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Art Colony: in the event of something happening to me
Monday, November 7, 2005
› by victoria
this morning i woke up at 5:40 AM sharp, jolted awake by the uncontrollable spasming of my own muscles. My fever has been high all weekend of course--as soon as I got back from work on saturday night, it was a good thing that Gina cancelled the Art Club film night activity because I was in no shape to go--Sunday morning was a nightmare, as far as I can recall Biff and I spent all of sunday trying to nap off whatever we had. Well, Biff doesn't have it (thank God) nearly as bad as I did. But Sunday night my fever was really really high and Biff wanted to call a doctor, and I said "No, no hospital" and i drank a lot of soda while he worked on his project which was due monday morning and then we went to bed. And everything went according to plan until I woke up and couldn't control my body, which was absolutely terrifying. It took almost an hour for it to stop. Biff watched over me the whole time and declared that I couldn't go to work. I hate missing work. Hate hate hate it. But he was right: I'd gotten myself into this fix by working too hard and driving myself beyond the point of exhaustion so I drank my gatorade and went back to bed...well, that is after i had called as many of Biff's professors/teachers as I could and told them he was taking care of me and not pulling a Ferris Bueller on them.
I just kept drenching my clothes with sweat and changing my shirt and changing my shirt and changing my shirt and taking another bath and still my fever was really high. Finally it broke around this afternoon and I was able to sleep. (*If anybody knows what I have--what the symptoms sound like--please tell me, my head still aches abominably as do my legs)...
And then I called Robin and found out that something dreadful had happened.
Robin called the ambulance at 4 AM this morning when Jill fell and broke her collarbone and several ribs and right now she's at Columbia hospital. The news hit me like a punch in the gut. I couldn't believe it. Biff and I said we'd be over there as soon as we could. We stopped at Columbia on the way over to Robin's house (after several mistaken stops--I thought St. Mary's hospital was Columbia's at first) and we took the elevator up to the highest floor and we looked through the door and it was like someone had beaten our spirits down. To see Jill--one of the strongest, most energetic people I know--lying back in a hospital bed connected to all these machines looking like a ghost of herself... it hit Biff and me really hard. We went over to Robin's and hugs were exchanged all around: then we had to bundle back into the car & head back over to Columbia's for the whole family visit. And ohmigod, this time it was gutwrenching. I just can't believe this happened. The Jill on saturday who gave us a ride home is now there, unable to shift herself in bed, being monitored by machines, in agonizing pain. It hurt so much to watch. I wish there was something we could do besides visit.
So tomorrow's my big long day o' classes. And I promised Jill that we would make sure that Robin didn't hurt her back doing anything & that we'd help to hold things together until she got better again. It just makes it seem like nothing else matters for a while. Hold up look happy, right, that's what I've got to do.
Right now I'm glad all i have is a headache and a little bit of a fever and muscle aches. That's nothing. We all have so much to be grateful for. Everything can change in so short a time. And friends are everything.
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