Lady Enide resurfaces with horror story from the doctor's office

Hello people. I'm reposting here what I posted earlier today on my other non-blogger blog, with some slight edits for names, etc. This is the most... um... thrilling? adventuresome? horrific? thing that happened to me during holiday break. Chances are you'll enjoy the break from J's rants (no matter how much you tend to agree with him), if nothing else.


Well, I just finished experiencing the worst morning in the history of... Lady Enide's visits to the doctor, anyway. If it hadn't been for the strange absence of anxious-mortified self-consciousness that usually accompanies such episodes, it would have easily been the worst morning of my life. God is good; I could not have felt more at ease in my misery.

Eye doctor: simple checkup, right? Least invasive and disturbing of all routine medical procedures, right? Even after waking up with a somewhat woozy stomach, the intrepid Lady Enide was unshaken in her faith that nothing truly awful could possibly happen. She ate a solid breakfast (even avoiding coffee) so as to deter further queasiness, drove herself to the office, filled out the insurance info without much ado, read the bottom line of the chart easily with both eyes (though the number 2 at the end confused her brain somewhat, as she wasn't expecting numerals and was trying to make it out as a letter...), and obediently chose to have her eyes dialated with the eye drops instead of being charged $35 for the use of the laser-photograph-gizmo-machine. The drops went in, they weren't bad, and as she waited for the nurse to return for more tests, she thought how proud her mother would be of her.

Near the end of the nurse's tests, she began to feel cold--and somewhat more woozy. "These are simple, non-scary tests. Why am I freaking out? I have no reason to be!" She returned to the examination room and sat in the chair to wait for the doctor, and began feeling colder... after a minute, she lay down on the floor to catch her breath, and when the doctor walked in, she felt well enough to sit up and start finishing the examination. The doctor was a little wigged out but said plenty of people had fainted before, so L.E. should let her know if she started feeling poorly again. The test was almost through when this proved to be the case...

At first I thought I'd just sat up too quickly the first time. But laying down again didn't really help--I was *very* cold now, and quite light-headed, and my abdomen was hurting more. They gave me a sugar tablet but it didn't help. Finally I asked the nurse assigned to look after me to show me to the bathroom, and I literally did not get there a moment too soon.

Now, if you don't like reading anything disgusting, even in a roundabout way, you should skip this paragraph. I'll spare you the more gruesome details; but, readers, I felt like a wet rag being wrung at the middle so that all the extra fluid would run off at the ends. I think I *have* felt more sick in my life, but not so completely helpless in trying to control my body. What made me worry somewhat at first was that the fluid in the sink was a very dark pink--or possibly diluted red. Oh, great, methinks. I've got internal bleeding from some unknown cause and am going to end up a case the like of which you'd view on House. This thought wasn't nearly as disturbing as it might've been, though, seeing as I was fairly well preoccupied with just trying to get the stuff out of me. As it turned out--or as I realized shortly thereafter--that pink stuff couldn't be anything but the excess dialating fluid which had run into my nose and down my throat. The well-meaning doc has given me a fairly good dose in the right eye to make sure it worked, cause I'd kept blinking. I, thinking it was like any other nose spray or the like, had swallowed the better part of it--it didn't even taste bad.

I suppose I can't blame my stomach for not wanting its muscles paralyzed, too.

I must've been in the bathroom for half an hour; they called my mom for me, then my dad when they couldn't reach her, so he came up with my brother to take me home--even though I was feeling well enough to drive myself when it was all through, I certainly wasn't at the time they contacted him. By that point the doc had given up on me and gone out for lunch... so now I have to go back this afternoon sometime, if they can fit me in, and finish the checkup. Or at least show them my insurance card and give them the co-pay, which they never asked for. If I was really cheap, maybe I could make a practice out of inducing these episodes and just keep switching doctors...

My cat has to go the vet later today, too. I think we're going to spend the rest of the day recovering together. You know what? They need a Calvin & Hobbes where both of them are under the weather and suffering together... I thought Watterson had a strip for every life experience, but I guess he missed that one.