I'm so thirsty right now. really thirsty. I know you can't give me water yet. it's not a plea; I'm just describing my symptoms.

I was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance the other day. That was a new experience.

I was watching a toddler, and I started getting dizzy. I wouldn't have called 911 otherwise, but I felt like I was going to pass out, and I didn't want that to happen before anyone could come watch the child for me.

So, the paramedics came and sat with me and kept asking me if I was stressed or had had some kind of bad day. Once someone showed up to take care of the toddler, they loaded me into the back of the ambulance and took me to Good Samaritan.

I kept trying to figure out what had caused this episode. I had drunk a latte that morning, and I don't usually consume much caffeine. But I was dizzy, and my hands were doing weird things, and my heart rate was way up, and I was having trouble breathing and thinking straight. Caffeine has never done that to me before. And there was that bite of brownie I had eaten. I mean, I didn't make the brownies, so who really knows what was in them? At every step of the process of being checked into the hospital, a different person asked me if I take any drugs. I replied no, all the while thinking about that bite of brownie...

Suddenly, in the ambulance, I was a little loopy. I just started grinning, sitting there on the stretcher, reacting to my own internal monologue. I realized that as I was describing my symptoms and trying to slow my breathing, I was also playing out how the story would go when I told it to people. I would describe this paramedic who sat beside me, and whose gender I had been trying to determine for the entirety of our interactions, as either a super feminine guy or a very boyish lady, whose face would be really pretty either way. He/She had no idea what I was smiling at, which struck me as all the more hilarious.

The ambiguously gendered paramedic asked for my address and then told me he/she lived on 27th.
me: Ooh, you're in Charles Village too?
him/her: Yeah. 27th at Maryland.
me: So, I guess that's Remington?
him/her: It's right between Charles Village and Remington. They call it Charles Village.
me: Well, it sounds like Remington.

Man, I thought to myself, I am being feisty right now! It is kind of inappropriate to argue with someone you just met that they are confused about the name of their own neighborhood. Was I under the influence of an unknown substance??

Lying on the stretcher in the hallway, waiting for a room to open up, I found myself being (hopefully) pleasantly sarcastic with the staff. They were chuckling at me a bit, and I hoped they were having a good day. A million people asked me a million questions and filled out the same amount of forms. Some of the questions made me laugh out loud. One lady asked me my religion. I couldn't figure out why they would need that, but she assured me they did. I started arguing with her. I didn't see the purpose, and I also don't like putting labels on myself. I mean, spirituality is a complicated thing and a generic term doesn't really convey the full meaning of any one person's beliefs, values, and practices. In that moment, it somehow seemed really important that I not give in to this lady's attempts to box me in. I refused to answer her, and she wrote 'no religion specified.' Judgmental Hospital: 0. Anna: 1.

As I watched my heart monitor, I tried to lower it by being calm. As it got lower, I got excited that it was working. Then my heart rate went up. Up and down, up and down. In that moment, nothing could have been funnier to me. I was stifling laughter, because I knew it just didn't fit. For whatever reason, I still felt the need to describe all my symptoms to the paramedics.

me: Everything...(long pause while I tried to figure out how to not sound stoned)...is making me laugh right now.
him/her: ...Maybe you accidentally ate a pot brownie.
me: I did have a bite of brownie today! And I don't know what was in it!

Shocked by the serendipity of this accusation, I was also so relieved to finally get that piece of information of my chest. Probably mistaking my enthusiasm for sarcasm, he/she did not react to my brownie confession. Whatever. I had come clean, and the blood tests they were going to run would bring everything to light.

Eventually, I was wheeled into an observation room, given an EKG, a CAT scan, blood tests, urine tests, and an IV. They all came back normal. The ultimate diagnosis? 'Probably dehydration and too much caffeine.' Go figure. The brownie was a red herring.