Monday, December 23, 2013

A Touch of the Flu

Also known as my trip to the medstop.
So at about two o'clock on Friday, my awesome colleague suggested that I go to the nurse's office where I found myself having a temperature of 101.6
Time to go home.  Let an administrator know, packed up and went to the wonderful magical place known as The Medstop.
When I checked in, I hadn't realized that I had signed up for hours of fun.  Seriously, I didn't leave this place until 6pm.  
That day was pajama day so my sickly self was curled up in a tucked away nook of the waiting room pissing my time away as I waited with more than a dozen people in front of me waiting to be seen.  So I called people, I messaged people, I updated my status and tweeted until my phone died.  And oh what fun I had.
After some time, I noticed a huge problem.  There were no tissues in the waiting room and my nose was leaking.  Besides this lovely option:

Mmmm... That's a vision of health right there.  
Luck was with me in about twenty minutes or so when I got called back for height/weight and other preliminary glance arounds.  Tissues!!  
I was sent back out to the waiting room.  I tucked myself away back into my book until it happened.  A lady needed to sit down with her infant boy.  Agh, time to move from my spot of recluse out into where the rest of the people wait.  
Picked a nice corner chair under the tv which was displaying HLN covering the top viral videos of 2013 and other such nonsense.  As "What Does the Fox Say?" began to play, another patient entered the medstop.  Upon hearing the song, he actually made move as though he considered leaving instead of receiving medical care.  
So he signed in and sat down by my new seat.  Hello stranger that I'm not going to talk to but silently judge because you're actually reading the Flint electric magazine.  
Then I coughed myself to the point of sneezing.  In this place of no tissues.  Which upset my new seat neighbor to the point that he got up and started pacing the waiting room.  Because apparently I came off as though I'm carrying death.  But what's this?  He went back into a registration room and came back to the chair wearing one of those masks.  He even scooted his chair away from me as he sat down.  I must have looked some kind of diseased.

Someone walked in around this point with seven boxes of donuts.  Went back to a registration room and gave one to a nurse while another patient in the wait room received one as well.  Random donut delivery, what?
This is when my phone died.  No!!  No more tweeting the excitement of the wait room!  No more updating my Facebook to share the details!  No more phone calls and messages!
So I pulled out the book I'm reading for book club.  I still haven't gotten around to getting my vision screen and fever on top of it, I stopped after a chapter and a half. And then our delightful mask buddy decided to start giving his opinions back to the tv.  From Duck Dynasty to that surprise cam stuff, he was voicing his opinions back.  
After another series of sneezles and mask man left me to move into a chair away from me that opened up.  Seriously dude, I am not death.  You're at a medstop.  We're all sickly and dying.  If you're only so mild that you're going to run hiding from my sneezes then you need to move on from here buddy.
Finally back to the back!  A nurse has finally called me!  My time has come!
Propped on the table in my pjs, she's gonna do a swab test for the flu.  Okay, open wide.  No.  That's not where the swab goes.  I turn into a four-year-old as she swabs my nose.  I don't want it!
Then she takes it away to go through testing before my attending arrives, the same physician my grandmother still prefers to see.  
Why is it so horribly cold?  Well, from here I slept on the examination table until the physician came in to tell me that I had the flu and prescribe some medicines of all kinds.
I also polled many of the staff members about the theory that drinking more water makes for less stuffy noses and meh.  It doesn't hurt because you're flushing out the bads by flushing through your system but really any fluids will do.  

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