My Nose Hurts.

So it’s two nights ago around midnight. I get the craving for a midnight bagel so I go upstairs and make one, slather on the cream cheese, bring it back downstairs and settle in on the couch to watch an episode of Supernatural with Roommate. Right before he turns the episode on (Houses of the Holy – one of my least fav episodes but hey a bad episode of Supernatural still has Sam and Dean in it – AMIRIGHT?!) my head fills with pressure. “What is this?” I ask myself. It feels weird. I’m used to feeling many weird feelings but this is a new weird. So I get up and go to the bathroom to see if maybe I just need to blow my nose or something. I bend down to get some tissue paper and that’s when I start bleeding out of both nostrils. “OH GOD THIS IS IT. I’M DYING!” I think. Roommate walks into the bathroom and sees the blood and says he wants to take me to a physician. “Nah,” I shrug it off, “it’s all good in the hood, just a bit a blood.” That was my outward response. My inner response? “JESUSHCHRISTIHAVEATUMOUR! ALL THOSE FREAKIN’ MRI MACHINES GAVE ME A BRAIN TUMOUR!”

The bleeding only lasts a few minutes and then I get a nasty headache so I slouch off to bed without my Sam&Dean fix. I get in bed and text Boyfriend what happened and that I’m going to sleep now and Boyfriend tells me not to die and I say I won’t. I go to sleep and my nose remains free of blood all night and then in the morning I text BestFriend who is a nurse and who gets way too many texts from me lately that start “Baby? This terrible weird sickness thing happened to me last night so now you have to tell me exactly what it is via text.” And then she usually does and she’s usually right (I keep telling her she has to go to med school so she can be my doctor). This time she tells me to go to the hospital because every weird thing that happens to me could bring a doctor one step closer to figuring out what is wrong with me. So I pack my book (Let’s Pretend this Never Happened by Jenny Lawson – buy it you won’t regret it) and head off to the hospital.

The cab driver asks me why I’m going to the hospital because he doesn’t care much for privacy and I respond that I work there. Every time a cab driver asks me why I’m going to the hospital (which is way too often, UNDERSTAND WHAT PRIVACY IS, CAB DRIVERS!) I lie and tell them I work there. One guy once responded with “interesting, you don’t look like a nurse.” First of all, that’s just stupid, what does a nurse look like? Sure I wasn’t wearing scrubs but nurses take those off when they aren’t working, buster! I was wearing a leather jacket. I wanted to yell at him MY BEST FRIEND IS A NURSE AND SHE HAS A REALLY NICE LEATHER JACKET AND IT LOOKS GREAT ON HER AND SHE CAN WEAR IT AND STILL BE A NURSE. Instead I just shrugged it off, paid him the fare, gave him a nice tip because I like to come across as a nice person, and left the vehicle. So I tell this cab driver I’m going to work and he drops me off at the main entrance and then I walk all the way around back to the Emergency Department entrance because I felt the need to hide the fact that I needed to see a doctor.

I walk into the Emergency Department and it is insanely packed and 75% of the people sitting there look like they may expire in those very chairs. “Oh good,” I think. I’ll be waiting here until next Monday.” The florescent lights have already brought my headache back so I cover my eye and sit down to be registered. The nurse who registers me is really nice and sympathetic and tells me someone will take care of me as soon as possible. That makes me feel good and I want her to hug me but she’s a stranger and I could have a contagious disease so I don’t ask for her to hug me. I have to wait a little while before she comes back to get me to be triaged and as soon as she calls my name I see her hand my chart over to the nurse from the other night who didn’t know what baclofen was and I moan under my breath. When she takes my blood pressure I make that awkward joke about how I might as well just buy a room in the hospital. She doesn’t laugh. I think back in fear and wonder if I accidentally said it in my terrible Cockney accent that I use for my terrible jokes. Probably.

I wait for a little while in the emergency department next to an Irish woman with a lovely accent who fell and hurt her arm and used this fancy scarf as a sling and I want to ask her where she got her sling because it was super stylish but I have a rule about not talking to other humans at the emergency department because it seems like whenever you say “excuse me” or “you’re stepping on my coat” they hear me saying “I want to know why you are in the emergency department, then I want you to complain to me about how long you’ve been waiting, and considering we might be awhile why not go back to the beginning and tell me your whole life story?” So pretty much every time I’m in the ER I close my eyes so everyone thinks I’m sleeping because that’s way better than having to listen to someone’s life story.

I don’t have to wait very long, surprisingly, and the doctor tells me I have an untreated sinus infection and gives me antibiotics. I text Boyfriend this news and he is happy that they gave me something to make me feel better. I respond with “I’m just happy it’s not a brain tumour. I thought for sure last night that I had a brain tumour!” And then he says “So your reaction to having a brain tumour was to go to sleep?” Which to me was logical, it’s not like a brain tumour will grow eight sizes in one night. I figured it was okay to go to bed. Then Boyfriend excitedly says “maybe you don’t have MS at all, maybe it was all just a sinus infection!” I laugh and think wouldn’t that be nice.

Then I go to the gift shop at the hospital and buy two ice cream and put them in my purse for later. Then Roommate picks me up and I forget about the ice cream in my purse and they melt onto my Short Term disability forms, because I’m a grown up.

And that’s pretty much the whole story. Except I will add that my antibiotics are hot pink and look really pretty.

The end.