It’s Wednesday night , so this series continues.
Last week, we left off spending the weekend at Tufts Medical Center.
Let me tell you, Tufts is sort of awesome. Of course, it wasn’t awesome to have my weekend taken away in the hospital. After every show, my friend Ben gave me updates on everything I was missing at the theater.
But if I had to be stuck somewhere, Tufts was the place to be stuck. Tufts Medical Center is like a hotel – a fancy, swanky, unlimited room service hotel. They have the best food. The. Best.
I had never been admitted in a hospital before, so I didn’t know how the food situation worked. On TV shows, there’s pretty gross food, and not a lot of it. (And there’s always so much jello everywhere.)
In real life, there were amazing plates of pasta, so much delicious toast, and so much more. I don’t even remember everything they had, but it was pretty much anything you could want. You just called down when you were hungry and read from your menu. It was awesome.
And the nursing staff! My goodness, these were the nicest people ever. Everyone was unbelievably sweet to me. The doctors were nice as well. If you ever have to hang out in a hospital, this is the joint. All the cool kids kick it here, ’cause it is the bomb dot com.
Now that I’ve talked about all the amazing things, let’s spend a second talking about how stressful this was already becoming – and this was just the first few days in the hospital.
Back in the day, I was incredibly happy to be busy to a pretty insane degree. Most days, I was scheduled within an inch of my life – multiple jobs, tons of classes, side projects, and on and on.
Wouldn’t you know it? I had this humongous project I was working on for one of my classes. People often refer to it as the biggest project you’ll do in the Music Production & Engineering major. It’s called a sound-alike. You take a popular song, and try to recreate it as best you can – getting every single sound (from the kick drum, to the synthesizers, to the vocalist, and everything in between) as close to the sounds on the record as you can get them.
My first session was supposed to be Monday night. And my overdubs session was supposed to be Tuesday. For a while, I assumed I’d get some kind of test on Monday. The doctors would see this was all some sort of big misunderstanding or broken EKG machine or something, and I’d be let out, never to see another hospital again.
After all, how could something as crazy as having a heart problem happen to me?
On Sunday, I learned from a doctor that they were most likely going to have to do multiple (time consuming) tests, and they probably wouldn’t be able to fit them on the same day. It seemed as though best case scenario for when I’d leave was Tuesday, but Wednesday was more likely.
Wait a second. A weekend vacation was one thing. (One thing I already had trouble wrapping my mind around, but somehow found the ability to let go for three days.) But anything more than that was kind of ridiculous. I mean, doesn’t everyone in the world understand that I’m super busy with my little life, and obviously my world must revolve around me? Therefore, no time for this.
I grudgingly emailed Stephen (the professor I had for the class with the sound-alike), absolutely freaking out about missing sessions on both Monday and Tuesday. (Studio time was extremely precious at Berklee.)
I was already mortified that I had passed out in my class and had to be taken out of school in an ambulance.
Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, I’m a sucker for attention. I will sing and dance and act for hours if you’ll applaud me. But I didn’t want it this way. This way pretty much sucked.
I like to try to be known for you know, being awesome, and handling a lot at once. I like to be known for being strong and driven, not some weak victim. That’s boring, right?
So my goal was not to tell anyone, and already I had to get another professor in the mix.
Of course, because he is an awesome human being, he was very nice and understanding. He said to focus on my health and we’d worry about the project once I was out of the hospital with the all clear.
We’ll pick up here next week.