How Not to Vampire - Season 1

14. Doctor, Doctor

Pro-Tip for Vampires #55: 

There is more to life than parties and looking pretty. Vampires have jobs too.

Reality returned, much like a brick to the face. One minute I was in a happy place with clouds, then boom, I woke in the front passenger seat of Claude's car, dimly aware from the way the passing streetlights zipped past, that we were in the middle of committing several dozen traffic violations.

A spasm jerked my body, and I turned my head to look at my friend, my eyes unable to focus. They had picked up a nasty habit of wandering in opposite directions, and it gave me a headache to force them to behave. I blinked a couple of times, which seemed to do the trick. Except now, one eyelid stopped working entirely.

"Wha's happ'ing?" I managed to slur. Apparently my mouth was also taking a vacation. Upon further inspection, it seemed that the rest of my body was as equally unresponsive. I was a ragdoll, held upright only the grace of a seatbelt.

"I'm taking you to the hospital, man," Claude said without taking his eyes off the road. He glided the car around a difficult corner and then continued. "You just had a fucking seizure back there. You might have had a stroke or something." He glanced at me for a moment. "Your eyes and ears were bleeding, dude."

Something popped in my ear, and my eyes finally decided that they wanted to focus on Claude after all. There was a tingly feeling all over my body as nerve receptors started to fire again. I somehow managed to flop one hand up in an attempt to massage my neck.

"I feel like shit. Like I overdosed or something."

"Just stay still, man. I got your back."

"Feeling better already. Really." I slurred.

"She sells silly salty sluts by the seashore. Say it!"

"Brain no like," I sputtered.

By the time we screeched into the hospital entry road, I was fully recovered, but a certain stubborn someone-who-shall-remain-unnamed (Claude), wasn't listening to me. That same someone managed to commandeer a wheelchair, and dumped me into it with more force than necessary. Then humming the theme song to the Facts of Life under his breath, he wheeled me into the emergency room, where I expected to spend the next three hours of my life waiting for boredom to slowly kill me.

As soon as we entered, the guard on duty who had a bit of a John Goodman (Big Lebowski era) thing going on, took one look at me and pointed Claude toward a desk where a bored-looking black lady sat. There were about a dozen people scattered throughout the waiting room, and more would be coming. According to Louise, Friday nights were always the busiest nights, with all of the whack-jobs simultaneously deciding to engage in risky behaviour. The lady at the desk looked particularly formidable, so I got ready to explain why I didn't have my health card and why I had the number committed to memory. It was a charming story guaranteed to make the nurse not hate me too much.

Claude wheeled me over to the desk, and without looking, the nurse handed a clipboard to him. Claude didn't even pause, just took a pen and started writing, filling out my information as if he too had it fully memorized.

"What happen with him?" Nurse Bradshaw (according to her nametag), asked with a sharp Jamaican accent, and then she saw my eyes, and one eyebrow shot up.

Fuck. I had forgotten about my eyes. I didn't have a story, charming or otherwise to explain that anomaly—

Nurse Bradshaw exhaled in a way that clearly said "not this shit again" and got up from her chair, picking up what looked more like a price scanner than a medical instrument. There was a de Biers Instruments logo on the side, which at first glance it had looked like a little bat, but that must've been an illusion of design.