Hospital sushi

When my daughter was out here last month on her Christmas break from school in Iowa (don't get me started), she didn't do a lot of the usual things you'd expect students on break to do.

She didn't go to movies every night.

She didn't party with her friends at every chance.

She didn't go with her BFF's to Disneyland and stay until closing time, or until (SPOILER ALERT) Mickey and the other cast members take their heads off, hang up the costumes and head out to their second job. I'm sorry you had to hear it this way.

She didn't do any of that. Instead, she had her tonsils out.

Now, of course she could've had them taken out by someone in Iowa. But before you accuse me of being an overly protective, elitist west coast dad who thinks Iowa doctors—as educated, experienced, compassionate and stellar though they may be—just aren't good enough for his daughter, allow me to do it for you. You're absolutely right. (Full disclosure: it was an Iowa ENT who looked down her throat and said, "Oh yeah, it's your tonsils. They have to come out.")

So six days after she got home, her mom and I were in the Outpatient Surgery Center waiting room at Long Beach Memorial, biding our time until she came out of recovery. I'd like to mention her surgery was performed by our ENT, who also happens to have been Chairman of the Division of Head and Neck Surgery at Long Beach Memorial from 2008-2013, and is currently Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Long Beach Memorial and oversees all surgical divisions at the medical center.

I'm just sayin'.

Anyway, somewhere just shy of the halfway mark of the 8 hours we spent there, the wife and I were feeling a bit famished. But we weren't about to leave the premises in case the doctor wanted to talk to us, or they needed me to scrub in on an emergency surgery (I didn't go to medical school, but I did see 8 seasons of Grey's Anatomy).

So I made a run downstairs to the basement where the hospital cafeteria is, along with the morgue. Coincidence? I think not.

It was pretty much like every institutional cafeteria you've ever seen. But what caught my eye was the pre-packaged sushi. As you might know by now, sushi's one of my favorite credit card torching, bank account-draining meals. However the idea of hospital sushi was only slightly more appealing than gas station or car wash sushi. The good news was if it made me sick, I wouldn't have far to go for help.

I decided to go for it, but to also hedge my intestinal bet by buying a chicken salad sandwich along with it. As I think back on it now,I should have probably given more thought to the age of all that mayonnaise in the chicken salad.

When I got back to to the surgery center waiting room and started eating, I was spotted on a security camera, and the lunch police nurse was in front of me in a nanosecond letting me know there was no eating there as a courtesy to patients who weren't allowed to eat at least 12 hours before their surgeries. Like that was my fault.

But since my daughter was under the knife, er, laser, I didn't want to rock the boat. I decided to obey their rule. And by obey, I mean break it.

Since it was late in the day when I got back with the food, the only people in the waiting room were families of patients who'd already gone in. There was no one left for my eating to offend. I was still scared of Nurse Ratched, who was now sitting at her desk. So being the brave rule breaker I am, I put the sushi container in my wife's purse and snuck bites out of it when she wasn't looking.

Driving home after her surgery, my daughter wanted to stop at In-N-Out for a milkshake, one of the few things she was allowed to have for the next couple of weeks.

If I'd known we were going to do that, I definitely would've thrown the sushi back.

I'm screwed

I have a fairly sizable scar on my right forearm. When people see it, they always ask what happened. And every time, depending on the mood I'm in, they get a different story.

Sometimes it's the one where I was scuba diving off Catalina and a baby shark bit my arm. Other times, it's the guy who pulled a knife on me so I shot him. Rarely is it what really happened: a bad auto accident.

Decades ago, a guy in a Monte Carlo decided to run a red light just as I was going through the intersection at Crescent Heights and San Vicente (for you Angelenos). I was driving an orange '71 Super Beetle. He t-boned me, and because I wasn't wearing a seat belt (which the police said probably saved my life) I flew out of the car, wound up sanding the asphalt with my face and breaking my right radius in three places.

I know, stay out of those places.

And unlike the kind I'm used to making from jobs and relationships, it wasn't a clean break. So in order to set it properly, they had to put in the steel plate you see here.

Now when I think of medical equipment, I think of hi-tech, thin, durable composite whammy-jammy that can stay in my body unnoticed for eternity. What I don't think of is a door hinge with five screws in it.

There were some interesting things about it. When I ran my thumb over the scar, I could feel the five screw heads. I used to always set off the metal detectors at the airport. And when the weather would turn damp or cold, my arm would ache like a sonofabitch.

Eventually the arm healed. But then, in a moment of over-confidence and feeling thin, I had to go play volleyball one day with my then girlfriend, now wife, and repeatedly smack my arm until it swelled up three times its size.

That was the minute I decided I was going to have the plate taken out. I wasn't looking for a second surgery, but the arm muscles (yes, I have them) rubbing over the plate and screws all the time was just too irritating.

After the plate was removed, it took about seven months for the five holes from the screws to completely heal.

So it's all good. I have a nice souvenir and a good story. Plus now I can walk down alleys at midnight with my sleeves rolled up and no one bothers me.

It's because of the scar, you know, the one I got when I was sky-diving and my arm caught the door just as I jumped.

Riding the news cycle

If you've been anywhere on planet earth this week, you know Harrison Ford crash landed his vintage plane on Pen Mar Golf Course in Santa Monica. As you'd expect, the farce and con that is social media ran rampant with Han Solo, Millennium Falcon, Chewie, Indiana Jones and Brian Williams jokes. I've included a couple of my favorites.

Fortunately Mr. Ford survived the landing with a cut head, broken ankle and fractured pelvis.

He's a big star so it's a big story. But here's the thing: is this story about his wife racing to the hospital to be at his side news?

Obviously Calista Flockhart has read the celebrity wife manual, which states very clearly in section 4a, paragraph 3.1.1, that a wife must race to her husband's side if he's been in a plane crash.

It's a good thing she has the manual, because how else would she have known what to do?

It's sad when something so natural and decent and expected becomes a news story. It exploits their pain, and even though they're public figures I believe they have a right to privacy - such as it is with the interwebs - just like the rest of us.

Besides, if the news uses headlines to report on a wife going to her husband after an accident, it means I have to look harder for the story about Kim Kardashian dying her hair blonde.

Checking into St. Elsewhere

You might want to read this - stat! Before medical dramas on television were taken to new heights by ER, Grey's Anatomy, Doogie Howser and Chicago Hope, they had St. Elsewhere to show them how to do it.

Thanks to my wife, who introduced me to the show (and who in fact introduces me to most of the shows I become a fan of) I was a huge fan of St. Elsewhere. With it's stellar cast including a then unknown Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Ed Flanders, Norman Lloyd, David Morse, Ed Begley Jr., William Daniels and, as Dr. Fiscus, Howie Mandel to name a few, St. Elsewhere was to medical dramas what Hill Street Blues was to the cop show: groundbreaking.

For the first time, characters died. So did patients. Dream sequences were surreal, scary and violent. Topics that hadn't been taken on before like autism (one of the main characters had an autistic son), rape, AIDS and mental illness were intelligently written about and sensitively portrayed.

The show had a brisk and dark humor which made it all the more appealing. It was produced by John Masius and Bruce Paltrow, Gwyneth's dad.

I liked the show so much I did something I'd never done before: I wrote a letter to Brandon Tartikoff, then head of programming at NBC to tell him how much I enjoyed the show. In the letter, I asked him if it would be possible to visit the set, and to my ever-lasting surprise and gratitude, he said yes. He had his second in command, and eventual successor, Warren Littlefield call me and schedule the visit.

When I got to the set, Masius and Paltrow were my guides. They personally toured me around, showed me the script they were shooting that day and introduced me to a few of the actors.

While we were talking over coffee at the craft services table, Bruce Paltrow casually asked me how I knew Brandon Tartikoff. I said that I didn't - I'd just written a letter he liked. Paltrow laughed, and said it must've been some letter because Tartikoff had given them direct orders to treat me like I was his mother.

Next comes one of the biggest regrets of my life. I've never spoken about it before because it's just too embarrassing, but here it is.

In that same conversation, both Masius and Paltrow asked what I did, and I told them I was a copywriter. Then Paltrow asked if I'd ever written any television, and I told him I hadn't. He then asked me if I'd like to. Let's just say at the time I was much more enamored of advertising than I am now, and gave him an answer which I regret to this day. I'll regret it for all my days.

But enough about my bad choices.

The series ended on a controversial note. It turned out that the entire six seasons had been the imagination of the autistic character I talked about earlier. A lot of people thought it was a cop out, including me at the time. But as I watch the scene now, and the alternate reality it presents for the characters, and what it says about what's going on in the head of an autistic child, I like it.

For some reason only the first season is available on DVD. When they're all finally released, I'll curl up with the wife and we'll spend a weekend or two watching them all again to see the characters we love, and the moments we remember most.