Saturday, February 03, 2007

Medical Mysteries


A haiku describing yesterday's Bloodmobile visit to Madison:

Stab. Stabby. Stab! Stab!
Can't get blood! Vein keeps rolling.
Free shirt, anyway.


Well, that was a bust. It wasn't the blood tech's fault, bless her vampire heart; she got a skin plug on the way in with her giant garden-hose-sized needle. At one point, she asked if I were okay, and I told her that she could have "one more minute." She tried two more times and gave up.

In the meantime, I'd gone completely pale, and they offered me juice THREE different times. (They wouldn't let me leave until Charlotte finished her donation and could walk me back across the street.)

Love the bandage...but is that FAT poking out? Egads.

After school, I was helping two sixth-grade boys with our persnickety copy machine, opening and closing all the drawers and pulling all the levers trying to get the error message to go away. My left arm was hard to bend because they told me to keep the pretty purple elbow bandage on for four hours. When I told the boys my problem--and how they couldn't get any blood out of me--one of them, wide-eyed, suggested that I didn't have any blood. Laughing, I told him it would be our little secret and that if he told anybody, the librarian robots would come after him. Hope he didn't have bad dreams last night! :-)

Another medical mystery...this morning, on NPR's "The People's Pharmacy," they did a report on how scientists solved a medical puzzle regarding young boys sprouting breasts. It turned out that all of the affected boys had either used lavender or tea tree oil shampoos. These substances can mimic the effect of estrogen on the body, and the scientists warned parents about exposure to these products. Here's the crazy part...I wash my face every morning with tea tree oil and have NEVER been cursed with this annoying side-effect...lol...

So, anyway, I'm blowing off the gym this morning because they told one lady on the Blood Bus that she couldn't lift weights at Curves for 24 hours because it could reopen her wound site. (And that's just the Curves thirty-minute circuit! Can you imagine what a Gold's Gym hour-long BodyPump class would do to my repeatedly-stabbed left arm? I'd look like the gushing, armless Black Knight from Monty Python...)

Currently reading: Gave up on Meg Cabot's Size 12 Is Not Fat at five o'clock this morning. Funny title, but not my cuppa tea...like a Princess Diaries book with murder and cursing. Instead, I'm gonna tackle Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, which just won the National Book Award.

3 comments:

Karen said...

Your haiku cracked me up! I'm sorry you had to go through that, and you're a good person for trying. Hopefully, you're not too sore today from the experience. I'd come and help you with your household duties, but I'm busy making a poultice of lavender and tea tree oil.

mad4books said...

Do you see how funny my sister is? DO YOU?

Can you imagine how much milk/tea/soda/egg nog I've snorted out my nose these last forty years?

Steelerfan06 said...

Tea tree oil gives young boys breasts? I give that a "gaah" and a "Whaaa?" That run-on blog was humorous yet disturbing, informative but appropriately relegated to a blog.