Why Stomach X-Rays Blow

Listening to Quando Quando Quando by Michael Buble ft. Nelly Furtado
Longing for another.
 
This post was written a few days ago, but my digital pen, Priscilla, freaked out and wouldn't let my computer have the words. So now that she's given up, here you go!

    It is very early in the morning and I cannot sleep. I'm also feeling very writerly, so I thought I'd jot down a few ideas I had for a blog entry or two. This one is a story. The moral of this story is that embarrassing things happen to everyone (especially me), but I promise you will come away with something entirely different than that. Probably something like, "Sarah does gross things to doctors." Before your mind supplies something wildly inappropriate, allow me to explain...

     There is something wrong with my stomach. the shortest way I can properly explain it is that when I wait too long between meals, I sometimes get very sick and pass out. Its aggravated by physical activity, and possibly stress as well. Senior year in high school, my doctor named it "overactive metabolism" and told me to eat like Michael Phelps.

     This is all well and good except that I have a very sensitive stomach and can get sick off almost anything (which makes me think that my lack of motivation to put everything possible in my mouth as a baby was more an act of self-preservation than laziness.) Anyway. By the time college came around we thought I'd grown out of the weird metabolism thing until it struck with ferocity this past summer. At this point we decided it was something we should get checked out. So tests were done.

     At first they wanted to do a blood test, but they'd already needled me once that day to give me a flu shot and I got really dizzy and queasy and had to lie down (needles and I don't get along). So they decided to do a breath test instead. The breath test was really weird; I'd never done one before. I wasn't sure what my breath had to do with some obscure bacterium possibly living in my stomach, but it wasn't a needle, so I didn't really care. Remember those, like, super-Capri-suns with the clear backs that I always accidentally punctured with my straw? Yeah, they were awesome.. Remember the blue one? It was my favorite flavor, too! Now add that really unpleasant medicinal undercurrent to it, and throw in some sterile-tasting grains at the bottom you have to suck up and make it twice as thick. That's what I had to drink before blowing into that dumb bag. I know, gross, right? Not only that, but I had to drink it through a straw for some reason unknown to me. I gagged.

     Then I had to stay for fifteen minutes afterward to be sure I didn't die. Trying to enjoy the book I brought while constantly fearing every tickle in my throat or hiccup was a harbinger of death was my favorite part. And that's still not all. That test came back negative! So we still had no idea why my stomach was so screwed up!

     They decided, "Hey, since x-rays are so super fun to do, let's go with that next." So precisely one week later, I had an appointment at way-too-early o'clock for a stomach x-ray. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever had a stomach x-ray, but let me just say this much: they absolutely suck. First, you have to take off all of your clothes except underwear (yes including bras, ladies, because of those pesky underwires) and wear one of those awkward almost-paper hospital gowns. You're not allowed to eat or drink anything for eight six hours before hand, which for me, means I was dizzy and nauseous. Then they have you drink all kinds of delicious thick and crunchy medical liquids. 
     The first was clear, until the nurse poured in some sort of powdery chunky-ish stuff that turned it sort of opaque and made it fizz like no one's business. She had me down it and the doctor - a man, yay, as I stand there in only underwear under that stupid gown - instructed me firmly not to burp. At the moment, this didn't register as something that would be difficult to manage. How wrong I was.
     The second liquid was super thick, like glue, and white with little crunchy baubles in it. It tasted about as good as it looked. (For those of you who may have taken that milky antibiotic as a kid that sounds about like I described, double that flavor intensity, and that's what it tasted like. Yum-o.) I had to drink that one through a straw; given how thick it was, I began to wonder if it was possible when it finally massacred my taste buds. I gagged. Again. 
     About this time, all of that first liquid hit my stomach. Literally. You recall that one was fizzy? Well, it made my stomach expand with air until it looked like I was pregnant, which while kind of funny for me was really awkward with other people in the room. This is when I had to stand on the x-ray table and the whole thing started moving around. I leaned back against it, as instructed by the doctor, and he had me rotate in different ways in addition to the table itself rocking all over the place. That liquid is still nice and bubbly. I rolled over, propped on my side, sprawled out on my back, and watched on the screen as the gluey liquid oozed through my stomach. It was grossly awesome.
     We were almost through with the x-ray when it happened. I had just been moved back to a standing position when the doctor had me face him. He's standing right next to me, poking various places on my stomach and asking if it hurts. I guess he poked the wrong place, because when I opened my mouth to answer... Well, I'm guessing you can fill in the blanks, but in case you can't, I'll tell you.
     I belched enormously. Right in the doctor's face. 
     I felt so badly for him. 
     All he could do was close his eyes, scrunch up his face (trying not to laugh), and say, "Lucky for you, that was the last one we needed. You can go change now."
     I couldn't get out of there fast enough. 
     Guess what else? That x-ray showed nothing either. So I exploded in a doctor's face for absolutely nothing. 
     Like I said, the moral of this story is that embarrassing things happen to everyone. But I'm sure all you're taking away is that I'm gross and I burp in doctors' faces. 
     I said, "Excuse me."

On a side note, today was totally awesome. :) Happy Tuesday to all.

Are We Sure Alice Didn't Just Get Lost in the Central Deck and Not a Rabbit Hole?

Sort of half-listening to Saw It On Your Keyboard by Hellogoodbye
Thinking about the coming months. 
    Yeah, that title is really long, but it applies, I promise.
    So, last night - or, I guess the night before last... it's one a.m. now. So this time yesterday? - was really good. Lovely things happened, but those lovely things are not what I want to discuss right now. What I want to discuss is the fact that so many things went wrong in regards to school and such today that I really just want to redo it. The school bit, anyways.
    I set my alarm for 7:30, since I have a 9:30 a.m. class Tuesdays and Thursdays. That gives me an hour to get ready, leave at 8:30, and arrive promptly at 8:45 to find a parking space and trudge to class. Of course, it would be ridiculous for my day to begin as planned, so this is what actually happened: I didn't hear my alarm at all, so I must have turned it off in my sleep, and my dad woke me at 9:00 on the nose. Nine. Fifteen minutes after I'd planned to be on campus.
    Now, I'd showered before bed the night before, so I wasn't dirty or smelly. In other words, I didn't need a shower, but it sure as heck would have woken me up. But I didn't get that, did I? Didn't put make up on; just mascara at a stop light (on the bright side, someone told me that no makeup looked good on me [: ). Didn't get my tea either, which would have helped. So, what with rocking my just-rolled-out-of-bed look, and speeding a bit so as not to be late, I arrived on campus at 9:10-ish, give or take a minute.
    I've had early morning classes before, so I assumed the West Deck would be fine to park in. Never assume, reader. Never. Apparently, by 9:00, every student and faculty member and maintenance worker and car-pooler is magnetically drawn to the West Deck, which is the most convenient deck to park in for my classes - right by the building I go to. Having made the stupid mistake of turning into this deck, I got stuck there for ten minutes, leaving me only ten minutes to go to another deck, find a parking spot, and get to class. The class I still haven't been to, and have no idea where it's located.
    Once I've broken free of the black hole of time wasting that the West Deck has become, I jet around to the Central Deck, where I've never parked before. Now this parking deck is enormous. I mean, really huge. Something like seven or eight floors, I don't really know. It's like a massive multi-leveled car-bearing beast just looming over Campus Loop Road (for some reason, the comparison my brain supplied was a "multi-leveled vacuum cleaner." Please don't ask me how that makes sense; I really don't know..). I've never been in this deck before, hence I have no idea how to get around. Somehow I made it up to level three, by simply following other drivers, as the signs made no sense to me.
    It's like MarioKart in there... All these weird colors on the walls, cars on every side of you and randomly popping out through breaks in the walls and such... The layout is so confusing for me. I managed to circle the third floor something like fifteen times. I was literally lost on one floor. I never ran into other cars, so I didn't realize I was going over the same path over and over. I finally noticed a car buzzing up toward me from one of the breaks in the wall, so I decided to turn down that way, thinking it was a way to go up a floor or something. I quickly discovered it was one-way, and that one-way was not my way. I feel like I gave that stupid silver Volkswagen Bug the scare of it's life.
    Anyways, I finally figured out how to move up and down floors in the deck - I'm telling you, it's nuts - and I parked and headed across campus to my class. I'm now roughly five minutes late or more and haven't even gotten to the English building yet. When I entered the building - silent due to classes which have all started - and got to the floor my class was on, I passed the room twice because the room was quite difficult to find.
    It turned out it was down this weird little half-hallway that I easily missed. Twice. My professor was very understanding though. She said that everyone has those days when they just get lost going everywhere. Then she said, "You're like Alice, and there are plenty of rabbit holes.. You just happened to fall down the right one." First off, I immediately thought, "Who's Alice?" Then, realizing the allusion to Alice in Wonderland, I thought, "If she fell down that one particular rabbit hole and got terribly lost.. That wouldn't be a good thing. That's not the right rabbit hole. That's the wrong one. The right one would be the one that she can get out of - a normal rabbit hole, which would only fit her foot or something..."
    If this is an omen of the rest of my semester, I honestly don't know how I'm going to manage. My second class of the day gave me no trouble. Plus - added bonus - my professor is from New Zealand, so I get to listen to her cool accent every Tuesday and Thursday night.
    So yeah. That was my morning, really. Not so much my whole day. The rest of my day was alright. Just the morning sucked. So much.

Coping: Grammatical Errors

Nodding my head to Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Soundtrack (the videos can be found here) 

Dying for Douceur de France... Mmmmm...

    So, I recently noticed, and not for the first time, that grammatical awareness is collectively dropping. It's really not something that's difficult to grasp - the use of apostrophes, commas, and the correct homonym (those three really get me). But there are more that I've noticed, especially on Facebook. I know many people argue that on Facebook it's not important to have proper grammar (spelling is another matter entirely), but is it really that difficult to throw in an apostrophe or a comma where needed? Or use "well" when necessary?
     Anyways. I've developed a few ways of coping with frustrating grammatical errors. Although I don't run into this error as often as others, the phrase "a lot" can be easily dealt with. Simply imagine the Alot, a friendly cross between a bear, a yak and a pug who eliminates anger at the misuse of "a lot." 

When people forget their commas, I imagine the phrase was meant to be worded that way. For example, on Facebook, someone said, "Thanks for hanging out with me lover butt." So this is what I imagined:

See where I'm going with this? With a little creativity, even the most irritating grammatical errors can become fun! (No, my butt is not really that big. I edited it. Now it's bursting with love.)
    So, I'm heading into snow day number four! This was my first week back in college for the semester, and still no classes! How fantastic is that? 

    [Subscribe if you wish your butt were as huge and love-filled as mine!] 

    Added: Have problems remembering how to spell simple words like awesome and awful? "'E's are for 'Awesome,' not for 'Awful.'" 

Shunning the Resolute*

Dream by Priscilla Ahn ringing in my ears
New Year's Resolutions running through my mind
    As a kid, I never gave much thought to New Year's Resolutions. I always thought it was something that you did once you got to Middle School, or something. When I reached Middle School, I figured, "I'm a kid, there isn't much I need to change about myself," and decided that High School was when I'd start setting and striving to achieve any yearly goals. Once High School rolled around, I acknowledged that I am a truly lazy person and responded to resolutions with with the same method I reserved for huge papers and projects: procrastination. Now that I'm in my second year of college, I feel like this is something I need to take seriously.
    It's being impressed upon me more and more that I am an adult and need to be responsible, be driven, and act on that drive. I have to instill good habits now so that I can depend on them later in life - don't ignore my alarm clock now, because if I do in the real world, I'll be late and be fired; don't procrastinate and stay up all night to complete a project, because once I get a real job, if I do that, I'll oversleep, ignoring my alarm clock, be late, and be fired; write down everything I have to do, because if I don't, I'll forget until the night before, stay up all night, oversleep, ignoring my alarm clock, be late for my job, and be fired. You see how all my bad habits now will eventually lead to the deterioration of future me's job?
    So I've gathered (read: been told time and time again) that I need to set some goals and "resolutions" for myself, to become a better person, and to help future me keep my job. The problem is, I still view New Year's Resolutions in the same way I did in Elementary, Middle, and High School. I know they would probably help me a good bit, but I also know that I will never stick to them. I could say that my resolutions are:
    1. To go to sleep earlier and wake up on time.
    2. To eat healthier.
    3. Not to procrastinate.
    4. To keep track of everything in a planner, like they tried to make me do in Elementary and Middle School.
    5. To submit my first book for publication.
    6. To finish my second book.
    However, I know that I'm going to:
    1. Stay up until roughly three a.m. tonight doing who even knows what, sleep through my alarm, and be extremely rushed to be at work at ten a.m. tomorrow.
    2. Eat Chick-fil-A until I throw up, and then go get Zaxby's.
    3. Wait as long as I can to go get my books for my classes, thus making myself overly stressed.
    4. Insist I can remember when I'm supposed to work this next week, then promptly forget and have to go back in to check my schedule again.
    5. Delay submitting my book because for every "no" I receive, a piece of my soul will flake off and die. Plus there's always something I can improve, right?
    6. Give myself a "break" on my second book because I just spend a whole month writing it - I have plenty of time to finish it.
    Look there - I already have reasons why I don't need to stick to my resolutions, so what on earth is going to keep me going through the whole year? The answer, reader, is nothing. Nothing will keep me going, so why start? Not trying at all is way better than failing. That way, no one has to know that I'm a failure. They'll just look at me and assume, as anyone would, that the reason I have not set any resolutions for myself is that I am already completely perfect and there is nothing about myself I need to change. Why would I correct them?
*This entry is rife with sarcasm. You have been warned.