It's been a long couple of weeks. I got this cold thing the Thursday before finals, and it's still here. Now I'm at the point where I can only get squeaks out when I try to talk. It was worse when I was finishing up my paper on Wednesday, though, because then I couldn't talk at all. I can hardly remember what I wrote in that paper. All I remember is a particularly heinous final paragraph.
I had to go to the doctor's office yesterday, where the doctor decided to test me for mono (a girl on my hall apparently has it and has had it for a long time). Anyways, the tests she wanted to run required blood samples, so I went over to the lab to get blood taken. I've had blood drawn before, so it wasn't big deal.
**In case Jess reads this -- the next few paragraphs involve needles and stuff, so you can skip it if you'd like. Nothing graphic or anything, but I thought I'd give you a heads-up**
The lady who works at the lab isn't the most experienced (she couldn't even find a vein on Becca when she came in for tests, and her veins are almost as blatantly visible as mine). Anyways, she begins to take the blood, and I start to feel lightheaded and sick to my stomach. I can't talk to tell her to stop, mind you, so I have to make worried hand and facial gestures to my mother on the other side of the room. The lady doesn't seem to notice, so my mom had to say, "Um, I think she's going to pass out."
She kind of looks up at her and says,"Oh...should I stop taking the blood?"
"...Yes."
So she takes the needle out and sits there, and my mom comes over and asks if she has a bed I could lie on. The lady says no. Oh, then can she lay me on the floor? No, not on the floor. The woman finally remembers she has a rolling recliner chair in the back and goes to get it, leaving my mom propping me up against a wall with her arm because I've completely fainted by now.
Around this time my mom has decided that the nurse is completely incompetent and starts barking orders (I had pretty bad ringing in my ears, but I could still hear what was going on). After 24 years of being a mother, my mom kinda becomes a cool-headed bamf when one of us gets really sick. She knows what works with us, and she has little patience waiting for the girl in the scrubs to figure out what she should do. (Usually I would side with the person with the medical education, but this girl had to look up how to perform the test she was doing and didn't know the signs off a person passing out. That, and my mom went to the med school of hard knocks -- we kids have had a lot of illnesses over the years, and I am definitely not the first of her kids to faint on her.)
My mom asked for a cool rag or paper towel for my face, somewhere to lay me down, a basin in case I threw up, and some juice to raise my blood sugar levels (she knew I'm not one to faint at the sight of blood, so she assumed I hadn't had much to eat or drink -- which was right). It was so funny, because after everything was done and we were in the car my mom criticized everything down to the quality of this woman's paper towels ("too thin -- like wet notebook paper").
Anyway, the woman had no vomit basin available (isn't that supposed to be standard equipment?), so she ended up giving my mother a bucket they keep in the fridge to hold biomedical materials. It was cold, so my mom ended up putting it next to my face to make me feel better. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a bucket on my forehead.
They had, like, five women come in and out to bring me sugary stuff (all the lab woman had in the office was orange juice, and my mom and the pediatrics ladies said it was too acidic). After I had gotten a bit better the woman took the rest of the blood that she needed and we left and ate at Wendy's. The end.
I'm sad I couldn't come to the Field with everyone yesterday. How did that go? Someone should write a lengthly xanga entry about it : ) Hopefully we can all find a time when Jess and Nicole aren't working and everyone is free so we can all hang out together.
Oh, and I don't have mono, in case anyone was wondering.
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