A Hospital Tale

(I ask your pardon if I've been slack in visiting your blog. I spent most of last week in the hospital, hosted by my ruptured appendix. All is on the mend now, and I'm working as fast as all my little meds will allow me to get caught up. There's no place like home.)

The small taps on the door stirred me from the quasi slumber of the surgically repaired.

Even as my eyes worked to focus in the early morning hours, the door pushed open carefully.

"Good morning, hon, my name is Wanda and I'm with the hospital volunteers," an elderly woman with a lacquered beehive introduced herself as she moved towards my bedside. She consulted her clipboard and flipped a few pages, tapping an area at the bottom of a sheet.

"And you are George, " she proclaimed with a sweet smile.

I was drug addled, hooked to more lines and tubes than I knew what to do with and unsure of the day and year, but I was pretty sure I wasn't George.

"Um, no, I'm Shelly. But it's nice to meet you."

She frowned and underlined several things furiously on her clipboard. She pulled cat eye glasses up from the chain on her neck, fixed them on her nose, and carefully studied what was written there, tapping again in finality.

Slowly, with the enunciation of an elementary teacher, she said with a determined smile, "You...are...George...Morris."

I'd seen myself accidentally in the mirror the night before. I had hobbit hair, an odd swipe of Betadine on my neck, no earrings, no mascara, no lipstick, but...but...George?

"No ma'am, I am Shelly. Shelly."

She leaned in a closer. "You are in room 439?"

I exhaled and smiled. "Well, this is actually room 438."

She shook her head in small swipes side to side and made soft, disapproving tsks with her mouth.

"Hon, you'll need to call the office here and straighten things out. They have you under the wrong name and in the wrong room!"