Alice Morse Earle once said “every day might not be good, but there is something good in every day.” This is both a wonderful sentiment and absolute bullshit. What our dear friend Alice fails to take into account are the days that deserve to be scratched off the historical record for having been a complete waste of everyone’s time; days like last Wednesday. I’d like to call these “Garbage Days.”
A few weekends ago, I woke up in the morning with a puffy tongue and some weird dots on the inside of my mouth. This wasn’t a medical emergency, per se, I just acquired more tongue than I was used to. Assuming, as one often does, that if I didn’t address this problem it wasn’t a problem and would just go away without consequence, I decided to ignore my newfound abundance of tongue. This was all going very well until it didn’t go away and I made the absolutely idiotic mistake of checking WebMD. Now convinced that I had oral cancer, I scheduled an appointment with health services.
Me: Hi, I’d like to schedule an appointment for Wednesday.
Nurse: Ok, what is this appointment about?
Me: My tongue is more than usual.
Nurse: What?
Me: My tongue is kinda puffy.
Nurse: Can you breathe? Is it blocking your airway?
Me: Um, yep I can definitely breathe.
Nurse: Okay, well if you stop being able to breathe definitely call 911.
Based on this conversation I can only assume that the nurse’s initial concern was that I was calling to schedule an appointment with health services for the next day while I was unable to breathe. To her credit, I am willing to bet that this has actually happened on a college campus.
Wednesday morning dawned like any other morning, and I headed over to my appointment. Upon explaining my vaguely annoying mouth issues to the doctor, she asked me a series of very specific questions which I answered “no” to. Having apparently ruled out any normal reasons why this had happened to me (including, but not limited to: allergies, STIs and hypochondria) she turned to some more intense possibilities.
“Well,” she said, “I want you to get tested for lupus.”
WHAT? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, lady. First of all, everyone knows it’s never lupus – what kind of doctor hasn’t seen House? You mean to tell me that you became interested in the medical profession because you actually wanted to heal people and not because of a hospital show? I don’t know if I can trust those motivations. And secondly, why the heck would you tell me you think it might be lupus? Now my tongue was puffy and I had been suddenly confronted with the tangibility of my own mortality. Sure, any other patient might want to know what the blood tests were for, but I would’ve been content with “just for funsies.”
Having been newly instilled with the fear that I had a debilitating autoimmune disease, I trundled off to the lab to get my blood drawn. Now, I must admit that having blood drawn is not exactly my forte. Almost passing out while getting blood drawn, however, is my forte. True to form, I left the lab feeling dizzy and nauseous, clutching my right arm. People often tell me that I am “a huge whiny baby” about getting blood drawn so when the nurse asked, I didn’t really want to own up to the fact that my arm really hurt. That is until I returned home and removed my coat only to find that my arm had developed a large, purple lump at the draw site. At this point I was concerned that I had lupus and that my arm was going to require immediate amputation. I busted ass back to health services.
Upon arrival, a different nurse assured me that this was “just a lil’ hematoma,”* confirming public opinion that I, Annie Warner, am “a huge whiny baby.” I proceeded to sit in the health services lobby for a full hour holding down my bulging median cubital vein with an ice pack. It occurred to me that the point of this day at the outset was for me to a.) figure out what was wrong with my mouth and b.) get some work done on my impending thesis prospectus. Unfortunately, I now had more questions than answers about the whole mouth situation and could no longer use my right hand properly to type. It wasn’t that the day was a widespread disaster – though we all know what that is like – just that I had a net loss in my goals for those hours of daylight. That is, it wasn’t the worst day, just a waste of one. A day where I started with goals, dreams and a functional forearm and all of these things got dumped in the trash. In short, a Garbage Day.
Also, House was right – it isn’t lupus.
*For an illustrative picture of the bruise I now have almost a week after obtaining said hematoma, see Figure A below. If bruises gross you out, for the love of all that is holy please stop scrolling.
Figure A: Illustrative Example of Why I Will Never Voluntarily Let Blood Leave My Veins Ever Again
Images via Annie Warner.