FEEDING TIME

I fed the turtles and Sid, the horribly ill tempered blue tongued skink who is unusally ill tempered these days because on his last shed his left eye did not clear. While this makes him 50% less dangerous and/or likely to bite the shit out of me, I'm sure it sucks to have one of the eyes that are on the side of your head out of commission until I can soak it off for him.
Although it means closing the odds for a skink bite, I have been soaking him (it must suck to not be able to see one whole side of your world). When Sid bites...he bites hard.
Anywho...the menu last night was cherry tomatoes, mixed melon and banana. As I cut and sliced I heard multiple scratching sounds. When I looked up at the turtles closest to me, I saw my hatchlings and my ornate wood turtles pressed up against the closest side of their containers...watching me. Doing the "throat bloat" thing with necks fully extended.
They were hungry and they were'nt being shy about it.
But there was more noise coming from the living room...from the other 5 tubs. They smelled the fruit and knew it was feeding time. Clamoring around in a state of recognition and arousal that I have never noticed before when they are in the house. Outside pens are...
Phone rings...it's a friend whose wife had her gall bladder removed last week and is back in hospital with complications, she's gonna be ok but it has been a trying week for him. I'm glad he called. _______ knows, having a loved one go through this kind of shit is hard. But especially hard when your perceptions and memories of hospitals revolve around trauma and death. It's a peculiar mind fuck. Hospitals are here to help people get well, frequently, people are too fucked up to get well and they die. In the hospital. That palce where you go to get well. My friend and I have spent more than our fair share of time in hospitals watching loved ones die. Certainly, the loved one in the hospital has the winning hand on freak out,
but those of us in the waiting room experience an equally intense freak out. It's an externalized kind of freak out. I wish them well.
So here I was, rambling on about an obviously pavlovian response in reptiles in relation to the smell of fresh fruit. I was gonna say that they (my critters) are attached to me and not to the smell of food and I am an obvious ( yet insignificant ) component of food thinking it might be funny. But it's not. During the conversation with my friend about bad hospital memories, I remembered an event from my previous life as a social worker. I shared it with him. It's funny.

There was this girl who lived at the treatment center I managed. She was a very large black girl (6'2" or 3) and heavy. and, I'm sorry to say, Butt ugly. And she had GIANT feet. Part of her social history disclosed that, in the second grade she won the "bigfoot" contest. She was marked from the beginning, I swear. This kind of bullshit followed her around all her life
and by the time we crossed paths she was (understandably) fucked up. But she was smart, academically and socially. I liked her. A lot. While she could rationalize her peers cruelty on an intellectual level and understand it, her adolescence succumbed to the bullshit and she began to act out. OK...so it's not funny yet...but just hang on, I'm getting there.
We had the suicidal ideation histrionics, we had the delicate cutting, the whole nine yards. But the pinnacle was when she was discovered "passed out" in the parking lot behind the van, alledgedly overdosing on meds she had allegedly hoarded. I might add that her "passing out" behind the van coincided with the time for the rest of the group to leave, in the van, for evening activity.
She was unresponsive to the point of being ridiculous. Something wasn't right, so I instructed one staff member to summon an ambulance. She made the call. Another staff member
sensing my feeling that we were being had, had an idea. "Let's try and revive her"! he proclaimed and went in the main house and came back with a slice of combination pizza. He waved it under her nose and she was miraculously revived. She sat up and was chowing down on said slice when the ambulance crew showed up.
They could not be undeterred, having liability issues of their own, so she was whisked off to the nearest emergency room. This one being South Austin Hospital. I had spent some time here with my mom while she was being killed by cancer, other patients from the center for a variety of reasons and that time that girl from the emergency shelter tried to kill me with a curling iron. Not fond memories.
But when they busted out with giant beaker of activated charcoal and instructed bigfoot ( I wish I could remember her name...there were so many ) to drink it all, I was stoked. Here's a lesson that will stick. BF: "But I don't want to drink this...I'll get sick". ME: "That's the point bigfoot, those pills you (didn't take) took could kill you""This will clean you out" BF: "Okay...glug-glug". Shortly thereafter...."Bloooooorrrrrrggggghhhh"! this fountain of black fluid came shooting out of the ugliest child I have ever seen in all my years and cascaded down her blue gingham hospital gown, at which point she said to me " I didn't take any pills". I said something vaguely therapeutic to her like " well, when you say you have we have to take it seriously and this is the price you pay for denying your feelings...deal with it".
Her "readings were off" according to the ER staff and she was admitted to ICU...Budget ICU...A multi bed room that housed BF and this old lady who was dying. Loudly.
The ER staff decided that BF needed to spend the night, and when I could find no staff to stay with her, I signed on for the night. . So I sat up with her while that old lady died over the course of the night...I remember explaining to BF the reason for the priest and the endless line of weeping family members. All the while playing tapes in my head of riding the elevator up from the parking garages of two different hospitals for my mom and dad in their time of dying. A process that I repeated for years. It was a slow death.
When the old lady finally flatlined BF was sound asleep, still sporting the big black ring around her lips and the river of black down her gown...snoring. Free from the ridicule that had
brought her to this place.
To hopefully learn an important lesson.
We saved her with PIZZA. Go figure.