Part II-"Friday Afternoon"

2:00. Eliana calls me, and tells me what happened.

"So did you call the health center, and poison control center?" I asked.

She said she did. The Poison control center told her the toxic level of contact solution is very low, so not to worry about that.

The health center told her to try various methods of getting the contact out, such as:

*eating something hot
*eating bread
*going to the bathroom
*throwing up

When none of these methods worked (Ok, she didn't try the last one) she called the health center again, and they told her to go to the ER. So, 2:30 Friday afternoon, 3 and a half hours before Shabbat, we head out to the Hospital.

Eliana has since come up with a theory about hospitals. "The whole point is to simply move you from waiting room to waiting room, so that you think they are getting something accomplished."

When it was 5:00 and we had only been seen by the triage nurse, it was pretty clear we weren't getting out of there before Shabbat. We called the campus rabbis, and one of them offered to walk the 5 miles to the hospital to come and meet us after dinner! We told him no way, we did NOT want him to walk ten miles in the cold rain for us.

The other one advised taking a taxi. It's better that a Jew not do the driving, and theres no way we could have walked. Theres more to this psak than simply that, but I don't have time to go into it now. Perhaps a later post.

We still weren't a hundred percent sure what we were going to do when we finally were ready, but as the sun set, Eliana and I sang lecha dodi to the passing police officers, men in handcuffs, and drug dogs.

Part I - "Friday Morning"

It's 9:30 am. "Eliana", a friend of mine at UMD, wakes up and goes into the bathroom to do her morning routine. She has a nutrition test coming up that she has been studying for, so vitamins are all on her mind.

"All right," she thinks to herself. "I'll be healthy and take a calcium pill today."

She reaches for the pills and then realizes that since she doesn't usually take pills in the morning, she doesn't have a cup in the bathroom. But, no worry, her roomate's cup in sitting convienently on the counter. And even more conveiniant, there's already water in the cup.

"Sweet!" Eliana thinks to herself as she gulps down her pill with the water.

But as she drinks the water, "sweet" is not the term coming to mind. More like "bitter" "burn" and "acid". Thinking that it must not have been water she swallowed, she asks her roomate what was in the cup in the bathroom. Roomate responds "My contacts and contact solution. Why?"

"Eh.." Eliana responds. "I think I just drank your contacts!"