A Halloween to Remember...

October of 2010 was about the time I had finally settled into college life at TCU. I had established some of the best friends a guy could ask for, and, academically, I was in a fairly good place. As Fall began to settle in, well places that get that season, which apparently isn’t here, my friends and I began to brainstorm ideas for Halloween costumes. I am not one of those guys that usually goes “all-out” for Halloween, but I figured since this was my first Halloween in college, I would actually try. So, because I always try to plan ahead, I started to think of ideas that Friday, the thirtieth. As chance would have it, I wasn’t feeling to well, so I decided I would get plenty of rest that night, wake up on Saturday and go get a costume that morning.

Well, I woke up on Saturday not feeling well at all. I actually spent most of Saturday morning throwing up and watching football on my bean bag in Milton. Around three o’clock I began having these really random convulsions where I couldn’t control different limbs of my body. The health clinic was closed, so I asked Brandon take me to an immediate care clinic. We went to a clinic by the Super Target off of Overton Ridge Blvd. Apparently they don’t accept BlueCross BlueShield insurance past four o’clock, and they weren’t sure they could even see me before they closed at five, so we left to find another clinic. Brandon thought he found one off Bryant Irvin Rd. just south of Overton Ridge, but apparently they had moved or closed because we never found it. While he was looking for another place, I lost feeling in all of my extremities and could barely speak, so we decided that it would be best to just call an ambulance to our location, which, at that point, was some random parking lot. Brandon, however, couldn’t describe where we were so he had to put me on the phone. I somehow was able to spit out enough coherent thoughts to get the ambulance there, and they took me to a nearby hospital without being able to decipher what was wrong with me. After being admitted and giving me an IV with a morphine drip, they began to run various tests on me, one of which needed to be a urine sample. I hadn’t kept fluids down in nearly fifteen hours, so I really couldn’t give them one. The nurse told me that I had twenty minutes to make it happen or else they were going to have to put in a catheter. For the next fifteen minutes Brandon was Googling different ways to make someone have to urinate while I tried any tactic he could find. Finally, literally five minutes before the nurse returned with the catheter, we were finally successful in our task. I must say that having Brandon cheer me on as I urinated in a bottle took our friendship to another level. They discovered I had a rare stomach virus that threw my body into complete dehydration causing my body to quit functioning properly. I was allowed to return to my dorm room later that night, and spent the next two days in bed recovering. Guess it was a good thing I didn’t get a costume. Best. Halloween. Ever.