I think posting scraps from old journals I come across might become a regular-ish feature. I certainly have a lot of material to draw on!
Anyhow, this bit is from early 2009, and was written shortly after my 5-day hospitalization for a kidney infection. It’s pulled from an absurdly long livejournal post explaining to my friends what those five days were like. I’m choosing this bit to share because it’s a decent expression of the aggravated attitude I’ve tended to have towards dealing with medical shit ever since that hospital stay.
Apparently at twenty years old you shouldn’t: be trapped in the hospital for almost a week with an infection, get multiple severe kidney infections in the space of a year, have any problems with blood oxygen levels, or have veins so tiny and fragile that it took three nurses a total of six tries to get my first IV started. I understand that the nurses weren’t used to seeing people my age sick like this, and that I was on a floor full of old dialysis patients, which made my age all the more remarkable, but by the end of the time I was there I found myself clenching my teeth to prevent very bitchy responses to these comments. For example: “I GET it, at twenty years old I shouldn’t have this infection, shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be seemingly having a new problem show up every two seconds, and shouldn’t have the veins, as you so kindly put it, of a “90 year old woman.” I also shouldn’t need two different psych meds daily + therapy to keep my shit together, but I do. I already get that life isn’t fair. Now can we stop talking about how much my body sucks? I know I’m twenty and I SHOULD be a big girl, but frankly it kind of scares me talking about how goddamn broken I am. I also work rather hard to convince myself that my life DOESN’T suck, and you’re really not helping with that right now. Oh, and it’s just getting really, really old.”
In summary: My body does weird shit that no one can explain, and I get that that is interesting from a medical perspective, but I have to live with my stupid inexplicable body, so is it really so fucking surprising that I don’t find my weird problems amusing? Also, I may be smart and educated and mature, but health stuff is still fucking scary.
a little dose of keelium 