The Grinch Pants

I love "How The Grinch Stole Christmas." Not the feature film. In fact, I've never seen it and have no desire to see it. I love the Dr. Seuss animated show from the 1960's with Boris Karloff narrating. I have it on DVD so can watch it whenever I want instead of being limited to when it actually airs each Christmas.

Several years ago, Diane bought me some awesome sleep pants that have The Grinch and Max on them. They are awesome; within the right context.

To understand the context; you need to understand a little something of my fashion sense. It is simply this. I will not be caught dead in public in anything other than a starched, button down shirt and khakis or dress slacks. Spray starch won't do. The shirts end up too limp. I want my shirts so crisp that they would stand up on their own if I wasn't in them. The only way to get that is with a good, old-fashioned soaking in starch, wringing out and pressing.

Everyone I know scoffs at how stiff my shirts are. No one understands how comfortable a heavily starched, pressed shirt is, though. I find limp shirts to be terribly uncomfortable.

But that's just me.

Diane manually starches and presses seven shirts for me each week.

She really loves me!!!

But I digress...

I was feeling a little out of it at work one day a few years ago. I left work to head to the urgent care center where they diagnosed the start of strep throat and also gave me an albuterol nebulizer to open up my lungs. They told me to go home rather than go back to work. I stopped at a Walgreen's along the way to get my prescriptions filled, but was feeling really out of it by the time I got there. Diane and Matthew met me there and one of them drove me home and the other drove the other car home. I really don't know which was which.

Once at home, Diane and Matthew helped me change into my Grinch sleep pants and my Bob Jones University long sleeved t-shirt and got me settled in on the sofa to rest. Somewhere along the way, my fever shot up and I was becoming delirious. How that could tell that I was delirious and not just my normal self is still up for debate, but they insisted I was delirious.

Diane decided that I had to be taken to the emergency room. Now I do not recall much of that afternoon, but I do recall protesting that Diane must allow me to get dressed before going out in public.

I lost that argument. It didn't help that Matthew was on her side and he is big enough and strong enough to carry me out to the car even if I'm not sick and as limp as a rag doll.

So, Diane and Matthew - mostly Matthew, I suppose - loaded me up and took me to Waukesha Memorial Hospital's Emergency Room.

In Grinch pants and a BJU t-shirt.

It doesn't matter how delirious I was; I still had the sense to be embarrassed about being taken out in Grinch pants!

Once there, they loaded me onto a wheelchair and I was taken into a room to wait for the Dr. Sore to see me.

Seriously, his name is Dr. Sore.

Of course there was the obligatory IV and blood draws, throat culture and chest X-Ray and all of the other things they automatically do. Dr. Sore evaluated the results and came to the conclusion that my throat was unimpressive. He was surprised that the strep throat was far enough along for the strep test to even register. He said my chest X-Ray showed a bit of pneumonia.

The concerning thing was that nothing he had found could be causing the symptoms I was experiencing. The culprit was revealed when the blood cultures came back. I was Septic. It was a blood infection that was wreaking havoc on my system. This was a big issue. Survival rates for patients suffering from severe sepsis drop seven percent for each untreated hour.

Obviously, I survived, which I take as proof that there still would have been time to change into respectable clothes...