Queen of the Over-Share: New York Trip, part 1

**Once you’ve blogged about boob surgery, not much else is sacred. So in keeping with recent tradition, this post is full of TMI. Fair warning: it’s about some medical things; it contains a few blood-and-guts references (Just kidding! No guts were involved!); and it’s technically part one of my New York story. (If you choose not to read it, however, you won’t be lost when part two comes out.)**
    
It was 9:00 on Monday night. I was packing for New York in a fury (last minute as I am wont to do) in hopes of finishing in time to watch a bit of TV and decompress before hitting the sack early (my flight was scheduled to leave at 7:15 the next morning). My mom was about to leave for the grocery store (for reasons that are irrelevant to this post but still mysterious at 9PM) and she stopped by my room to see if I needed her to pick up anything. Snacks for the plane ride? Band-Aids for my New York feet? Xanax for first-day jitters? I needed none of those, but I did request a bottle of cranberry juice. “For what?” you and (she) ask? Well, I was having some troubles, you see, in the lavatory, which I won’t explain in detail but THIS IS THE BLOOD REFERENCE I WAS TALKING ABOUT Google “urinary tract infection” if you want to know the other symptoms.

After I explained my situation to my mom she was all, “Um, yeah, you probably shouldn’t leave the state like that. See if any doc-in-the-box clinics are open on Memorial Day.” The results that turned up initially looked something like this: “haha yeah right,” “not on your life,” and “die, sicko, die!” so we decided to just hope and pray that an industrial sized bottle of cranberry juice would do the trick, my mom headed off to the store, and I started in with the “WHY ME!?”s. I was indescribably nervous about starting a new job, you see, and even more nervous about navigating a new airport and a new city not known for welcoming newcomers and oh great all of a sudden it feels like I have to pee all the time but it hurts when I do and there’s blood and what’s that sharp but unrelated pain in my foot? If I’m going to die I hope I do before tomorrow so I don’t have to suffer on the plane or in a cab. 

Two seconds (I kid you not only a little) after my mom left, the straits in the loo got direr (MORE EXTREME BLOOD REFERENCE!). So after a good bit of fit-pitchery, I moped to the closet to find an outfit suitable for sitting around in the ER for the rest of the night (I was, of course, dressed to pack and sleep). But then, a breakthrough! Sean found a local clinic that was open until 10:00, so we booked it to the garage just in time to meet my mom (with two bottles of cranberry juice and cranberry pills in tow!) and sped off toward the clinic.

After I’d filled out a fair bit of paperwork, a very surly young nurse called me back and started mumbling a series of hard-to-understand questions at me: “howmuchdoyouweigh?” “currentlytakinganydailymedications?” “anymedicalhistory?” “peeinthiscupandbringittome.” Then she led me to a brightly colored exam room and said “thedoctorwillbehereinaminute.”

When the doc showed up, he asked me (clearly!) why I thought I had a urinary tract infection, banged around on my kidneys in hopes of eliciting a reaction (nope), and told me he’d be right back with the results from my urine analysis. And right back he was with the obvious UTI diagnosis, the promise of meds (hooray!), and the unfortunate news that the grouchy nurse was on her way with a shot. A shot in the hip! “Thisisgoingtostingalittle,” the nurse said as she swabbed me with a numbing solution, reared her arm back, jammed the syringe in as hard as she could before anything was actually numb, and screamed “damnyouformakingmedomyjob!” Actually she didn’t say that, but I bet she wanted to, just like I wanted to say, “Look lady, I did not contract this UTI 12 hours before I was scheduled to leave for a business trip across the country just so I could screw with you on Memorial Day, so take it easy!”

After she spent what seemed like hours administering the painful shot she shooed me back into the waiting room while she tracked down the doctor. When she returned, she handed me a sheet of paper with a prescription for antibiotics and one for a pain reliever that she said would “turnyourpeeafunnycolor” and sent us on our way.

Mom and Sean graciously volunteered to fill the prescription for me so I could finish packing and continue peeing every five minutes. (They call this symptom “urgency,” and boy is it ever!) By the time they’d returned, I’d finished packing, drunk half the bottle of cranberry juice, taken two cranberry pills, and driven my parents’ water bill to record heights. I downed the antibiotic and the pain reliever with another glass of cranberry juice and was finally able to do the TV decompression thing. When I wasn’t in the bathroom, that is.