[Adult language]

My good pal @seanset, http://seanset.posterous.com/, wrote a comment here moaning and groaning about me not writing a Saturday Funhouse for awhile. How the hell did that happen?  Thanks, mate, for reminding me. Here you go. This one’s for you. And yes, I know it’s Sunday Funhouse where you live.

My Ideal Hospital Room

No jumpers, please. The first thing I’d add to my room is a balcony. I’d like fresh air each day without having to gear up with a mask and gloves and endure the fearful looks from people in the elevator (yes, idiot person who moved to the back, as if that will really help, I have the Bubonic plague, but they let me roam the hospital to drive up revenues with fresh patients).

Each morning I want to pop out of bed, I.V in tow, and take three steps to the great outdoors, yelling: Hello, World, I’m still here, ha ha ha ha ha ha, the joke’s on you.

How nice would it be to sit on the balcony in the morning reading while doing treatments? I could wave to my fellow CFers on their balconies. We could have a contest to see who could make the funniest voice with the vest turned to max. Then we could see who could spit farther, which might be the reason they don’t have hospital balconies in the first place. Not exactly the image the hospital wants to promote with a bunch of us sitting in our underwear spitting on the roof or gardens below.

Imagine people driving up to the hospital watching patients on the balconies doing nebs. Might be too much for them to take. Not us, cause we’ve been to places no one should have to go. So there. Roll up your windows when you drive by, people. BTW, I’d hang some laundry on the railing just to give it that old apartment-building look. And I want the BBQ in the picture.

You can’t make me go in there. I don’t take showers in the hospital. I look at that dark, nasty chamber and connect it to the thought of how lazy the cleaning staff can be. You’d need a team of football players to force me in there (or two drunk Victoria’s Secret supermodels). The shower is bacteria heaven.

I read that some gas stations, or petrol stations in England (you’re welcome for that translation, Sean), have self-cleaning bathrooms. Perfect. That’s how I want my hospital bathroom to work. I want to be able to press a button and watch the entire bathroom sprayed down in bleach. Then I want flames to light it up like the “Backdraft” tour at Universal Studios, killing everything the bleach missed.

Finally, I want test swabs done to make sure nothing is living in there that I don’t want living in me. After all of that, I’ll take my shower with confidence. Girls, show me that pose from page 27 again.

Trying living in the Material Girl’s laundry basket: I want a room bigger than Madonna’s smallest walk-in closet. It’s amazing what a difference an extra 20 square-feet makes when it comes to your mood and health, and where you put all of your shoes if you’re a woman. How about designing a CF room that doesn’t make me feel like a caged animal gone mad during two weeks in the hole?

Come on, hospital bed, let’s do the wave. Have you ever awakened covered in sweat because of the plastic hospital mattress? Plastic doesn’t make the best material for temperature control. However, and this is true, when I was 16 I got a waterbed. And it rocked – and rolled. It was AWESOME to sleep on. It had a plastic mattress with temperature control and heated water. That was the trick. In Winter I was warm and cozy and could sleep with only the top sheet of my Spiderman bedding.

Now as there are a ton of needles in hospitals, waterbeds may not be the best idea. Can you imagine pressing the “I want my nurse now“ button and saying, “my water bed just popped. Oh, and can you bring in some towels and fresh scrubs because my wife and I are soaking wet.”

Let’s hang in Unknown’s room. I cannot tell you how many times I have come close to going “rock star” on the crappy TV with no good channels and fuzzy reception. I came this close to ripping it off the bracket at Cedars-Sinai once and tossing it out the window. Had I been a rock star, they would have just billed me. If I had done it, I would have been fighting back the cons in the L.A. Jail. So, for us time-share hospital patients, let’s load up the room with the finest entertainment center available.

I want a 52-inch HD, 3D flatscreen with every f***ing channel in the world. That’s right, in the world. I’ll even watch those crazy-ass soap operas from Brazil. I won’t understand what they’re saying, and won’t care because everyone looks tan and pretty.

Don’t forget the sound system. I need to block out anyone yelling “nurse, nurse” from the other room. I want people to think there’s an earthquake and it sounds a lot like the battle scene in Avatar.

Lastly, give me a remote control that selects channels up and down and that doesn’t make me want to inject Drano in my IV because I just passed the channel I wanted and now I have to go through 20 crappy channels to get back to the one I passed. Whew, that’s a mouthful.

To the joker who invented that piece of shit remote, I’m still looking for you and will one day take the reverse gear out of your car. They’ll be no backing up for you after that.

Some of us work for a living. I’ve said this many times – give me a desk and chair. I work when I’m in the hospital. This ain’t no holiday, people. I have a family to feed and insurance to keep. Help me keep it, hospital room designers. That way I can come back and use my insurance again, as opposed to doing my IVs while pushing a shopping cart on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Design a desk and have it pull out of the wall like a Murphy Bed or something. Get with the program of the digital world we live in – the one that doesn’t go away just because you’re in the hospital.

Here’s one from Fox: Thanks, Unknown, for giving me one, you generous bastard. Fox here. Look, my fox friends, nurses have heard every line you’ll ever come up with. There is nothing you can say with your golden tongue that is going to catch one of these intelligent, caring women. Even though they wear pajamas to work, which is cool, you have zero chance of getting them to change into something more comfortable – they’re already comfortable in their nurse PJ’s and Crocs. So, you have to trick them in a different, more subtle way.

The water bed is a great first step. Nurses love water beds and will want to test it. When she gets on, bump up the wave action and wait for the fun to begin. You say: “Look who fell into my arms. Que romantico. My name is Fox, and I come from an exotic land called Brazil. I will kiss you now.”

Second, and this is the bait of all bait, put a stripper pole in your room. Always say it’s for exercise and the docs won’t barf all over the idea. When the doc is gone, the patient will play. No nurse can resist a pole in the room (except the one in Louisiana who’s going to write Unknown a nasty comment for this post).

Now gents,  you have to stay cool and subtle and say it like this: “What’s a little spin around the pole going to hurt? It’s a great way to get over the barf storm Mr. Wilson just coughed up all over his room?” Be encouraging. “There you go. That’s it. I’ll just be sitting here reading on my iPad. You go ahead and get crazy. Oh, yeah. Wait, let me crank the AC/DC on this awesome sound system. That’s it. Did they teach you that in college.” [the rest of Fox’s post was censored because, well, you can only imagine what happened next – out came the beer and dollar bills. Then all hell broke loose when the nurse twins came in. Oh, my, Fox. What am I going to do with you?]

Last words . . .

I’ll be playing the lottery tonight, hoping I win big and can have my hospital build a wing just for us. We’ll party like it’s our last and live the rock star lifestyle with IV’s in our arms, a neb in our mouths and a cold beer in our hand. It will be the hospital of choice for those of us who value partying. Let’s drink shots from our Flutters. What the worst that can happen? We’re in the hospital, damn it. Code Yellow, drunk fox peeing off the balcony again.

Live the high-rise life.