I’m in our local hardware store buying paint when I begin feeling lightheaded. Am I that excited about the color Greenmount Silk or just a Victorian lady about to have a fainting spell?

Somehow, I manage to drive home and drop off the paint – and while at it – take my blood pressure. I resent the machine telling me to ‘relax’. Such pressure, and the reading is high, causes me to start blacking out. I guess it’s time to go to the emergency room.

At Garnet Health Hospital on Route 97, I can’t figure out how to get through the doors marked emergency. FYI, there’s a button on the right-hand wall. Push it and you’ll be simultaneously greeted by wide open doors and a health professional. This time it’s a male nurse.

Whenever I’m attended to by a male nurse I wonder why they don’t just change the term ‘nurse’. It seems so politically incorrect. I always thought it referred to someone who actually ‘nurses’ a baby but according to Oxford Dictionary: “The verb was originally a contraction of ‘nourish’, altered under the influence of the noun.”

Nouns at it again! Butting in and changing the world. I let go of suggesting alternative terms to the staff at Garnet Health.

Mr. Nurse attaches what looks like a large plastic clothespin to my right index finger. It monitors my heart rate in real time, which I’m told is totally normal – the heartrate, not the clothespin on the finger. Mr. Nurse slips away and another nurse, this time a female, comes in. She hooks me up to an electrocardiogram (EKG) by placing lots of small sticky strips of tape around my chest and on my limbs. A bunch of wires with clips on the ends are then attached to the tape and voila! She gets a more in-depth picture of my heart. It took longer to attach all the clips than to take the reading, but it was painless and, thankfully, the heart was perfect. Blood and urine samples are analyzed. Again, good on all counts.

“What did you eat before you came here?” Mr. Nurse asks as he reenters the room. “Liver and bone broth,” I say.

He just stands there and stares. I’m not sure which part of the answer he doesn’t grasp so I repeat what I ate for lunch and then add that I had sardines and chocolate for breakfast. He excuses himself for a moment.

Someone else arrives at the ER with a tick bite. From the other side of the curtain, I hear the attendant describe how to take a tick out without it regurgitating into your blood stream.

When they throw up into your blood that’s how you get Lyme’s. Therefore, by swirling a cotton ball or Q-Tip dipped in soapy water around their hind end for eternity, they will back out voluntarily. And then you can photo the tick and send the picture or even the actual tick to https://www. tickcheck.com/ and they’ll tell you if it’s a Lyme carrying tick or not.

The voice of the tick victim sounds familiar. It’s a friend of mine. Seems every time I go to the ER, which is not often, I know the person in the next bed.

Sure enough she comes around the corner and greets me. I invite her into my cubicle. We laugh about being in the ER at the same time.

Her tick is gone and I’m feeling much better just being in the air conditioning and lying in a bed in the middle of the afternoon.

It was a very hot and humid day.

Did I drink enough water? Probably not. I’m still excited about the color Greenmount Silk. And I’ve got painters already putting it on the walls of my entryway. I can’t wait to get home and see their progress.