My First Big Boo-Boo

This afternoon, an eight-year-old girl needed stitches in her knee, and I had to exercise all my considerable powers of distraction and storytelling (as well as my arm muscles) to let that happen successfully. Twenty minutes later, shaking and covered in sweat, I met two siblings coming in for shots -- a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy. The girl was getting Gardasil, the new vaccine against genital warts (HPV) and cervical cancer, and the boy was getting his tetanus booster and a meningitis vaccine. He volunteered to go first, so I gave him his tetanus vaccine in his left arm -- the one he doesn't use as much, since we all remember how much tetanus shots hurt the next day -- and then grabbed for the second syringe. As I depressed the plunger into his other arm, I caught a glimpse of my scrawled Magic Marker letters on the plastic: 'HPV'.

Holy fuck. I just gave this boy a shot of Gardasil.

For an instant, I panicked, and my mind spun with a half-second of options: could I get away with this? Maybe just not give him the Menactra? No, he has to have his meningitis shot, and anyway, what am I going to give his sister? No, I realized immediately that there was no way to cover it up and still do everything necessary for both kids. I was going to have to confess, come what may.

I turned to face the mother, who was congratulating her son on being brave and encouraging her daughter to get up onto the table for her turn. "Um, one second." She stopped and looked at me expectantly.

"This will not hurt him," I stressed, "it won't do anything to him, but -- I have three shots here..."

"Yes..."

"...and he just got the Gardasil," I finished with a rueful smile, pointing to her son.

To my relief, she laughed out loud. Oh, thank God!

"They're already using it on boys in Europe," I hastened to explain, "and doing all sorts of trials here, and boys will probably be getting it regularly in the U.S. too, in another year or two."

The mom was nodding. "Yeah, I've been reading about that, actually." Hurrah, an educated parent!

"It absolutely won't hurt him, and actually gives him extra protection." I finally felt reassured enough to grin. "Hey, he's safe from genital warts!"

She laughed again, and as I left the room to draw up a second Gardasil for the originally intended (FEMALE) recipient, I saw her poke her son and heard her say, "Hey, you'll never get cervical cancer!" She and her daughter cracked up.

My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly draw up the second shot. That was unbelievably stupid, and could have been very, very bad.

However, in hindsight, if I had to make that mistake, I think I definitely dodged a bullet -- it happened under the best possible circumstances. The mistake was with a shot that would do no harm (and probably provide some benefit), the mom was educated about the vaccine and took my flub with grace and a laugh, and the boy was of the proper age to receive the shot, even if he wasn't a girl. And the physician who signed off on my incident report, one of my favorites, absolutely died laughing when I told him. ("I made my first big boo-boo today, and am hoping you'll sign off on my idiocy." "You know I will." "Well, let's just say there's a 12-year-old boy walking around town who will never get genital warts.")

My true boss, who can be temperamental, doesn't know about this yet, but apart from making the mistake in the first place, I did everything absolutely right, so I don't see where she'd have any cause to take any sort of action... so in many ways, I got very lucky.

Just another Friday afternoon...

Life Update, March

Three big things have happened this month, in both Aphrodite's and my lives, which I've forgotten to share.

First, Aphrodite got accepted to the Master of International Studies program she applied for, and also received a TAship position which will provide her with full tuition, health insurance, and a generous stipend to live on. She's over the moon with happiness, and feels like her life has a purpose again, which is a feeling she's been looking for for a long time. She'll finally be taking a step in the direction of her goals (to earn a Ph.D in political science or international education). The program starts this fall. I'm almost as thrilled as she is, and couldn't be more proud of her.

Second, I'm finally on spring break from school, which meant the two of us got to go to her stepdad's beach condo for a long weekend. We used to try to make a point of going there every one to two months, not because it's especially close by, but just because when we're there, we never take any 'work' with us, so it forces us to completely forget about Life and its demands for a couple of days. We hadn't been there since October, and were really pushing the breaking point as far as stress. Three days of shrimp pasta (the one thing I can cook), walks (and runs) on the beach, coffee and doughnuts (two luxuries we only indulge in on vacations), lazy evenings watching DVD after DVD, and great sex (yeah, it has to be said!) recharged our batteries, and we're doing better this week than we have since Christmas. It's amazing what a little self-imposed laziness can do.

And third, back at the beginning of the month, I went home for two days over a weekend to visit my parents and run in the annual 15k held in my hometown. It's a wonderful race, with around 12,000 runners aged (this year) from 5 to 87. We cross two huge bridges and run through lots of nice residential areas, where people sit out in their front yards and cheer you on while their kids run up and down giving everybody high-fives -- and then finish on the field in the NFL stadium, watching ourselves on the JumboTron while hundreds of spectators cheer. I look forward to it every year.

I should explain here that something always happens to me before this race -- the first time I ran it, I had plantar fasciitis and shin splits for over a month and hadn't run a single step for the six weeks prior to the race. I made a dramatic improvement in the week before the race, and since I'd already paid the fee and my running partner had already booked her flight to come do it with me, I decided to run it anyway. I was super sore for the next week, but pulled a 1:59:41 -- 19 seconds under the time I wanted to beat. :)

The second time I ran it, Aphrodite, my running partner, and I were all at my parents' house, and somehow the stars aligned so that I ended up coming out to my parents the night before the race. (Aphrodite had gone for a walk in my neighborhood, which she's not familiar with and which isn't among the safest of places, and was gone for almost two hours. I got panicky, then tearful with relief when she finally turned up, and was trying to hide those emotions from my parents, who thought she was just my roommate, and couldn't, and they were questioning me, and... yeah... anyway.) Talk about timing. Luckily, my running partner, also a lesbian, was understanding -- she'd been there too. So Aphrodite and I were up all night crying and almost-fighting (she was upset that I had told them 'on the spur of the moment' without considering her feelings, as their guest), and I didn't eat or drink much of anything either, so I ran a horribly painful 2:02.

This year, my running muscles, nutrition, hydration, and emotional health -- everything that had been messed up in past years -- were fine, but something had to happen... so, of course, I got the flu and was out of training for two weeks. Plus my running partner bowed out at the last minute, which I was dreading, because it was going to make the race horribly boring. BUT, although I love running with her, I forgot about the fact that she's somewhat slower than I am, so I raced a 1:49 (10 minutes off my best time) despite not having trained very well. My goal is to eventually get down to about 1:35, but that'll take another year or two, I think... because honestly, what else can go wrong?! :)

Speaking of health, as long as I'm on a roll here... three things have come to my attention in the past year or two that concern me a little, but I'm reluctant to go to my doctor because I don't want to get slapped with that dreaded 'preexisting condition' label (I'll be changing health insurance at least two more times before I'll be set 'for good'). Don't get me started on the ridiculousness of our health care system, but here we go:

1) Hematuria. While still an undergrad, it was discovered that I had small amounts of blood in my urine. Too small to see with the naked eye, but consistently there (over 3 tests). My doctor wanted to check my kidneys, but it was near the end of the school year, and I wanted to wait to start that process... and never followed up on it. However, she did say that athletes, particularly runners, often have trace amounts of blood in the urine due to all the jarring. That would have eased my mind, except that I wasn't running more than two or three times a month back then because I was swimming 16 hours a week. So... that makes me a little nervous. I might wait for a weekend day when everyone's out of the office and run my own pee through that machine we have and see if the blood is still present.

2.) T-waves. We hooked ourselves up to a 4-lead EKG in my anatomy lab last week, and although my resting pulse was great (61 bpm, and that was while holding a conversation in a bright, noisy classroom), my T-waves (the part of the wave that signals the electrical stimulus for contraction of the ventricles, the most muscular part of your heart) were off-the-charts huge -- bigger than my QRS waves (the big 'spike' most people associate with a heartbeat). My teacher looked at them and said, "I have never seen T-waves that big!" She said it was probably nothing to worry about, that it's normal to have some variation among individuals, and looking online, one document says that can happen in athletes because our hearts are more muscular than other people's... but it still worries me a little, because elevated T-waves can also signal hyperkalemia (too much potassium) or a heart problem.

3.) Cholesterol. A little over a year ago, I participated in a clinical trial (I don't even remember what it was for, just that they were giving me $50 to have some blood drawn) and my results got thrown out of the study because my cholesterol levels were above normal. My triglycerides were fine (on the low side), my 'good' cholesterol was fine (on the high side), but my 'bad' cholesterol, while also technically fine, was on the high side, and my total cholesterol was about 10% above the normal limit. Which isn't huge, but as a 24-year-old lifelong athlete and reasonably healthy eater, it worries me. Another number was also high -- my c-reactive proteins, which are a general measure of inflammation in the body. The scale was 0.00 to 5.00, and I was exactly 5.00 -- .01 away from getting flagged for that, too. However, I had just run my first half marathon three days before the blood test, so I'm thinking (hoping) that the elevation of that number was probably just an indicator of my body recovering (inflamed muscles, tendons, etc.). The cholesterol wouldn't have been impacted by that, though -- and that worries me. I don't have a very strong family history of high cholesterol, I exercise almost every day, and I eat lots of low-fat, high-fiber foods... what more can I do?

Sorry for the long-winded post, but you know how I am... I get rolling and just can't stop! :) Anyway, if any of you have any insight into any of these things, please do speak up and put me out of my misery, because I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm not as healthy as I've always perceived myself to be... and that's a real smack in the confidence area.

I Wonder How My Mother Felt

Let me preface this by saying that I adore my mother. She is beautiful, outspoken, intelligent, and practical to a fault. We've always gotten along well. However, as my mother's oldest daughter, I was always a bit, well, different from what I believe she had envisioned.

As a newborn baby, I could be comforted only by my father. Being wrapped tightly in a blanket and snuggled on his chest -- not Mom's -- was the only way I would sleep. As a toddler and a young child, I followed him around like a puppy, always wanting to play with Daddy's wrench set or help string the Christmas lights. As far as sweeping the floor or cooking like Mommy, though... forget it. (I still can't cook!)

Mom has never wanted to travel. She likes quiet, predictability, routine. I, on the other hand, have been to half the 50 states, spent a year and a half living in Europe, and consider traveling and learning about other languages and cultures one of the great passions of my life. To this day, I often hear my mother saying aloud to her friends, "Where did I get this kid?"

While my kindergarten friends were playing House and drawing hopscotch grids with sidewalk chalk, I climbed to the very top of the climbing structure, higher than the boys could go, all the way up to the topmost intersection of wooden beams, the part that wasn't really meant for climbing. I never fell, never even slipped (though some child must have, because the structure was removed when I hit third grade).

(Aside: I once broke my mother's nose by accident, by jumping up off the floor while she was standing next to me. I was about eight, and didn't know she was bending over me.)

My mother is a tiny and petite A cup -- she didn't even top 100 pounds until she went to college -- and has never exercised beyond her daily morning walks. I am a muscular 5'6", a 36DD, and have eagerly tried practically every sport there is, from horseback riding to skydiving.

My mother has dark brown eyes and nearly black hair, which she has always worn longish. I am a carbon copy of my dad -- hazel eyes and light brown hair -- and have always kept my locks trimmed as short as I could get away with. As a teenager, I recall her telling the hairdresser not to cut it as short as I had asked for, whispering that she didn't want me to "look like a dyke."

My mother's school performance was always on the good side of average, As and Bs and the occasional C. Somehow, I learned to spell my name with alphabet blocks before I could walk, began reading at age two and a half, was accepted into the Gifted program at age seven, attended magnet schools, completed the International Baccalaureate program, became a National Merit scholar, and got a full scholarship to college.

My ninth-grade female friends only went to gym for the purpose of checking out the guys -- all the ones I was beating at basketball. When they tried on each other's makeup, I wrote stories at my desk. And during lunch period, while everyone else was sitting in the courtyard gossiping, I joined the boys on the football field for knock-down drag-out games of Ultimate Frisbee, and returned to class dripping sweat.

My mother got her period at age twelve, and was overjoyed to have finally 'matured'. A box of maxipads mysteriously appeared in my closet when I was eleven -- and stayed there as I passed twelve, thirteen, fourteen. At fourteen and a half, I finally got my period... and sobbed for an hour, dismayed at the incontrovertible evidence of growing up.

I remember a seventh-grade classmate, part of a group who spent their free time tormenting me, slipping a note into my locker that said, among other things, "WE KNOW YOUR [sic] GAY!!!" I didn't even know what the word meant.

I wonder if my mother knew about me? She was the only one of my family and friends who was surprised when I told her -- but did she really not ask herself that question even once throughout all my years of growing up? My room was literally plastered with Shania Twain, I drew cartoons of my camp counselor in the margins of my notebooks, my Spanish teacher's name came up in literally every other sentence at the dinner table when I was 17... How can you live with a child for 18 years and not know on some level? I always felt like I was keeping a secret from her, for all those years when I wasn't sure... but did she really not have her suspicions?

I wonder how she felt, as I was growing up and following a path so different from her own? Proud, I'm sure -- I know I've accomplished a lot in my life, and I'm grateful for all my gifts -- but did she ever feel resentful, dismayed, jealous, disappointed, confused? My gut says that she did, maybe does to this day... and that makes me wonder if I'm another disappointment to her even now?

As much as I want to deny that... my gut kinda says yes to that one, too.

I Feel Your Pain

A four-year-old girl came into our practice a couple of weeks ago for her well-child checkup -- adorable, as most of them are, and a little fearful, which many of them also are. She didn't want to get on the scale without clinging to her mother, and nearly threw a tantrum over standing against the wall to have her height measured. I made sure to be gentle with her and fully explain each task we had to do, and she eventually began to loosen up, smile, and interact with me a little. As part of the standard physical exam, we start doing vision checks at three years old and hearing checks at four -- which, as you can imagine, aren't always easy with a child that young -- so her checkup took a little while.

One of the things many people don't realize about a pediatric practice is that the parents can sometimes be far more difficult than the children. Some of them are wonderful, but some are just horrendous, too, and they make the exam that much more difficult for their children. Luckily, Lila's* mother was friendly, tall with short salt-and-pepper hair. She was quite firm with the little girl, and when Lila was hesitant about something, her mom mentioned more than once 'remember how we talked about this?' in reference to a previous in-depth conversation about the doctor's office. That impressed me, that a mom would take the time to walk through each aspect of a trip to the pediatrician ahead of time, and struck me as a good idea.

At first, I was so focused on Lila that I wasn't paying much attention to her mom, except for the occasional glance, smile or, "Your mom's right, we're just going to..." Near the end of the exam, though, as I was getting my things together to leave the room and allow the doctor to come in, my eyes landed on the woman... and I suddenly got a familiar vibe off her. My 'gaydar' isn't always accurate, not by a long shot, but this time I was sure I was right. I smiled, said the doctor would be right in, and closed the door -- then checked Lila's last name: hyphenated. A clue, but not a certainty. Flipped open her paper chart, and saw the Post-It note from the doctor to herself, as a reminder before she entered the room: Both moms are PAs. Smiled to myself.

Desiree, another nurse, stuck her head over my shoulder. "She was a cutie."
"Yeah," I said with a smile, still absorbed in the chart.
"What does that say?" she asked, trying to read the scrawled handwriting on the Post-It.
"'Both moms are PAs.'"
"Huh? ... Maybe she didn't mean to say 'both moms'."
I tried to hide a smile. "...No, I really think she did."
"Why?"
"Oh, I dunno, just the vibe I got," I said casually.

* * *

"Lila needs her Hepatitis A and Varicella shots," the doctor said to me upon emerging from the room, "and then they'll be free to go."

I scurried to the fridge, grabbed the two vials, and prepared the shots. Grabbing the necessary paperwork, I entered the room. I'm still being observed when I perform immunizations, so Desiree was at my side.

"Okay, Lila, let's lie down on the table," her mom said calmly.

Immediately, Lila began to whine and cry. She clutched her mother as if I were the Antichrist, her eyes wide and fearful.

"Remember, we talked about this. You're going to lie here, and I'm going to hold you, and it's all going to be over in just a second." Lila began to struggle in earnest, her whines escalating to wails, her legs flailing. I had to hand it to the mom, though -- most moms would have continued to try to talk the child down, but the PA training kicked in and she grabbed Lila's hands (to keep them away from the needles) pressed her down into the table, and hung on grimly.

Without speaking, Desiree and I each grabbed a kicking leg and held it still. We uncapped our syringes, counted "One, two three," and injected simultaneously. Lila screamed at the top of her lungs as we withdrew our needles, slapped on Band-Aids, and stripped off our gloves. She continued to cry as her mom held her and soothed her -- "It's all over, they're all done."

Lila looked at me over her mom's shoulder, tears streaming down her tiny face, and what I saw there made my heart wince. I hate, hate, hate seeing that trust go out of their eyes.

My own tears threatened, prickling and hot. This woman was a PA. She had a daughter. And she had a life partner who was a woman. So many things about her matched up with the life plans I had for myself, the red carpet I saw stretching out in front of me. She had undoubtedly endured most of the same emotions and struggled with many of the same situations as I had, as many of you have, as many of us continue to. Getting taunted on the street for holding your partner's hand, not knowing what to write for 'relationship' on your emergency contact form, seeing the look on your parents' faces when you tell them your secret. This woman and I shared a bond, although she didn't know it. I felt a strong and unique kinship with her... and there wasn't a single thing I could say or do to reach out to her.

I watched them walk out the door, hand in hand. Wiped a tear. Smiled for what was. Sighed for what might have been... and went back to work.

*All names have been changed, as usual.

Par For The Course

10:00am - made the decision to skip my 11am class so I could devote sufficient time to my online chem quiz, then organize all my school stuff, clean the kitchen, and maybe even fold some laundry.

10:30am - sat down to take quiz.

11:15am - submitted quiz, and realized 20 seconds later that I made a stupid stupid stupid mistake that's going to knock my potential 100 down to an 80.

11:25am - tried to get some of the organizational stuff going, then remembered I had to complete the online chem lab for this week, since we didn't meet in person. Tried it, and encountered major technical difficulties ("that test tube is only a quarter of the way full, yet for some inexplicable reason, you may absolutely not add more than .387 mL of virtual water to it, ha ha. Nope, not that one either.") that meant I spent an hour on the stupid thing and had to make up about half the answers.

12:29 - and now that I am down to approximately negative four minutes before I needed to be out the door and on with my life... I have realized that in all my frantic studying for my genetics exam on Monday, I neglected to write up the prelab for tonight's lab in that class. Which I have done religiously every other week. Which has never been checked. Which will be checked tonight, because he hinted that it would be. Argh.

Not to mention that my hair is standing on end, my scrubs are wrinkled, and the only food I've got to sustain myself until I get home at 10pm tonight is a partial bag of M&Ms and a Nutri-Grain bar.

Anyway, I had a really great, poignant post to write, I promise, and it's coming -- I just had to throw this in as a frustration-venting mechanism for how much I HATE MY LIFE sometimes! Gaaahhh!

OK, off to work now.

Diary Excerpts

Looking back over my old diaries, it's painfully obvious to me how in denial I was. A few snippets from the old days (names have been changed):

10 years old

"Guess what? Cassie Harding is trying to steal Jilly away from me. She skips me in line, sleeps in the same tent with her at Girl Scout Camp, sits next to her at lunch, and more! But she's pretty much given up now, since I fight back."

14 years old

"Camp was so much better than last year! Unfortunately, I now have more evidence to support my sex theory of myself. That I'm a lesbian, I mean. I've always suspected it, because I hate boys and now I love Rachel. But then, it's not as if thinking about girls naked turns me on either. So... I dunno. Oh well, it's not important right now."

17 years old

"[My Spanish teacher, Juanita] was confiding in me, and that made me feel honored. She wasn’t seeing me as a student at that moment – I was being viewed as a friend. The fact that she could let down her defenses in front of me – to curse, to complain, to just talk uninhibitedly – is something that I treasure. Perhaps it was a moment of weakness, perhaps not. But I appreciated that, because I see her as much more of a friend than a teacher, and it was encouraging to think that maybe she was beginning to think of me as the same... I hope that I really was useful to her, and not just an annoyance... She also said that Mitch was the most lucid person in second period most of the time, although he 'has his moments'. I’ll confess that that made me feel a little jealous. I know this isn’t a Competition for Juanita’s Affection or anything – I think it's just that I just broke up with the guy, you know. ...I think I followed her as we left the parking lot... I had hopes of maybe catching up to her, but it never happened. I wonder where she lives? West side, I know, but where? I don’t know why I wonder that; I just do. Makes me feel kind of like a stalker. LOL! As if. No way. I think she’s near Sterling High, though."

18 years old

"I’m doing that thing that I always do, which is checking out the competition. I’m getting worried that [my Dutch teacher, Annemarie] likes Steve more than me, which is SO elementary and horrible of me. I’ve always been a couple of years behind everyone else emotionally, and now I’m worried that I’m WAY behind, because only six-year-olds say “You like her better than me.” It’s a baby thing.
But I made sure to tell her today that I’m going to Utrecht in the fall semester, so that she doesn’t use Steve's program as a reason to like him more.
Okay, this is getting really stupid."
...
"I feel really shitty and I don’t know why. It has something to do with Annemarie but I don’t know what. Is it because I didn’t sing for her when she asked? Or because she went off with Steve? Or a combination of both? I think that’s what it is – I think I’m jealous, and that makes me even madder because I'm supposed to be mature enough to not have these stupid fixations anymore. Sometimes I think I’m just as crazy as the next person but I’m smart enough to know what the hell's going on. Like, maybe I’d be stalking her right now if I were a average person, but I’m intelligent enough to be able to recognize that and tell myself not to do it. Maybe I’m just as fucked up as anyone in a mental hospital but I’m just more in tune with myself. Oh, I don't know. I just have to stop thinking about all this. I don’t know what my problem is."
...
"Annemarie admitted something that I’d suspected - she said, 'You can’t tell anyone - because I really like Steve.' And I could tell by the way she said it and how she looked at me that she meant as more than a friend. I'd suspected that before, but never called her on it... I'm jealous, I admit it. She pays more attention to him than to me. Like in Fat Tuesday’s when she said to him, 'It might sound stupid, but I wish that I could talk to you in Dutch [her native language], even just for ten minutes.' But now I know that a lot of it is because she’s attracted to him in spite of herself, and at the same time, I’m glad I’m a girl, because she’ll tell me things that she wouldn’t tell him, and we have less of a chance of our friendship being disrupted by sexual/romantic tension. Even though she did comment in Fat Tuesdays about having wondered 'what it would be like with a girl'. But I think all girls wonder that. Maybe guys don’t, but I think all girls do. It doesn't mean we’re gay, or even bisexual – we just think about things like that. I know what she means."

----------

I sort of stopped writing about things like that during my last three years of college -- I was dating Dutch guy after Dutch guy in an attempt to be 'fulfilled' by someone, anyone -- but now, at age 24, all I can say is OMG, how blind can a girl be?!

My only defense is that I think the idea of being sexually attracted to women scared me so much when I was starting to figure it out -- see above, age 14 -- that I ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction, and thus put myself through a lot of confusion and (unrecognized) heartache. It's like with the throat swab for a strep test when I was six -- it made me throw up, because I was sick, and so for ten years after that I was terrified of throat cultures for no good reason. Our minds can do some really wacky things.

Do any of you other RSGs have old diary entries, etc. like that, old thoughts and justifications that make you want to slap yourself in the forehead and go duuuuuuuh? I sure hope I'm not the only self-induced idiot here. :)