I had to go to the hospital last week. It was nothing too serious, which will disappoint most of my readers. And, honestly, it disappoints me too. When I’m missing several classes to spend four hours in the hospital, it should at least be for a damn good reason.

Doctor: Miss Madden? We’ve gotten your lab results back and, well, umm, how to say this …

Me: What, doctor?

Doctor: You have ebola. You’re dead meat, Miss.

Me: Wow! I’m sure glad that I took the time to wait two hou—(collapses and dies).

But no — in reality, I merely had to wait four hours for confirmation that I really did have exactly what I suspected I had.

As I was changing out of the hospital gown and back into my clothes at the end of the visit, it occurred to me that hospitals are a bit like prisons. People who go to both places realize they need to go, and they really should go, but they don’t really want to go. When you’re committed to both institutions, your clothes are taken and replaced with a ridiculous facsimile of human garments. When you’re released, society looks upon you as “improved” and “healed,” but you just feel a little dirty, a little violated and in need of good home-cooked meal and a decent bed.

Oh, and in both places, you’re touched by strange men who insist it’s for your own good.

Scripps Memorial Hospital is a fine hospital — so fine, in fact, that I’ve made sure to visit it twice since I came down to UCSD. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable, the place is clean and spacious and they keep everything very orderly and professional. It’s so nice that it almost makes me forget that hospitals are fundamentally unpleasant places to be, and that I only came so they’d give me drugs. Anyway, thanks, Scripps. Thanks for the tender loving care … and the drugs.

I’m a pretty good judge of the quality of a particular hospital; I’ve been to at least four or five in my life. I was “that kid” growing up. I contracted scarlet fever as an infant, and everything went downhill from there. (“Scarlet fever? Does that even still exist?” you’re no doubt asking yourself. Apparently, it does. Even as an infant, I was gifted at contracting strange diseases.)

Limping my way through childhood was like starring in my own “Three Stooges” film, but I was all three Stooges, and the bumps, bruises and blood were real. When I wasn’t falling off ladders, I was getting my upper lip sliced halfway off my face; when I wasn’t putting rocks up my nose, I was getting hives, eating poisonous plants or having seizures. I’ll be the first to admit that, as a child, I was a total dumbass. Hell, I’m still a total dumbass, but now at least I have more highly developed survival instincts.

But the odd thing about children is their incredible resiliency; even after getting stitches on progressively stranger parts of my body and getting my teeth knocked out not once, but twice, I don’t have as much as one cool scar. I’ve fought the battles — so where are my marks of courage, damn it? All I have are knees with the faint footprints of skinning and an index finger bearing the marks of having been sliced open with a kitchen knife. Can you say lame? At the tender age of six, I’d visited the emergency room so many times, the nurses knew me by name and gave me a purple teddy bear to clutch as they fished the latest foreign object out of my head! I deserve some better markers of my flirtation with death, don’t I? Here, hand me that mallet …