Forgive the detour from gaming and game related things. It's tangentally related in that involves two gamers.
Last thursday I spent the evening with one of my friends at the Emergency room. He's a gamer (and one of the few people who willingly GM's games for me, since I usually GM otherwise, and people seem intimidated by my experience.) From 1045 PM to 7ish AM. Most of it waiting. They finally cave him a CT scan and a shot for pain and sent him home.
Saturday I was going to go to a Tae Kwon Do tournment (to watch my friends/class compete, I wasn't comfortabel enough with my skills to do so.) I ended up not going due to exhaustion from the all-nighter. At 3 pm I got a call and ended up going to take my friend BACK to the ER. Same process of testing, this time they said "infection", and ran the tests again. Gave him meds (pain and antibiotics), and rather than keeping him for observation (considering he was in terrible pain and had an infection that was impacting him so heavily--they sent him home again.
Sunday, he had to be taken to the ER by ambulance , now he was incoherent, and had slept most of the day--his words were scrambled a bit--I understood him but his wife couldn't at all.
He got out of critical care this morning at 11, and I visited shortly after.
It took them this long to get him treated and the infection was close or IS possibly still able to shut down his kidneys.
I have rarely in my life been angry enough to hurt someone. I'm just non-violent by nature, a pacifist for the most part by choice. (I don't like real world violence, games and gaming are different.)
Yet I want to lash out, I want to make it right. Mostly I'm worried for this friend who is as close to me as a brother.
This is an unacceptable state of the world.
We must change it. We have to. Who else will?
