Two for one …

I actually started this entry yesterday evening but then life took over and I never got a chance to finish it so here I am today to finish it up. I will take the lazy approach and consider this one entry for 2 days so I won’t be back to write before tomorrow lol

August 1, 2012

It is after 6:30pm in the evening and it is still 111ºF outside. Will fall never arrive? So over this heat already lol. Granted we don’t have the humidity that I had to deal with in Charleston, so I am thankful for that. But still, I’m ready for this heat to be over.

Yesterday I got bored and took a few pictures of myself with my iPhone. People have a hard time believing how happy I am here. Especially my family. Oh well. Why would I lie about that? So what better way to prove how happy I am than with a picture. After all a picture can speak a thousand words. Now they have proof lol.

The below picture was taken the night Hubby came home from Korea back on Feb. 2. I don’t even recognize myself hardly in that picture. That is what 8 months of hell can do to a person. I’m not happy showing this picture but I needed a "before" to prove to you all what I am talking about … (I look so old and wore out in this picture)

And then this picture was taken yesterday …

See what I mean … you can definitely see how happy I am. Of course it helped that I had spent the weekend purging myself of the "Charleston Evil" as I called it. Now that I got all that crap off my chest, I feel more free. And it shows ….

I’m glad I took those pictures yesterday because if I had taken them today, it would have been a different scenario lol. I had to fast last night so that I could do blood work this morning for my 6 month checkup next week. Oh the joys of fasting LOL. I never am hungry at night but the minute I know I can’t eat, I want to grab everything in sight! LOL Damn Murphy’s Law!!! And then not being able to have coffee first thing is no picnic either. My day is just not the same if I can’t start it off with coffee!

So anyway, I’ve been doing this whole fasting/blood work/every 6 months thing for about 14 years so I have a system pretty much down pat. Today, that system was shot to hell. I over slept, which is really not a big deal. So I get to the brand spanking new clinic, that just opened yesterday. A nice person greeted me at the door and directed me to where I needed to go. I get my number & wait to be called. So then after about 30+ mins. I am walking out of the lab. Then I pull a number for the pharmacy so that I can pick up a prescription my PCM put into the system yesterday.

I wait about 10-ish minutes and my number is called. I go up to the window and the elderly volunteer man kindly informs me that I need to pull a different number to activate the prescription. Say what? After much fussing on my part, he directs me to someone who is manning the whole "pull a number kiosk". So then I asked the man to please explain to me which number I need to pull. His first response was to do what I had already done. When I explained to him what I had just been told, he figured out where I had went wrong & pulled a new number for me. There were 21 people ahead of me then!!!!!! So at this point I am 14 hours with no food. I’m trying not to get too emotional. I explain to the man that I have been fasting and I need to eat soon and that I have left my 10 year at home because I didn’t expect to be gone longer than 1 hour. After more discussion with an active duty person, who I guess was in charge of the kiosk system, and being informed that had an active duty person been at the window, he or she could have activated the prescription, but since I only had a volunteer, they could NOT activate so I had to wait my turn just like everyone else. I not so nicely took my seat among the hundreds of other people waiting to pick up their prescription. In 45 mins, they had called 3 numbers in my group!

After about 10 minutes of sitting there, swinging my foot, the man that had tried to help me comes up and asks me for my name, what I am picking up and the last 4. About 30 mins. later he comes back and asks me if the number he was holding in his hand was my number? "No, I had that group of numbers first and was told I needed this group." So then he’s all, "No, you dropped this number. In fact, they just called it at window 1." Then he shoved it in my hand and walked off. So I go up to window 1 and 3 people are standing there wondering why I have a WTF look on my face. I hand them the newest number ticket & my ID. They scan my ID and then started talking in gibberish. Actually it was in English , lol but I had no clue what they were talking about. The gist of the situation is that the nice man went & explained to someone in charge about the confusion/mix-up with the kiosk, then they pulled my info to activate my prescription, & somehow managed to get me ahead of the line. Of course his intentions didn’t work out exactly the way they wanted but at least when they had scanned my ID, it activated my prescription and now I only had to wait for it to be filled instead of waiting even longer (17 people ahead of me by this point) to activate it and then wait some more for it to be filled.

At noon I gave up. I’d been there roughly 2 hours and I was thisdamnclose to passing out. I even had the shakes. So I went and double checked what all I needed to do when I came back and then left to go home to eat. It had been almost 16 hours since I had last eaten anything. After lunch, The Child and I went back and proceeded to wait 35 minutes to get my prescription. But I finally have it and that is all that matters.

Of course my body is not doing so well. I didn’t drink enough water in between waking up and eating lunch (I had left my water bottle in my car when I went for my blood work) so I got dehydrated. I’m trying to play catch up now but it seems the older I get, the longer it takes for my body to bounce back. Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal.

Oh, remember me sharing pictures of The Child’s leg here from when she had her ordeal last summer? Well this is what it looks like a year later … (I took the picture on June 13, the anniversary of her surgery) …

 

Yes I am quite proud of her leg. She still has issues about the scars and often gets upset when someone asks her about them. I’ve tried to tell her time and again to be proud of them because it could have been so much worse! But she just doesn’t understand that so I end up changing the subject. She hates anytime a Dr. wants to touch them. But I tell her she just has to get over it because the Dr. needs to make sure nothing is going on underneath the skin/scars and we worked too hard to ignore anything that could happen now. I am proud that she sucks it up and does what needs to be done, but man am I tired of her mouth LOL.

Ok, I am going to end here. I’ll be back tomorrow for some more clearing of the chest. I"m too emotional to do it right now. So on that note … till next time …