My little corner of Opera

Yesterday around 3AM I started feeling sharp, stinging and excruciating abdominal pain on the left side of my body, near the stomach. It was so bad that I ended up vomiting profusely (enough to fill one of those large party sized cups) and was doubled over. I couldn't get comfortable, and nobody was near enough to drive me to the emergency room. So I called for an ambulance. One of my friends (who doesn't drive) came along just so that there'd be a point of contact between the hospital and my family (who had been woken up due to this mess).

Bear in mind the pain is unbearable at this point. Naturally the ER staff takes their sweet time (or so it would appear to anyone who's feeling like their insides are being torn to shreds), but they eventually get me set up. The saline solution's pumping, they injected some Zofran to stop the nausea and vomiting (yeah right, didn't work), took not one but two blood samples (since the veins weren't pumping enough blood through at the time for a good sample), some morphine for the pain (worked somewhat), and then had me drink about 40 ounces of this chalky white liquid that looked like Kayopectate (you know the real stuff, not the knockoff that's sold in drug stores today) so they could run an MRI (I threw that radioactive goo back up too).

To top that off, my heart rate dropped below 40 beats per minute and my breating was so slow and labored I was literally setting off the alarms while drifting in and out of consciousness. And what was the cause of all this strife? Kidney stones. Fortunately they were small enough to pass through (meaning no surgery for my uninsured bag of skin and bones), so they prescribed me with 500mg of vicodin to take every four hours and sent me home.

Naturally I have to go fill the prescription, and my friend wants to use the computer to check his messages and play some online games, so I let him. While I'm gone (I stopped at my mom's place to let her know what was going on) he's playing his games when he decides that he's done. So he puts the computer into hibernation mode (BAD IDEA) and leaves without telling me that he did so. I get home a few hours later, about the same time as some storms are moving through. I shut down the computer (being dead tired) by pressing the power button (now do you see why I don't hibernate my computer?) to avoid any damage caused by the storm (a lightning bolt actually struck a power pole about 30 feet from here a few years ago, which caused a friend's modem to get fried, and a neighbor's garage to go down in flames) and go to sleep.

When I wake up, the computer gets turned on and greets me with the BIOS boot screen warning me of a hard drive boot error. AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!

Why me? What did I do to deserve all this? This is the SECOND time my computer's gone down for the count - the last time I lost over $4,000 in revenue (I'm a freelancer). Now I have to replace the hard drive, reinstall Windows and make sure both the BIOS chip and the motherboard (an ASUS TUSI-M) are still working. I can't afford a new computer now (not with the hospital bills on their way, plus the city's bill for the ambulance, the ER bill and the doctor's bill, not to mention the vicodin cocktail I'm on) and to make things worse, I'm back to bumming off of other peoples' computers again.

I just can't take it any longer...