While all the Kings Horseman and all the Kings Men attempted to put my head back together again, I happen to have yet another hospital encounter. Yeah, no kidding! Maybe it’s a sign that I should study medicine when I go to college? Anyway, the encounter was quite brief and I never actually saw the diaper, but I did hear about it.

I was lying on my stomach on the rolling bed in the elevator. Some guy was taking me to have my head x-rayed and we weren’t alone in the elevator. There was a fairly attractive lady present. I guessed she was in her mid-thirties, with long shiny rust colored hair and pale, glowing skin. Although she looked worried and tired, she still looked pretty dang hot to me. I guessed that the girl and boy standing in front of her were her children, an easy assumption to make.

The girl was only tall enough for me to see her head, from her lips up. She looked like a smaller version of her mother, but with shorter hair. The boy was rather pleasing to the eyes as well, with his rust colored hair which he wore parted on one side. However, his most prominent feature was his heavily freckled nose. In another place and time, I probably would have made some kind of wise crack about him looking like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

The boy glanced my way and we made momentary eye contact. He smiled politely, but I can’t remember if I smiled back. I mean, I was suffering from a head injury, so things were a little hazy. He looked fairly young, but not too young. Like I said before, I’m a bad judge of people’s age, however I would hazard to guess that he was maybe eight or nine years old, but his eyes looked much older than that.

A shiver ran through me and the Orderly who was talking me to get x-rayed, patting my back and asked me, “You doing ok?”

“Huh, oh yeah, but I’m cold,” I mumbled.

“That’s probably the ice pack,” he said and tucked the thin blanket up around my neck. “When we get up to x-ray, they have some nice warm blankets. I’ll get you one.”

The boy and I made eye contact again. This time, he didn’t smile. He looked worried, or concerned about something. I watched as he turned toward his mother and motioned for her to bend down to his level. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he whispered, “I had an accident again.” Although he thought he was whispering, everybody in the elevator heard it. Even his younger sister gave him a disgusted look.

I was so disappointed when the elevator doors opened and they got out. My chauffer and I had to go up one more floor, so that ended that ever so brief encounter.

I am not sure if this next encounter actually happened or not. I was just so out of it that I can’t be sure I didn’t imagine the whole thing. I was parked in the hallway while the orderly fetched me a nice warm blanket. Oh it felt so good when he laid it over me.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“Cozy.” I hummed.

“I’ll be back to get you when their done taking your picture, okay?” He said with a jovial grin as he tucking the blanket under my chin for me.

“Sure, don’t worry about me.” I said trying to be amusing, “I’ll just be hanging out here ’til you get back.”

This is the part that I’m not sure happened or not. While waiting my turn, two others were wheeled up. One was an old lady on a bed like mine. I only got to see her as she was wheeled past me, but in that brief moment, I saw that she looked very old and I didn’t have to see her to know that she was sawing some major logs. The other to arrive was a boy who looked to be about my age, and he was in a wheelchair. Unlike the lady who had been parked behind me, he was placed so that he and I could see each other.

“What you in for?” he asked with a sniffle. He looked like he’d recently been crying and it was clear to see why. Both of his arms were wrapped up like a mummy and he wasn’t wearing a shirt or hospital gown so I could see that his chest was covered with a large square bandage.

“Hit my head,” I told him. “What happened to you?”

“Neighbor’s dog attacked me,” he said with another sniffle.

“Looks painful,” I said.

His face contorted as he said, “It is. And this chair is really killing my butt.”

I rolled my eyes slightly to the side and waves of pain radiated from the back of my head. I closed my eyes and tried to suffer through it. When I opened them again, the boy was squirming around in his chair, trying to get more comfortable. That is when the blanket which had been covering his lap and legs fell away revealing… a diaper of course. But it wasn’t a green hospital style disposable diaper like I would have expected. It was white and extremely thick looking. It also sat high on his abdomen and there was so much padding in the middle that it forced his knees apart. It’s not really important but I also noticed that his legs had bandages on them too. I guess that dog really tore into him.

I would have expected the poor guy to have died of embarrassment, but he didn’t. He simply looked down at the fallen blanket, then to me, and that is when he winked at me as though he knew that I was enraptured. I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, the blanket was back on him where it had been before. A moment or two later, some lady came and took him away; leaving me to lie there and wonder if the whole thing had really happened or if I dreamt it all.