My Point...And I Do Have One by Ellen Degeneres

terrible pain, you don’t care about the way you look; you’re not embarrassed by your facial contortions and grimaces; you don’t care if you’re wearing plaids with stripes, which, thank God, I wasn’t.
    I was doubled over in the car, my face pressed against the window (the passenger window, not the front window), crying out in pain. When we were stopped at red lights, people would look over from the next car. They’d see my manager driving and me sitting next to him crying. You could see on their faces what they were thinking. First they’d think that I was in an abusive relationship and had just been hit. Then they’d slowly recognize me, honk their horns, and give me a big thumbs up. My manager would never hit me, but while I was groggy from the pain he did have me sign something that gives him 50 percent of whatever I make.
    They rushed me into the emergency room: doors slamming, voices overlapping, people running—a flurry of activity. But as soon as I got in, I had to sit and wait and wait and wait. It’s not fair. It’s not like the bakery where you take a number and it’s first come first served. Here they have this crazy idea of bringing you in based on howserious they feel your illness or injury is. I knew I was in for a long wait when I saw a guy sitting next to me with his arm falling off and his head in his lap. As it was, he was only there for the happy hour. If you’re admitted between five and six there’s a buffet table with cocktail franks and nachos.
    The first thing I had to do, besides proving that I had insurance, was tell them what my symptoms were. Unfortunately, they recognized me as a comic, so they thought I was trying to be funny, that I was trying out a new part of my act.
    I said, “I have this sharp intense pain in my lower abdomen. I started feeling it about two hours ago.…”
    And the admitting nurse would interrupt me, barely able to control her giggling, “Yeah, yeah.… Then what happened? Wait! Mary, Stan, come over here, she’s really funny. Start from the beginning.”
    “I was hurting so much I couldn’t move,” I continued.
    The admitting nurse started laughing hysterically. “Oh yes. That’s great, it’s hilarious. Oooooo, I’ve got an idea. Tell the rest of it like you’re on the phone with God. That would make it really funny.”
    So after I made it past the admitting nurse, they had me sit on these extremely uncomfortable plastic chairs (they were rejected by Greyhound bus stations for being too painful) in the waiting area again until they could find someone to help me. Everybody else there was watching TV. They finally wheeled me in to see a doctor because my crying and screaming in pain was ruining people’s TV-viewing experience. “Keep it down, we’re trying to watch Jerry Springer!”
    They gave me a number of tests to try to figure out what was wrong: blood tests. X-rays, ultrasound, temperature, algebra. Some tests seemed valid; others seemed to serve no purpose at all. Like when one doctor had me siton a pony and whistle the theme song from
Mission Impossible
. “Why do I have to do this?” I said between whistles.
    “We just want to rule out whistling pony disease,” he replied, “and anyway, Dr. Jones brought the pony in so we figured we might as well use it.”
    What was really bad was when this guy tried to hook me up to an IV. He kept on missing my vein. He’d stab at me and miss; there was blood everywhere. I got really nervous when I looked down and saw his Seeing Eye dog.
    I told the nurse I didn’t think this guy knew what he was doing and I’d prefer it if she put in the IV. She looked at me surprised. “I’m sorry, I thought you wanted him to do it. I have no idea who this guy is.”
    The doctor came in later. He said that my blood looked good and that my urine was clear and looked good too. That calmed me, until I realized that I hadn’t even had a urine test. Either he had looked at somebody else’s urine or he found