This afternoon I had the most wtfomgdayum conversations ever had by anyone ever. Brace yourself.
I’m sick and left work early to go home and rest. Well, today is the day our repairman finally decides to show up and finish some repairs we had been asking for. A solitary creature, especially when sick, Jonathan was forced out of him home and into the streets.
I decided to stop by the optometrist and pick up some contacts I had recently ordered. Basic, boring chore, all the less notable while sick. Except for this next part.
I strike up a Dayquil-induced conversation with the receptionist while she’s fetching my contacts and I mention that I’m sick and just out of work. She says to me, “Yeah, I’m sick too, but I have something else going on so I’ll just combine the two trips and go to the ER tonight.”
She tossed it out there so I felt OK taking a swing.
“What’s bad enough to plan a trip to the ER?”
“Well, I have a second job at the mortuary. Last night this O.D. came in and I was working on her. The doctors there are always yelling at me to hurry up.”
She walks out of my eyesight at this point and keeps talking from the back room.
“So the doctors are yelling at me to hurry up and they’re always stressing about things. So as I’m cleaning my equipment after the examination, one of them come up behind me and yells. I kind of jerk up and stab myself with one of the dirty needles I had used on the body.”
This lady is back in front of me and I hold on to the counter with both hands hoping to emit a faux-cool, James Dean thing while my mind fights to escape out of my ears.
“Turns out this lady might have HIV and Hepatitis C, so now I have to go get tested. The needle I had stabbed myself with I was using down in her belly, just below the sternum. I had the belly clamped open and….”
She stopped. She could tell I had enough and I had.
We kept talking after this, mostly me asking stupid questions like in sex ed in 7th grade when you’re really not prepared for the issue at hand but feel like you should learn more just in case it comes in handy later. She was all very matter-of-fact about the whole thing and like I mentioned earlier, planned an ER trip to deal with it. She might be there now.
Now, in case you do a bunch of blog reading, you’re probably disinclined to believe this story. Well believe it. It isn’t April 1, Halloween is passed and it sure as shit ain’t a Thanksgiving parable. It happened, and this lady now has the best “It-happened-to-me” story ever and I’m left with a permanent brain scar.
Any questions? Ask away. I probably either asked her (like “Um, you didn’t do anything about that RIGHT THEN? Like scream and push the red contamination button that bathes everyone in a green mist and red light?”) or have since wondered.
