After a half hour more of waiting, another patient was wheeled into the room. A guy in his thirties maybe. He smelled awful and lay there unconscious. The nurses were hooking him up to all sorts of machinery. A middle-aged doctor with a crew cut came rushing in, glanced at his chart, and then checked him with his stethoscope. The nurse whispered something to the doctor, and together they fished through the guy’s pockets like he was already dead. Turning him over, the nurse found a pint of Old Crow in his back pocket. The doctor opened one of his eyelids and shined a penlight there, and that seemed to jolt him into semiconsciousness. The doctor stepped back and gauged the vital signs now beeping off the machines. The nurse left and returned with the man’s mother, who was a sad gray flake of a woman. The doctor interrogated her: How long had he been drinking? All weekend probably. How long has he had diabetes? Several years. The doctor nodded and said something about hepatitis. And Pat realized, yes, his skin was a blotchy yellow, like the filter on a used cigarette. The nurse reported the patient’s blood sugar, and the doctor looked put out and said something to the mother about a diabetic coma in a tone that this was all one giant pain in the ass.

Just then a nurse snuck up on Pat, asked how he felt without listening to the answer, and quickly drew some blood. The doctor turned to Pat’s bedside.

“Sorry to take so long. That storm made us awfully busy.”

Pat could read his name tag now: dr. roth. He examined Pat’s side and prodded until he found a scarlet surge of pain that made Pat jerk back in the bed.

“Yup, that might be the appendix.”

“Does this have anything to do with the MS?”

“Not likely. We should X-ray.”

Pat tried to reassure himself that he had extended the health insurance from American for just this sort of scenario, and he was covered. And then he accidentally shifted and, fuck, the pain in his side was intolerable. His skin was crawling, and he couldn’t sit still but he had to sit still, and Christ, this was pure hell.

Later that hour, they wheeled Pat down the hall to be X-rayed. The technician didn’t acknowledge his presence, and Pat just lay there like a slab of meat as the guy positioned the machine around his midsection, then stepped out of the room.

Pat was trapped.

He wanted to scream.

Quit crying. Shut the fuck up. You brought this on yourself.