After dinner last night we all grabbed some dessert and retreated to our screens/chores. The part of the day where we interact with humans had seemingly come to an end. I had my chocolate, Daisy had a couple of chocolate chip cookies, and Hank had whatever sugar-free and dairy-free monstrosity passes for dessert in her head. I think she had air juice (Note: did not contain actual air).

A few minutes later Daisy returned back to the kitchen and calmly announced, "Apparently these cookies have pecans in them."

Oh, shit.

Although Daisy grew out of several of her food allergies a few years back, nuts and sesame seeds still give her a strong reaction. We keep the house stocked with Epi Pens, but we've never had to use one. Any time Daisy accidentally consumed nuts, we've managed to get away with just stuffing her full of Benadryl.

So, we gave her a Benadryl, but her throat was still feeling affected, so we crushed up another Benadryl and had her swirl that around in her mouth and throat. That seemed to do the trick, so we re-retreated to our screens/chores.

An hour later Daisy came back and said that she was feeling worse and was having some difficulty breathing.

We're big fans of breathing in this house. I do it, like, almost every day, so we decided further action was needed. There's an emergency room 5 minutes away from our house, and Daisy was still successfully moving oxygen from the atmosphere into her red blood cells for the time being, so we piled into the car for a Saturday night trip to the hospital.

Long story medium-short, she lived! The docs in the emergency room promptly gave her an IV full of Benadryl and steroids, which simultaneously made her drowsy and jittery, and then monitored her for the next couple hours. All of which means that I sat in a San Francisco emergency room waiting room for several hours on a Saturday night.

If you can only spend one night in an emergency room waiting room in San Francisco, I'd argue that Saturday night is your best entertainment value. Such a good cast of characters!

There was the loud-banging-and-moaning guy in the next room, the weary seen-it-all-before security guard, and the wait-until-my-mother-gets-here disgusted wife of the drunk guy. It's hard to pick who entertained me the most!

Actually, it's not hard at all! It was the security guard! He barreled into the room about thirty minutes into my detention and threw open the door to the restroom.

"Man! You gotta get outta there!" he hollered to someone who had apparently been holed up in the restroom for a loooong time. Bathroom dude shambled out of the bathroom and collapsed into a seat. Thus began the next 2 hours of the cat-and-mouse game played by the dude who had no intention of leaving, and the hospital security guy whose job it was to gently move people to somewhere more healthy for them.

The most entertaining part was that every once in a while someone would go into that bathroom and would immediately bounce back out, repelled by something mysteriously horrific in there, demanding that the hospital staff find them another restroom.

I sat in my chair the entire time, wondering if I dared look into that room. Would it give me nightmares? Would I puke? What WAS in there?

Hank texted me just before midnight saying that Daisy had been discharged. It was now or never!

I cautiously made my way across the waiting room, gingerly opened the bathroom door and found.... a pile of yellow fuzzy stuff! It was not even recognizable as human. It literally looked like couch stuffing but apparently was something obviously vile to everyone else.

I didn't take a picture, but it looked like a yellow version of this (sans sweater or razor):

Any ideas?