Excerpts from the Diary of A Pissed Off Bodybuilder

Al-Mana Hospital… Revisited

By now, you probably know that I hate hospitals more than anything else. I hate the way they smell, I hate the way they look, I hate the nurses there, I hate the doctors, I hate their stupid f***ing handwriting that no one can read, I hate waiting for hours just to see the doctor for 5 minutes… etc. The reasons why I go there is to either get an excuse for work if I’m sick, or get a full medical check up with blood work. Other than that, if I was dying, I’d try to cure myself. Anyway, yesterday Maryam banged her little toe on the door real hard and it snapped (not the door, her toe…). Since I wasn’t the one that was hurt, it’s part of my responsibility to take her to the hospital (I can f*** around with my own health, not someone else’s. I can’t tell maryam to “take it like a man and put some ice on it for 6 weeks”). So, we headed out to Al-Mana shitty hospital. Something I’ve noticed since it was probably the first time I went to the emergency room over there… The emergency room is located in one of the most crowded areas in khobar. To make matters worse, there was a detour right before the corniche/pepsi road intersection (now, if you’ve never been to khobar, you’re probably wondering why the f*** would they call a street “pepsi road”?... the pepsi bottling factory is located there, so it kinda stuck to the road’s name for the past … I don’t know, 15 years?). So, it took me about 40 minutes to reach the emergency room. It got me thinking, if I had someone that needed medical attention ASAP, he’d probably be dead half way there! (if you say “why don’t you call an ambulance?” … get real… they’ll probably be there in 2 hours… they have to have dinner first… a couple of cigarettes… talk about stocks maybe… then attend to the patient… and they choose the longest route to be able to chat longer). Anyway, we reached the emergency room and had to wait in line behind people with real emergencies on their hands… you know.. like a cold or a flu… after about 30 minutes, the doctor saw my wife (the nurse was a real bitch, I could write a whole f***ing book about how much of a bitch she was… so I’ll just leave it be), the f***er started bending her toe up and down… WTF?!?!? My wife started screaming and was about to kick him in the face and she said “IT HURTS!!!! STOP IT!!!”… and the doctor/asshole looked at her like she was a freak and said “I need to do this to know where it hurts the most”… she looked at me as if she was going to say “how stupid can this guy get?” and she said “you can ask where it hurts the most and I’ll tell you”… you know what he said? “no, it’s ok… I know now.” Anyway, he took x-rays, turned out to be multiple cracks in her toe and the front of her foot. Then, the mad scientist (gypsum cast technician) arrived. When you see the technician throwing shit around the room and yelling “do we have micropapertape? Micropapertape!!! No? what do we have? This? I guess it’ll do… where's the blah blah… no? ok… maybe this one… hmmm… what did I forget? What did I forget? … hmmmm… nurse!!! Do we have large cotton? No? hmmm… maybe this will do… which foot is broken? How bad? From the ankle? Toe? Where? Ok…” …. When you hear that, you kinda freak out… and the nurse was talking to my wife, and after she talked to her, my wife looked at me like … like she was scared shitless I guess… Anyway, after we were done, Maryam told me what the nurse said. She asked maryam if her foot hurt, maryam said “yeah”… so the nurse told her “you haven’t seen anything yet. It’s gonna hurt a lot more when he starts bending it.” … f***ing sadistic whore… and now I have to make an appointment with Orthopedics tomorrow and wait 4 hours for the doctor to say “hmmm… looks fine… come back in a month”…