I'd also like to believe that I was good company. We would watch TV together and miss half of the shows with the distractions of our own commentary. She would stay and eat dinner with me, sometimes I would cook sometimes she would pay for pizza. And sometimes, she would have to go and throw up.
She had to explain to me that she have developed a new condition called Gastroparesis. Literally translated it means paralyzed stomach. While the average human stomach digests food in an hour or so, the stomach of someone with Gastroparesis might take four to twelve hours to digest the same meal. Sometimes the food that's been eaten goes bad inside the stomach and it has to be regurgitated.
She had developed this condition shortly after she started dating Ryan and I had seen her less and less. She had lost a lot of weight from it and she was not quite as curvy as she had been when I first admired her in geology class. She told me later that she had been at her biggest when I first met her. By the time she and Ryan broke up and we started spending every day together, she had lost almost fifty pounds.
I still thought she was hot. Just a skinnier version of the same hot girl I had met years earlier. I told her I was attracted to her and that I would love to volunteer for any newly-single sexual experimentation that she might be planning to help get over Ryan.
She told me, "I don't want to just sleep with you. Right now any sex I have needs to be with someone I don't care about. If anything is ever going to happen between you and me, I would want it to be a real relationship that I can take seriously and I'm not ready for that right now."
While it was disappointing to be denied sex, I really liked her answer. I hadn't even really thought about dating her. As soon as she suggested it, being committed to her sounded like it would be... good. I kept it always in the back of my head as something that someday would be.
Late February 2009, about a month or so after Heather had started coming over every day, a snowpocolypse was headed for Virginia and most of the east coast. The news warned us for days that three to five feet of snow was about to fall out of the sky and shut everything down for days. My roommates and I went grocery shopping and prepared to be snowed in. Hours before the snow began to fall I spoke with Heather on the phone and she said she'd rather be snowed in with me than at her parents house. The beltway was glazing over with snow as I rushed back home after picking her up when my Jeep spun around five times before gently bending the front fender on the highway barrier.
Remember, always turn into a spin, or at least try to remember. I sure as hell forgot.
Anyway, we spent a few days together, snowed in at my little communal home in a suburban cul-de-sac. While we had shopped for food, we had also become bored with what we had and searched for alternatives, to stave of boredom more than hunger. I offered Heather a Cup-o-noodles which she promptly ate.
What I had failed to warn her of, was that that Cup-o-noodles had been sitting in my parents laundry room for at least a year before I had pilfered it for the snowpocolypse.
She got sick. Very sick.
She threw up in my bathroom for over an hour until she was just puking up stomach acid. She told me that she was going to need an ambulance. She quickly explained between heaves that sometimes the vomiting just wouldn't stop on it's own. Her body would just get stuck in vomit mode until she received IV nausea drugs.
Getting an ambulance to come pick someone up when there is four feet of snow on the ground in a cul-de-sac is not as easy as it sounds. They sent an ambulance first. The driver didn't feel that he'd be able to get turned back around if he came all the way down our un-ploughed road. A second, smaller vehicle was sent out to come down to the cul-de-sac, pick Heather up and bring her an eighth of a mile back down to the intersection where the ambulance was waiting.
A cluster of EMT's came into my house and were led to my bathroom in which Heather was haunched over my toilet as she had been for a few hours. Amid the questions and explanations of sarcoidosis and gastroparesis, Heather lightened the mood by speaking to one EMT in particular.
"Your fly is down."
"It'll be ok," he clearly hadn't heard her.
"No, you. Your zipper is down."
The EMT's, my roommates who had crowded the doorway to observe and I all laughed as the tall and brawney man with the shaved head tried to shake off his embarrassment while pulling his zipper back up to the proper position.
I think we all laughed because we wanted the situation to be lightened. There is a strong desire to find humor in a situation caused by medical ailment. I found later that when the situation does not offer any humor, the desire to find it becomes even stronger.
The gurney wouldn't work in the snow and the EMT's had to half carry, half walk Heather out to the van-like-ambulance, which took her to the full sized ambulance, which took her to the ER. The whole transport took about an hour all together. She was given IV fluids and nausea medicine and I made the perilous drive several hours later to come and pick her up.
We agreed that the year-old Cup-o-noodles was the obvious culprit and Heather vowed never to eat Cup-o-noodles again.
Along with the desire to find humor, serious medical events also inspire you to unprofessionally diagnose the event as a fluke, something caused by unique circumstances that can easily be avaoded in the future.
Unlike the desire to find humor, when a diagnosis can't be dismissed as a singular fluke, the desire changes to hope. Hope that a professional diagnosis will be attainable. Cup-o-noodle persecution becomes nothing more than a misguided memory.
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