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guess covering up her floppy, tatted booby didn’t really fall into emergency care procedures, because the sagging donkey just kept winking at us as Ophelia was carried away on the stretcher. The stretcher had almost made it all the way to the ER doors when Ophelia opened her eyes, lifted her head, and cried, “Hey!! Isn’t anyone going to get my smokes?”
    She had faked it. You see, Good Old Uni-Boob had apparently decided to take matters into her own hands, and if the medical professionals weren’t going to come to her, she was damn well going to make them. And she had given me more than a cheap look at her private parts. She had given me an idea.
    “Help me!” I shrieked as soon as I saw a pair of booties or a paper hat come my way. “Please help me!”
    After the first several professional medical people ignored me, I decided to start reaching for their legs, and screaming louder. I didn’t feel guilty at all about demanding help; I felt I was simply vocalizing my pain. And I was. But I might as well have been sitting on a street corner, shaking an empty coffee cup and demanding change for my next fix for all the attention I got, which was not even so much as a stare.
    Finally, I was admitted to the triage room, although I don’t know how since I was pretty much unconscious. I believe I probably fell on someone passing by and they simply could not lift me off, so they just wheeled me in. When I came to, someone was struggling with my underwear, and I was almost alert enough to screech, “All hands on your own deck, buddy, it’s not your birthday!” until I looked up and saw a lady.
    This was the moment that my mother had devoted a majority of her lifetime to prepare me for; the time had finally come. And I had failed miserably. Earlier that morning, I had chosen foolishly. I had spotted a 1998 model, barely gray pair of panties in my underwear drawer, but instead had gone for the ones with little more than a rubber-band waist holding up something of a loincloth. As I had stepped into them and they flapped around my ankles like a hula skirt, I remembered thinking, “It’s Sunday. Who is going to see these besides my husband? It’s not like I’m going to be exposing myself to the world, is it?”
    Now I had my answer. And it was YES.
    This in addition to the fact that before I had left for the hospital, I was rather too busy fending off death to look for a razor and then use it on my, shall we say, most remote and secluded areas. In essence, the garden had not been tended, and was a bit in need of maintenance and something of a trim. I mean, really, I wasn’t expecting that any strange company would be coming over, I’ve been married and off the market for some time now, so my OPEN HOUSE sign is rusty and somewhere in the garage behind the Halloween decorations and flat bicycle tires. Nevertheless, there I was, overgrown, unruly, and in combination with my castaway underwear, it was a wonder I wasn’t ID’d as Sasquatch and sent to a kennel.
    On my right arm, a nurse was digging around trying to find a vein like I was a fetal pig in AP biology class. In all honesty, with my cookie exposed to the world, my shaggy, gray shredded underwear sitting beside me like a mechanic’s rag, rockets of pain going off in my abdomen, and a lady poking me in the arm with a needle so many times I could have qualified for methadone treatment on sight, I swore I had probably died at the check-in station and was now in my orientation session for my new lifetime/eternal membership in hell.
    Pretty soon, I was sure, classmates from high school and old boyfriends would be passing by, commenting on my weight and how very poorly I had aged. How could this scenario be any worse?
    The lady attempting to give me a homemade tattoo picked up my wrist and looked at my bracelet.
    “Oh, look at that,” she said. “You’re that girl from the newspaper. Oh, oh, yep, here we go. Got a vein. There we go. I was beginning to think you