FYI: Visit the UM Medical Center Emergency Room on a holiday weekend Saturday night and you should feel lucky that you’re only there a mere eight hours for a relatively minor complaint.

See, this sulfa drug that my doc prescribed for my reactive arthritis caused a nasty reaction. As in high fever, terrible aching and did I mention the silliness, zaniness, loopiness and nonsense rhyming and singing and forgetting and spacing and saying inappropriate things in public?

The ordeal started Thanksgiving night and for me it was mostly a blur. I remember bits and pieces here and there, but reality and fantasy were seriously mixed up for quite awhile. For Frank, it was hellish. Poor guy.

We arrived at the ER at 20:00, didn’t get into the treatment area until almost 01:00 and we got home at 04:00. They took an x-ray of my chest (clear), lots of bloodwork (all normal), urinalysis (no problems) and gave me an IV (which just caused me to have to quickly stagger to the restroom) and then they misdiagnosed me (‘you’re having a viral syndrome’), shot me full of morphine and told me to keep taking the drug to which I was reacting.

The rash started Sunday afternoon and by Monday morning, I was loopy again. I saw my regular doc and he called it correctly, prescribed prednisone and within a few hours, I was back to normal, playing with the dog, grumbling about ignorant fascists in the newspaper and so on.

I still don’t remember a whole lot; it seemed that sometimes I thought something and then realized that I might just have said it out loud. People probably thought I was some crazy drunken homeless man in my pajamas, slippers and blanket wrapped around me. The whole ER scene was bizarre anyway, although I’ve seen worse.

It was quite the surreal and weird and painful and hallucinatory holiday weekend. The best part by far was the morphine.

And so how was your Turkey Day?