Hello, again

I have NEVER missed so many days blogging before, not ever. And even though I was incapacitated Wednesday and Thursday I truly did mean to put something up yesterday. Time and interest both escaped me however. All the same I thought you might be interested in Wednesday's adventures.

Wednesday morning I got up and left for my doctor's appointment at 9:30, which made me twenty minutes early. I was hoping if I showed up early I could get done sooner and hightail it out of that place of antiseptic and sick people. I really don't like doctor's appointments.
Eventually my name gets called, I go in, and at the end of my check-up, Dr. B says, "Oh, don't forget we need to draw blood today."
"Mm. I guess you can have some of my blood."
"You're not going to faint on me, are you, baby?"
I shrugged, "I haven't ever fainted before."
True. I'm not a squeamish person. I gave myself shots for a year and dealt with animal blood and guts over the summer.

So he sent the nurse in (because doctors like others to do their dirty work). Despite being certain I wasn't going to faint I wasn't taking any chances. I didn't even look while she inserted the needle. It hurt a little but not bad and I felt fine. A minute later I started feeling just a little dizzy so I said something to the nurse, and she was like, "Happens all the time. I'll go get you a glass of water."

Next thing I know the left side of my head hurts like someone beat me over the head with a baseball bat and I have no idea where I am, except that the world might possibly be sideways. Oh yeah, and my vision was shot. You know those kaleidoscopes you played with as a child? The ones that fracture your vision into a thousand little distorted windows? That's how I was seeing the world.

I don't really remember much after that except telling them my mom's phone number since I couldn't drive myself home, and responding to the 'how many fingers question' about fifty times. Oh, and someone put an ice pack on my head which helped with the throbbing. After thirty minutes, once my mom arrived, I started feeling better and Dr. B sent me home with a list of precautions and told me to take some tylenol.

Oh, but it gets much more fun.
We were almost to my house when the head pain started coming back. It was so intense that I felt like clawing out my hair. I hope I never EVER get a headache so bad EVER again. It was like someone was cutting open my scalp without anasthesia. My mom gave me some medicine but nothing helped. I was basically curled up on the couch in the fetal position, whimpering in pain. So we called Dr. B and he ordered us to the hospital for a CAT scan.
Which is about when I started getting nauseous, throwing up, and losing my ability to speak clearly.
Things get really fuzzy after that. I remember sitting in the waiting room, and I remember being put in a hospital bed. By the time the nurse told me she was going to put an IV in my arm I had pretty much lost touch with reality. It was as if everyone had started speaking another language. I could hear and see people talking but the words wouldn't stay in my brain no matter how hard I concentrated. I distinctly recall trying to figure out what the word 'medicine' meant. And forget trying to talk. I would open my mouth to say something, get really confused and be unable to speak.
I found out later that they put me on an IV drip, plus a couple drugs to manage the pain in my head and the nausea that kept causing me to throw up.
Eventually they wheeled me to the CAT scan, which apparently I slept through, and although they didn't find anything wrong they decided to keep me for awhile to see if the pain subsided any. If not, they were going to do a spinal tap, which is a HUGE needle shoved into your back. And can I just tell you that at that point I was in so much pain I didn't care what the hell they did as long as the made the pain go really far away.
Luckily the drugs began to work. I stopped throwing up. Slowly I started to understand what people were saying to me, although I was so exhausted and out of it I still wasn't talking much. The discharged me in the early evening and I went home and slept for hours.

The only sad part about this whole story is that I don't have a scar or a bruise! Although my head does feel a little tender, and there's a small cut next to my eye where my glasses tried to impale me when I fell.

Well, I hope that sort of made up for not having a post a day from me. :-P I apologize for typos and grammatical mistakes. I'm tired and staring at the screen for too long brings back my headache.

'Quel