked out.  Like, now."  Others echo the sentiment.

Groan.  A blood clot?  What does Gray know?  The closest he’s been to medicine was playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show.

Fine.  Whatever.  I’ll go to urgency care, you bunch of alarmists.

"I won’t lie to you," says the doctor at urgency care (who was in the middle of his first day on the job). "Coming in was the smartest thing you ever did."

He explains what happens if it is a clot in my leg.  "If you have DVT — or deep vein thrombosis — it could result in a pulmonary embolism.  It could get dislodged, get lodged again in your artery, and you die.  You’ll feel a racing heart, sweating, trouble breathing . . . and then you’ll feel nothing.  Because you’ll be dead.  You’ll be dead before your body hits the ground."

Then it’s my turn to ask Dr. Ray-of-Sunshine the world’s stupidest question….

"So, um, is that serious?" I ask him.

"I’m sending you to the emergency room of Forsyth Medical Center right now for an immediate doppler scan.  What do you think?"

He goes on to explain that the chances of it being a blood clot are small.  But the consequences of it being a blood clot are grave, and that’s why he’s concerned.  Whenever a guy with a stethoscope and a white coat says the word "concerned", you snap into some other mode.  You start wondering about wills and shit like that.  You might think that your mind wouldn’t go there, but trust me — it does.  Even for non-alarmists like me.

Anyway, I like the urgency care doctor.  Good bedside manner, and totally honest.  I luck out getting a doctor fresh out of med school; they’re not jaded yet.

Fast forward to Forsyth Medical Center — or, as I now call it, Walmart Hospital.  The lady at "reception" (which is actually just a lectern with a stool) reads my doctor’s note.  I’m sure the note is written in English, but full of medical abbreviations easily decipherable by medical people.  But she looks at it and she’s confused about where I’m supposed to be.

"Doppler scan," I say. "He said I needed a doppler scan — stat".  Okay.  I didn’t say the word "stat", but it was implicit in my voice.  Didn’t matter anyway.  She just looked at me like I was speaking Swahili.

"Have a seat," she says in Spanglish.

Here we go.  Wish I had a book or someone to hang with.  It’s going to be a long afternoon, especially with nothing to think about except Dr. Ray-of-Sunshine’s description of collapsing dead in less than one second.

I sit in the waiting room.  Yup, true to stereotype, I’m the only white guy.  Lots of people of every ethnicity.  If there was such a thing as a redneck U.N., this would be the place.

I glance up at the receptionist who is reading my note over the cell phone to somebody.  She eventually tells me I have to go to another department.  She gives me a ton of directions in a language that vaguely resembles English.  I’m not sure, but I have an uneasy feeling I’m going to end up at Spencers in Hanes Mall.

Um.  Okay.  I’ll just walk there, bitch, shall I?  I mean, it’s not like I have a bad leg or anything.

Okay.  Down this corridor.  Right, then left.  Right again.  Take the elevator up to the first floor.  Wait, those are "staff only" elevators.  Go down further.  No.  Backtrack.  No, this is the kitchen.  Wait, what?

Naturally, I get lost.  I eventually see signs for "Lobby".  Well, I can ask somebody there, I think.  So I hobble.  Fifteen minutes later, I’m in the lobby.  Nice carpet.  Comfortable seats.  Food kiosks offering culinary delights of dubious nutritional value (see graphic at left). 

And a grand piano.  Nobody is playing, but Bobby Short is being piped in, singing some song about how fuckin’ great Manhattan is during the month of June.

It’s all very nice for people who are hungry and/or want to dance while they slowly bleed or choke or whatever.

But it’s no help to me whatsoever.  There’s no reception desk — nothing. 

Ah, but there is a room off of the lobby with a sign reading "Cashier" — a perfect metaphor for how the medical community is more interested in money than actually providing medical, you know, care.  I hobble over there.

Of course, the people in that room are cashiers (I should have figured that out).  They know nothing about medicine or the layout of the hospital.  "Doppler scan" means nothing to them.  I’m polite to them, but I’m starting to lose it.  I want to scream "Can anybody in this hospital help me?" 

Mutually, the cashiers and I agree that the radiology department might be a good bet (although it’s clear that their guess is as good as mine).  They "think" if I go down the hallway, take a left, then a right, then I "might" see signs for the radiology department.  I hobble off.

I’m in unbearable pain at this point.  It’s been half an hour since I left the emergency room to find wherever I’m supposed to go. 

Fuck. No signs.  I can’t find the radiology department.

I did however enter the Twilight Zone.  Funny thing, hospitals.  You expect to see TONS of doctors and nurses zipping about, like on TV.  There was almost none of that.  I would walk down a looooong corridor and see nobody.  I would come to a junction and look down four loooong corridors . . . and see nobody.  Or, if I did see somebody, they were too far off, zipping out of one door and then around a corner.  I couldn’t get their attention.

I see three empty chairs ahead.  Damn, I need to rest my leg.  The swelling is so bad that I have a "rubber tire" that is flopping over the top of my sock.  So I hobble to the chairs, and I sit.

And there I am.  Almost an hour now since Consuela gave me directions from the ER to wherever I’m supposed to be.  Heart racing.  Sweating. 

"Heart racing"?  "Sweating"?  Hey, isn’t that what Dr. Ray-of-Sunshine said would happen just before I dropped to the floor, dead?

Jesus.  Get a grip, Ken.   Breathe.

Yeah, fuck this.  I’m going home.  It’s probably not a clot anyway.  And if it is a clot, I’d rather die alone at home.  Better than dying alone in a hospital corridor.  I’m reasonably sure I can find my way back to the lobby, and then I’ll hobble on to freedom.

Cell phone rings.  Melinda is "out the door" and on her way, and won’t take "no" for an answer.  She’s a nurse, so she shames me into staying.  Fortunately, I suddenly see a sign that points to "Radiology Department Waiting Room (fish tank)".  I’m not too keen on being put in a fish tank, but I decide to follow the arrow anyway.  Hobble, hobble.

Well, it turns out that radiology was where I needed to be.  The waiting room has a large fish tank with a large variety of no-confidence-building dead fish.  Fortunately, the receptionists are nice and speak my language. 

Scooby-Doo cartoons are on the waiting room television.  That”ll have to do.  Apparently, the Scooby-Doo gang is being chased by a ghost, but it’s not really a ghost — it’s just some weird dude trying to scare people off his property or something. 

The cavalry (Melinda) arrives.

Okay.  I’m where I’m supposed to be and someone is here with me.  Things are looking up.

And thereafter for the rest of the day, I resign myself to doing whatever it is that any woman tells me to do.  Which may be a good life lesson.

I never actually see a doctor throughout the whole day.  Although the radiology technician was nice.  She needed to scan the circulation in my leg with the ultrasound doppler doohickey.  At one point, there was no circulation in the lower part of my leg though.  The swelling, you see.  My socks and sneaker had cut much of it off.  When she took them off ("peeled" is probably the better word), there was a huge comical imprint in my left foot.

She explained that if they found a clot, I would be admitted right away — no going home or anything convenient like that.  And I would stay there for 3-4 days.  "I hope you don’t have any plans," she quipped.

"Well, I was hoping to do ‘Debbie Does Dallas’," I said.  She gave me that quizzical "look" that everyone else in the cast has gotten from time to time.  I shake my head and shrug.  I really don’t feel like explaining.  With my luck, she’ll be offended, and then do a haphazard Doppler scan.

Anyway, bottom line: no clot.  So Gray was wrong, even though he was, in the end, right.

I finally get home at around 7:30.  Put my leg up, take some meds, and apply ice. 

Then it dawns on me: I still don’t know what’s wrong with my leg.

Eh.  Probably just pulled something.

POSTSCRIPT:  The pain got worse throughout the evening, and I had to crawl upstairs to bed.  It wasn’t better the following morning, and it was still swollen.  But then around mid-afternoon that day, I decided to get up and start stretching it lightly.  That seemed to help.  A few hours later, I was at rehearsal.  Not exactly doing the hoedown all out, but I was walking pretty easily.  So whatever it is, it’s healing.