One of the many things in life I despise (besides asparagus) are hospitals.  They make me angry.  They make me itch.  They depress and sadden me.

 

My wife, being very great with child but not quite great enough (29 weeks, I think), decided to have her baby early.  With the help of her doctor, a handful of nurses and a lot of drugs, we talked her out of it but it required a LOT of time... in the hospital.  I may have mentioned it, but I HATE hospitals.

 

Every chair in both the waiting rooms and patients rooms are designed to be nauseatingly uncomfortable.  Since my wife was kept overnight (22 hours was the final count) I spent countless hours in those wretched contrivances.

 

The first night I had shuffled my wonderful but active children off on their grandmother but the following day I had to watch my lunatic daughter for hour after countless hour alternating from my wife's bedside to the waiting room.  Trystan, the daughter, is deranged.  The very concept of quietly sitting and playing with silent toys or cooing softly in a corner are foreign to her.  No... she must scream and race around the room, tripping over cords, cables and nurses. 

 

She screams quite a bit.  She screams when she is happy and she screams when she is angry.  She also screams when she is sad or hungry.  In fact, there are few times she does not scream.

 

As you can imagine, she was not a calming influence.  I was wound as tight as a very tightly wound banjo string.  I vibrated the way that banjo string vibrates when plucked.  I was a nervous wreck.

 

But, now my wife is home.  On COMPLETE bed rest.  On medicine.  BAD medicine.  Medicine that does very disturbing things to one's psyche.  But that is a different story for a different day.