Pizza Pizza

Sleep deprived + ZQuil = Maybe ten minutes to write this post before I pass out. It's the love of the game that keeps me writing tonight. Plus I've gone from four daily readers to sixteen and you can't buy that kind of percentage growth. So Random Word Generator, what's today's post gonna be about?

Vomit?

They don't call you Random for nothing, huh? Let me think....................(Jeopardy music)............Got it! (And it's not graphic)

A friend of mine scored some free pizza back in high school by gaming the system. And by "friend," I don't secretly mean me. He ordered two half and half pizzas (half cheese/half something else) and when they got there he acted like they screwed up the order. He asked the delivery guy to wait while he called to complain and the manager let him keep them without paying as a gesture of good will. Before the guy could come back with the "right" ones, and get his money, my friend called and pretended it was taking too long and canceled the entire order. If he hadn't gotten locked up for something completely unrelated I think he would've done well in the subprime mortgage industry.

So anyway I dropped by his house and he was like, "Hey I got you a pizza." I ate, played Playstation and went home. I woke up in the middle of the night soaking in sweat with a fever of 104. I barely made it to the bathroom in time to throw up. For the next two hours that's pretty much all I did. We have a 24 hour observation period in my house. If your symptoms (fever, vomiting, bleeding from a gunshot wound) persist longer than that, then you can go to the hospital. So I took the wonder drug, a teaspoon of baking soda and a cup of water, and that did absolutely nothing but make it worse.

By morning, my stomach settled and all I had left was the fever. I looked in the mirror and saw two busted blood vessels on my eyes. That happened once before and healed on its own, so I didn't think much of it. By the end of the day, the little splotches of blood were about the size of a pen tip. The next morning was a different story. They'd pretty much doubled in size. Dr House (my grandmother) decided to try a radical new treatment called "Just wait and let it heal on its own." The next day they'd doubled again. I decided to get a second opinion.

I won't say the name of my HMO, because they suck enough to sue me for telling the truth, but the earliest that they could see me was a week later. By then, both eyes were completely red. That's not an exaggeration. I started wearing sunglasses everywhere, because random strangers kept running up to me on the street as if I was unaware that I was having some kind of medical emergency. "Young man! Oh my God! Young man, your eyes are bleeding. You need to get to a hospital."

And because my HMO sucked so badly, the doctor took all of two minutes to diagnose my problem as (drum roll) allergies! I explained to him that this only started after I threw up and that it began as a tiny popped blood vessel that slowly grew over a week. He told me that it was just fall allergies and a coincidence. He gave me some cream that treats rashes and told me to apply some directly onto the surface of my eyeball. I am not making this up. That's when I figured out why my grandmother just skipped doctors altogether.

For the next two months I just walked around with sunglasses on waiting to go blind. I loved the look on people's faces when they'd tell me to take them off. "There's no sun in this class, take off those...Oh my God. Never mind. Are you okay?" I scored a few sympathy points telling girls that I didn't know how much longer I'd have my vision and that I should experience the beauty of life now.

Eventually it cleared up on its own. I still have two spots on my eyes where the original blood vessel popped. Occasionally someone will ask me what it is. "Oh, this is a reminder to never accept free pizza from someone."