03
Mar
Tuesdays Topic: Public Sleeping Day
Jgoode, our Tuesdays Topic Maven, posed the question … where is the silliest public place you’ve ever fallen asleep for last Tuesdays Topic (yeah … I didn’t get mine written til now … sorry … but better late than never is what my Grandma used to say)
As an 18 or 19 yr old kid … I got sick … went to the doctor [several different times even] and got antibiotics … shots and pills .. I did not get well … I kept getting sicker.
About two weeks or so after getting sick, I went downtown with my best girlfriend and my boyfriend … he went … somewhere … to get ice … I remember feeling like I was burning to a crisp in the Iowa summer heat …. she went into a store … I sat down on the sidewalk … or so I thought.
My temperature was sky high, my throat was swollen shut and I was probably rather delirious by this point in time … not being able to eat anything for several days and barely drink anything either … I had wandered off several blocks away … turns out I was laying on the sidewalk sleeping just outside a bank’s plate glass window several blocks away.
This was a time when you did NOT see anyone in downtown Des Moines sleeping [or even sitting] on public sidewalks [some hobos/bums/homeless slept under the bridges out of sight of passers-by - they hung out at the two cross-country bus depots and did all their panhandling across the street from the bus depots or at the local pool hall upstairs located above a drugstore].
I was not outside the store where she had been shopping – she and my boyfriend were frantically searching for me – someone in the bank called the police.
My boyfriend found me about the same time the police arrived … I remember my boyfriend promising me ice … I remember my friend telling me she was going to a store …. I remember sitting down on cold hard concrete … somewhere …. most of that two weeks was/is a foggy jumbled haze for me. The police did not transport me to the hospital since my boyfriend was there to take me – I was burning with fever, confused and incoherent.
My first clear memory from that time was when I woke up in a hospital isolation ward with a nurse gowned head to fingers to toes with a face mask hovering over me with a wet washcloth and an IV in my arm and my boyfriend staring at me through a large window from the hallway.
I had mononucleosis … highly contagious … AKA the kissing disease …. out of all my friends, family, co-workers and regular customers that I had been around the entire time of being sick before being hospitalized … no one caught it … no one else got sick … just me.
I was mortified beyond belief to find out that I had been sleeping on the sidewalk in downtown Des Moines. Knowing I had been deathly sick did not comfort me or make me feel better … I felt like such a silly fool … sleeping on a public sidewalk downtown.
Years later, I finally came to realize that being so “silly” as to … sleep on a public sidewalk … outside a bank … forced … someone to take me to the hospital … no one realized just how sick I was … the family doctor had seen me the day before and given me another shot of antibiotics [my third or fourth since getting sick] … I didn’t have insurance .. I was a waitress at a local drugstore food section … my boy friend took me to the county hospital … they diagnosed me immediately and put me in isolation with an IV of whatever was needed to put me on the road to recovery and to get me hydrated again.
The moral of the story? Sometimes the silliest of things can save your life … and you may not even realize it … for decades … search those “silly” embarrassing moments for the silver lining … not the shame.
The sad truth today in Houston Texas is that if I were to sleep on a sidewalk while sick … I might have a 50/50 chance of being recognized as being ill and needing to go to a hospital. The world has changed in the last 30 years.
