Work, again. seeing an entire family, all in different rooms, theres a note on the chart that their pediatrician is their mom, who is in the procedure room. i take care of the kids, they get dispo’d one at a time to mom’s room. Her chart says she has lacerations. Some teenage boy sport, I don’t remember exactly if it was skateboarding, parkkour, mountain biking, what. but she’s a doc, so she knows more than me, and i’m nervous. she’s on the big chair , the kids are on the spinny stools, and i’m looking at all these little itty bitty superficial epidermal cuts on her hands, and then i see the big one. the entire palm of her left hand is flapped, and i pull it up, like a lid on a box. and there’s her anatomy. tendon, nerve,, muscle, all down in the hole, moving just fine and intact, btw, and it reminds me of that scene from “Men in Black” when they open the little Jewish guy’s head and the alien is in his chair up there driving the bus. I close her lid, tell her “it looks like you’re all intact” and replace her little gauze pad. Tell her she has to see ortho. She wants me to fix it, I say no, I can give her the Keflex but that’s it. But i leave the room and get distracted by other things, and i forget to wrap her up, and I of course forget her Keflex. And she is discharged.
So now I am running around the parking garages, looking for her. I briefly entertain the idea of blowing it off; she is a doc, after all, I told her she needs the Keflex, surely she is smart enough to realize I forgot it and call in her own Rx, right? But of course, they are not anywhere to be found, for some reason I feel like she had a Middle Eastern husband, and I am looking for him, but all I see is groups of kids, sword fighting with wrapping paper tubes.
Me and a little girl, 6, maybe 7 years old? I own a bookstore, and it’s beautiful. multi level, open vaulted ceiling, wood staircases, (yes, i have espresso) and it looks, I am realizing now, like Harry Potter’s bookstore. Interesting. Anyway, there is also a basement, much more cookie-cutter; plain white walls, irregularly placed walls and doors, that I use for classes. There’s that long folding party table with the white plastic top, but the really neat feature is that the staircase down is double wide, and it’s in the middle of the wall, so that as it descends and pulls away, there are no sides, and this makes a kind of useless space UNDER the stairs you can’t really stand up in, but its fun for kids to hide.
So one day, I am in my bookstore, and the little girl is with me, and this tall black guy walks in with a fedora (think The Mexican), and pretends to be a customer, but then (yummy) Nathan Fillion walks in, all trench coat and shotgun, and tells me Fedora Man is out to kill me. Something about spies. And he wants the Kid too. But he is whispering, and I realize that even though he is warning me, he is actually part of Fedora Man’s team. So he leads me and the kid down the stairs just before the rest of the team busts through the doors taking up combat positions on my wood staircase levels, and barking orders at each other. Fedora Man is calm, looking around like he’s in no hurry at all, despite the para-military frenzy going on around him. Nathan, downstairs with us, puts us under the stairs (God, is this another Harry Potter reference? wtf?) and turns the lights off. breaks the bulbs. we are panting, loudly, trying not to let our breathing give away our locations, when Fedora Man comes calmly down the stairs, trailing his armed entourage behind him. (I can see him in the dream of course even though we are behind the stairs. I also see Nathan approach him, tell him it looks like the basement is unused, can’t even get the damn lights to come on, and try to redirect him up the stairs away from us. Doesn’t work of course, and FM insists on making his own rounds of the basement. Now the lights are on, fluorescent and bright, and I feel so in the open because there are no goddam walls on the sides of the stairs. And while he is checking out one of the little misplaced anterooms, Me and the girl run frantically for the once that leads to the service hallway. once in there, I take my red kitchen grill-starting flame thrower and hold it up to the hole in the ceiling where Nathan has broken a gas line. I wait for it to blow, knowing in the back of my mind that it will kill us, but when it goes, it blows a hole in the wall, smoke all over the A-team upstairs, flash-bang smoke grenade that gives us time to escape. And we hide next to the dumpster in the parking lot.
*facepalm 