time.
'Okay, okay. I'm awake!'
'Where are you hurt?' the medic asked.
'I have at least two broken ribs on my right side, maybe more. Did I win?'
The husband member of my instructor duo laughed. 'You got him with the ugliest spinning back kick I have ever seen in my life. But you won!'
'Cool. Help me up.' I rolled up very slowly. The crowd cheered. 'I'm going to change. Could somebody pick up my award and then drive me to the nearest emergency room?'
I didn't expect that a doctor could do anything for me other than prescribe some good painkillers. Doctors, or as I prefer to call them, physicians, databases, quacks, etc., haven't cured anything, not one damn thing, since polio, which was way before I was born. Come to think of it, they didn't even come up with a cure for that; they simply committed something akin to genocide on the poliovirus.
I'm not completely sure why the quacks haven't gotten anywhere over the last sixty years, though it's probably because they don't have to take enough physics and math in school. A physician depends on the miracle of the human body's ability to heal and adapt. Any good physicist or engineer will tell you, if you have a broken support strut (a bone) you either weld that damn thing back together or you replace it. You sure don't sit around and wait for it to fix itself in six weeks or so. The way the quacks deal with a more serious illness is nothing short of magic or alchemy. Whatever it is, it sure isn't science! 'My magic book says that if you look this way, smell that way, and have stuff coming out your nose then you should take two of these pills a day for ten days while standing on one foot and praying to Hypocrites. If you don't get better in two weeks then come see me again. That'll be a thousand dollars please.' No way that's science. The guy who invented the pill may be a scientist, but not the guy administering it.
An example of the physician's incompetence is aging. Why we still grow old and die is beyond me. All of us are infected with a genetic disorder that causes our genes to break down and start producing 'old' cells or cells that are mutated to create the symptoms of old age. This process is either caused by cosmic rays, ultraviolet rays, or other radiation exposure, or maybe some chemical mishap within our own bodies. Maybe it is a statistics problem. But whatever the cause, it is a disease we're all born with.
Physicians accept this as a natural thing because they simply won't do their homework and solve the problem. Fix the damn broken genes or replace them! The local university quit letting me teach the beginner level physics classes the pre-med and business students take. The student evaluations claimed I was 'too hard' and assigned 'too much homework.' You get the idea. If the first American in space were still alive today (old age got him), you could ask him if he would've wanted to be on top of several tons of ignited explosives that guys who complained about 'too much homework' designed. Maybe I'm cynical because I have had broken bones before.
Jim Daniels, one of my teammates and best friend and student and teacher, all in one, got my stuff together while I changed clothes. I still couldn't shake the weird 'punch drunk' dream that I had. I mentioned it to Jim a time or two. I think. I was still a little shaky.
I had to have help getting my shirt over my head. I wished that I'd brought a button-up instead of the pullover. Next we went to the hospital, then back to the hotel though I still don't remember a major portion of the transition.
I do remember one part of the hospital visit that reaffirmed my position on physicians. When it was all over the wizard at the emergency room said, 'There isn't really anything we can do for broken ribs. You just have to keep them immobile and let them heal on their own. It should take about six weeks. I'll write you a script for the pain.' What a surprise. Fortunately, my insurance covers emergency room visits.
'Hell man, I knew all of that. Why'd I need you? Oh yeah I remember now. You bastards have it lobbied so that you think you are the only people in this country smart enough to administer pain medication. I wish you were in my physics class you . . .' I get irate when I'm in serious pain and dealing with quacks.
'Anson, calm down!' Jim grabbed me and put a nerve hold on me that hurt worse than my ribs. That was his way of telling me to either shut up or he would shut me up. Did I mention that Jim was my friend?
Unfortunately, my insurance only covered about twenty bucks of the prescription painkillers that cost two hundred. I have some vague memories of speaking very harshly to a short Pakistani pharmacist at an all-night drugstore. Jim has since assured me that the poor pharmacist didn't deserve any of the tongue-lashing. Like I said, I get irate with the whole medical industry in this country. It is an industry, not an art, or a merciful charity, or a scientific profession. Hell, it's not even magic for that matter.
By the time I got back to the hotel, the painkillers were working great. I was so loopy, I would never have made it into the room by myself. It seemed like the next thing I knew my alarm was buzzing at me. I hit it and it stopped. Then the phone rang. It was my wakeup call. I forced myself up and took a shower. Jim must have helped me pack, although I have no recollection of that. I got dressed very slowly, trying to withstand the pain. After a short while, I became more awake and less under the influence of the painkillers that I had taken the night before. My mind was clearing, but there was still a dull ache in my side and any sudden movement nearly killed me. Once, I sneezed, and I thought I was going to die it hurt so badly.
I got a cab to the airport but unfortunately I wasn't going home. I had a conference on 'The Progress of the Breakthrough Physics Propulsion Program' to attend at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center the next day. I was looking forward to the conference before I broke my ribs. Thank goodness I had enough air miles built up to upgrade to first class. Coach seats would not have been fun.
CHAPTER 2
Normally I don't drink on airplanes. It dehydrates me, and the air in commercial aircraft is dry enough as it is. But this was an exceptional circumstance. My ribs hurt and I was in first class where drinks are free. I figured a couple drinks couldn't hurt and might even help dull the ache in my side. I was on my second domestic beer before the coach section was boarding. I watched the sky marshal eye the coach passengers as they filtered past him at the entrance of the plane. I think he realized that I figured out what he was and he quit making eye contact with me.
After a few minutes of that, boredom set in so I began flipping through my slideshow on my laptop for my talk the next day. I just couldn't get in the mood so instead, I pulled up a game of chess I'd been playing the computer for about a week. I'd lost the game about fifty times, so I kept undoing the game back to when I was in the lead and starting over from there. Needless to say, I'm not that good at chess. I was on about my third beer when it looked like the plane was going to be closed up and I would have an empty seat next to me. Then, at the absolute last second, a woman in a U.S. Air Force uniform came through the hatch, made her way to the seat beside me, put
