I spent Halloween\’s Eve and Halloween itself strung out and then asleep from morphine. (Pause.) That I somewhat unwilling had injected into my upper ass by a nurse in the rush section of the ER at Holy Cross Hospital on Tuesday night.

Wow, I spent Halloween of 2002 in Holy Cross Hospital, too, except that time was for an overdose.

Wait a minute, back the fuck up. I just realized that, while writing this. It\’s funny I didn\’t remember that before. While I was there, I remembered being in there last year, during Christmas (me + holidays = emergency rooms, apparently), but not the Halloween OD. Good god.

Okay, well, at any rate, it was actually TWO nights ago, on October 30, my grandfather\’s 93rd birthday, that I ended up in the ER. Five years ago it was Halloween night, proper, and last year it was actually December 23. (So nyah.)

5:15pm, I was at the bookstore, headed to my grandfather\’s birthday party. Just wanted to pick something up, last minute. Bent over to look at something and COPSHOOTCOPKABLAAM — that is the sound of my knee locking up, then me falling over in pain, attempting not to swear and yet still swearing.

Motherfucking self-involved yuppie shopping scum, it took me almost ten minutes before I was able to flag a customer down to get an employee to get me some ice. When the employee came back, the dick actually said to me \”there\’s been so much drama today, and now this,\” then walked off… and didn\’t come back or tell the rest of the staff that I was there.

I spent the next hour perched on the jutting bone spur on my broken tail bone, because that\’s the angle I fell on and I couldn\’t move into another position without my knee feeling like it was ripping out of my body. So for the next hour I contemplated what to do, called Matt (who roused himself from his cold and came to try to help me), called my mother, called my health insurance (who have a 24/7 nurses triage), and then called 911. When I first got on the phone with 911, I tried to get the address of the store from an employee, and it was the wrong address. The operator finally figured out where the store was and deployed an ambulance.

When the medics arrived, security met them at the door and tried to turn them away because they knew of no one in the store who was injured! Fortunately, the medics persisted and my boyfriend heard the commotion. Matt stood up and started yelling, \”she\’s over here!\” The head of security came up and started bitching at me because no one in the store\’s staff had notified a manager or security of the situation; a medic pulled the guy aside and told him, \”This is not the time.\” I wanted to kiss the medic, except I was still stuck on the floor.

The EMS crew had to lift me onto a stretcher, wheel the stretcher out into the street and into the ambulance, and then take me to the hospital, where I was deposited into a wheelchair. I got some X-rays done that showed that my knee was locked. Really? My knee was locked? I had no idea! They then injected me with morphine so that I wouldn\’t be able to feel my knee, and therefore could unlock it on my own. After that, I was discharged at 10:30pm — long before the morphine had kicked in.

I live in a walk up. Like, walk up the stairs from the driveway to yard, then walk up the stairs from the yard to the house, then walk up from the house\’s ground floor to the second floor, where my apartment is. A WALK THE FUCK UP. I accomplished that by hopping backwards and sideways on my good leg, while holding my locked knee in my arms, and muttering \”there is no god,\” and \”fucking checkout health care system\” every step up. (I\’d banished Matt from my presence because his attempts to help by holding me were actually causing my knee to be jarred more.)

On top of the shot of morphine, I got a prescription for some lousy Percocet. Percocet? \”I have oxycodone at home, can\’t I just take that?\” \”You might want the aspirin that\’s in Percocet.\” \”But you also just gave me a script for 600mg aspirin, which isn\’t supposed to be combined with Percocet.\” \”Just take them as needed.\”

Whatever. When I got home, I took an oxycodone, watched some brain rot on the death tube, and went to bed around 1am, where I slept miserably because I tried to be Good, so I didn\’t take a sedative with my painkillers, which means I slept like shit until the narcolepsy kicked in around dawn… at which point I slept straight until 5pm. So how did I spend my Halloween this year? Eating ice cream; in a greasy, unwashed cloud of pore-blocking opioid daze; watching Elvira movies; and thinking I am never going to get out of this semblance of a white trash existence, am I?

EDIT: My phone keeps ringing with family members calling to wish me congratulations on my engagement, which the boy and I announced to the family over the weekend, but I am so not feeling it right now that I\’m dumping all the calls to voice mail. \”Hi, tell my voice mail how happy you are for me, \’cos right now I\’m bitchily looking at the world through hooded eyes and am wondering if I can manage to get to the pharmacy for my next refill without the crutches, or if I\’m going to have to crutch it up.

from an e-mail written on Tuesday morning:

I was awoken this morning Tuesday by a phone call from my mother who said, \”Can I ask you a question? Are you pregnant?\” No, of course not, why?

Today\’s my grandfather\’s birthday, so the family is in town. He apparently told my aunt and uncle that I\’m pregnant. In turn, they congratulated my mother, who said, \”What?\” Then she thought, \’maybe she told her grandpa last night when she saw him, and hasn\’t told me yet,\’ but that wasn\’t the case.

What I think happened was that my grandfather assumed, after witnessing the actions of my older cousins, that my generation only settles down with someone/marries/buys a home once conception has occurred. So when I told my family over the weekend that Matt and I are engaged, and my mom told my grandpa, he figured I\’m knocked up — and started telling the rest of the family that!

No human babies. None. Ever.