Last Monday morning, around 2am.<\/p>\n

“You KNOW God is with you right now, right?” .. whispered she from behind me.<\/p>\n

In other circumstances I gladly would have engaged in the discussion by informing her that I, in fact, did not know that,\u00c2\u00a0and more specifically, that I was pretty sure he wasn’t, and that if he WAS, he wasn’t doing his job.
\nBut this was neither the place nor the time, so I kinda nodded. After all, she was a very nice girl and meant well.<\/p>\n

Just before entering a room she stopped and walked up next to me, turned around, grabbed my hand, gazed me in the eyes and said: “Do you want me to pray with you?”
\nThis is always a bit of an embarassing question to a devout atheist like myself, but in this instance even more unsettling, since a) I found myself in a situation where the LAST thing you want to hear is people praying for you, as it usually means there’s nothing else they can do anymore, and b) I just had several people ‘work’ on me, from hooking me up to an EKG, to taking chest X-rays and\u00c2\u00a0stabilizing my blood pressure, heart rate and pain (administering nitroglycerine, lopressor and (yummie!) morphine), and now I was ‘supposed’ to be rushed to have a CT scan to look for blood clots, so I found it a bit disturbing that this, undoubtly well meaning, nurse delayed this process by trying to take out some time for praying to God.<\/p>\n

I’m fairly sure (not really, since I don’t believe in God) that if God didn’t want me to have this heart attack, I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.
\nSo I responded with something like “Mwnaah”, with that friendly “Maybe not today” look one uses when someone tries to sell you something for a good cause at your door when you’re watching a Spurs playoff game (Go Spurs!).
\n“Well”, she smiled at me, “be sure that I certainly WILL pray for you!”. Again, friendly as it may have been meant, I didn’t find it very encouraging for my situation.<\/p>\n

Then, when she prepared me for the CT scan she happily informed me that I was going to experience the closest thing to female menopause (something about a warm feeling like I had been peeing all over my self\u00c2\u00a0 (apparently induced by the injected dye liquid) .. ? .. Uhm… okay).<\/p>\n

The whole procedure made me think of going through a whirring rotating mini-Stargate.
\nBut that was all.<\/p>\n

When she enthousiastically enquired about ‘that’ feeling, I had to tell her that I, truthfully, hadn’t experienced anything of the kind.
\nShe was visibly disappointed by this. She didn’t speak a word while she pushed me back to the ER.<\/p>\n

No feeling of peeing all over myself, and no prayer sessions, it must have been a disappointing night for her.<\/p>\n

Mine wasn’t too great either: Around 4am I was admitted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Monday morning, around 2am. “You KNOW God is with you right now, right?” .. whispered she from behind me. In other circumstances I gladly would have engaged in the discussion by informing her that I, in fact, did not know that,\u00c2\u00a0and more specifically, that I was pretty sure he wasn’t, and that if he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emotions","category-pointless-remarks","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/claessen.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}