Is this real life?

Growing up with a mom who doubles as a nurse, I went to the doctor’s office maybe… 4 times. And the first time I went to the Emergency Room was when I was 19, and it’s because I drove myself there. So when my mom tells me I should go to the doctor, I get my butt to the doctor.

I couldn’t even explain to you if I tried – but military insurance is very confusing. First thing this morning, I had to drive up to the grocery store to make a million phone calls (because I get absolutely no reception at my house – like, negative bars, seriously). I couldn’t get into my doctor for three weeks (what kind of crazy is that?) so I received an authorization to go to urgent care (not of my choice, but of Tricare’s choice… hello red flag).

I’ve never been to an urgent care because I don’t even think they exist in the little tiny state I grew up in. So I finally get to the sketchy-looking office, fill out 74 pages of paperwork (almost literally), and sit. And wait. And wait. And probably catch the flu from all the hacking, sneezing, nasty-breathing people in the waiting room with me. An hour goes by and my phone is dying, which makes me have a slight panic attack (I’m addicted to technology… don’t judge me). Almost another hour goes by and they call my name. As I stand up, a man walks through the door with a handful of bloody tissues, and they rush him in ahead of me, instructing me to take a seat (yep, again). Yeah, because a finger almost sliced off is as important as my sore throat. Deep sigh, followed by coughing.

I finally get called again, this time without any bloody interruptions (hahaha, I crack myself up). The sweet lady calls me to the scale and kindly says, “Would you like to step on?” Is this real life? Is she serious? Would I like to weigh myself? Hi, I’m a female, nice to meet you. I look at her and uncomfortably laugh. “Should I take my boots off?” She smiles and tells me to do whatever I want. I want to take my boots off, and my pants, and my jacket, and my socks, and my shirt, and ten pounds, whatever else is about to accompany me to the scale. But I slide my boots off and stare down the face of the devil. The lady tells me that she’ll set my purse on the floor for me. You know what… I wasn’t feeling terrible enough about this entire situation, so yes, I’d love to stick my new/pricey Coach purse on this germ-infested floor. As if she reads my mind, she says, “This purse is too pretty to be on the floor. I’ll hold it.” Thank you, sweet angel… the highlight of my day.

I get into a small waiting room where she takes my BP, heart rate, temperature, and whatever else doctors do. I had a small fever, which secretly made me happy, because up until this point, I thought I might have been exaggerating/imagining my sickness. She informs me that the doctor will be in shortly, and leaves. I sit. And wait. And wait. And crinkle the annoying paper on the table. And crinkle some more. And I feel like the paper is crinkling with every breath I take. And the crinkling is giving me a migraine. I relocate to the chair designated for the doctor, I learn later, where I sit. And wait. And wait. And then I notice a colony of ants on the sink. How unsanitary, right? I follow their trail and see they are coming from a crack in the cheesy linoleum flooring. Yep, that’s just what I want to see in a medical office. Ants. Lovely.

I wait for another 40 minutes. I lay my head against the wall, remembering that I slept for about 2 hours last night in between my coughing fits and reruns of Roseanne. Then I sit up straight and have a weird fear that ants crawled in my hair. I start to get antsy (pun intended… I’m so lame) and get sidetracked with a disgusting box of BIOHAZARD needles. Gross. I hate the doctor’s office, in case you missed that memo. I start to get nosey and open cabinets underneath the sink. Begin déjà vu. I am such my mother’s child. I remember being younger and sitting in the doctor’s office (you know, those 4 times) and my mom would be poking around the drawers. I’d freak out like we were going to get arrested. And here I am doing it myself.

The doctor finally comes in and again, “Is this real life?” The doctor is a middle-aged Asian man, with long curly black and grey hair. He’s wearing a purple shirt with horizontal stripes and a blue tie with vertical stripes. That should say enough. He’s also wearing high-water pants (expecting a flood?) that are black… with dark blue socks… vomit. I hate that, in case you’ve never met me.

But I don’t judge people based on their terrible ability to match stripes with stripes, so myself and my open mind smile – and then, as life would have it, I have a hard time understanding him, which sucks for me because I feel like I’m missing something important. He tells me about how he’s feeling sick himself, living off cough drops and fighting the dry cough. Yay – that makes me feel better. Before I finish telling him my symptoms, he tells me it’s Bronchitis with a hint of asthma... whatever that means.

He assigns me a cocktail of prescriptions and inhalers, and in comes a medical assistant who looks younger than me. However, he’s wearing matching scrubs (no crazy array of stripes) so I feel more comfortable with him. I do a weird lung capacity test, and I fail miserably. Breathing at a lung capacity 29% lower than I should be, sick and all, he tells me that if I can’t pass, I’ll have to do a breathing treatment that’ll take another 45 minutes. After three hours of this ant-infested office, I’m ready to go. I give one more big breath, see a few stars, and hit 82%. I passed, and in result, came very close to passing out.

I’m finally on my way, and the rest of my afternoon is a strange whirlwind of “Is this real life?” type events. My phone dies exactly as my cousin is telling me the most important part of our conversation and then my prescriptions are nowhere to be seen at the pharmacy. My life. So now I’m home and watching Parenthood… absolutely the highlight of this off day. I just had a small cough attack where I was pretty sure my life was over. The inhalers didn’t do a thing… maybe I’m doing it wrong. 

Ants. On the sink. You know, where people wash their hands.

Friends with Friends

Last night I had a dream that I was the 7^th friend in Friends – my absolute favorite television show of all time, in case you’ve never met me. I was pregnant in the dream, which was weird and scary and confusing, and Phoebe just kept telling me how painful childbirth was, because “trust her, she’s had 3 babies.” We were sitting on the couch in the Central Perk coffeehouse drinking coffee, which is weird because I hate coffee and I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to avoid coffee when you’re pregnant (I’m not really pregnant – it was just a dream – in case I need to clarify). And Joey kept saying “How you doin’?” and Chandler kept making cute eyes at me and Ross was talking about dinosaur things, and guess what? Dinosaur things are as boring in a dream as they make it look on TV. And it must have been Christmas because I woke up with “Noel” stuck in my head. I hate that song.

I have no idea where that dream came from. I haven’t even watched an excessive amount of Friends in, like, days. I really am obsessed with that show. I am in the process of owning all 10 seasons – one by one, I buy them on eBay as I finish re-watching them. I’m a freak. I also watch 2 hours of random re-runs every day on TBS from 1:00 – 3:00 pm. Pitiful, I know.

I’m guessing the dream came from an overload combination of Robitussin and Mucinex and Nyquil and multivitamins and cough drops and orange juice and Gatorade, because that’s been my life for the past 3 days. I’m surprisingly getting worse every day, so that sucks. 50% of the day, I sound like a man with a deep voice, and the other 50% of the day, I have no voice at all. I bet the mister appreciates that – the no voice, not the man voice.

All joking aside, he has been a wonderful mister. When I’m sick, I’m the world’s biggest baby, and I deserve the #1 COMPLAINER ribbon. He stayed home with me all weekend, cuddled up in pajamas, cooked dinner, watched my girly movies, listened to my terrible predictions during the Golden Globes (by the way, how about Jodi Foster?) and listened to me (try to) scream at the TV during the Patriots game. He’s a keeper. (I’m predicting 49ers v. Patriots on February 3^rd, with a big fat Patriots win, of course. It’ll be interesting because the mister is just about as die-hard 49ers as I am Patriots).

So my life has been being sicky and having weird Friends dreams and starting school this morning (sad face) and taking medicine and watching so much football and laughing at Amy Poehler and Tina Fey rock it on the Golden Globes (two of my four girl crushes – the other two are Katy Perry and Jennifer Aniston).

A few laughs to get you through the afternoon. You are so welcome.

Little Fish in a Big Sea

In case you read my farewell to 2012, let me update you on what ACTUALLY happened, because, you know, fireworks over the Golden Gate Bridge just sounded too good to be true, right?

It was actually fireworks over the Bay Bridge.

But settle your jealous bones. When you are as sheltered as myself and my mister, you tend to feel slightly out of place with 200,000 San Franciscans (is that what you call them?) on your heels. So here’s the story of how our night went down.

A very kind shuttle driver informed us that we were absolutely nuts if we thought driving into San Fran on New Year’s Eve was even close to a good idea, so he taught us about the BART, the Bay Area something something… the subway/train/whatever. So we did that, and that was an adventure in itself. It should be easy enough for two adults, you know, to figure out how to get 10 miles from our hotel to the city. So we finally get on the BART, 45 minutes later than we had planned, because everyone else in San Fran had the same idea. It wasn’t too difficult, except for the fact that we didn’t know what stop was which, and for about 35 minutes we assumed that we were going to end up in downtown Oakland after dark… NO thank you. I hate the Raiders, so I just assume that I’d hate Oakland an equal amount.

After we finally get off, stupid iPhone Mapquest takes us around the block twice, only to end up at the BART station again.  Thanks MQ, you suck. It’s dark and chilly and the roads are crowded and two miles later, we find the Ferry Building, which sits just off to the left of the Bay Bridge. A pretty view – but I insist to the mister that I read online, PIER 41 is the place to hear the music that is synced to the fireworks, so we walk. And we walk. And we walk some more. A nice man on a bicycle taxi of some sort tells us that Pier 41 is “only about a mile” from our current location, and even though we’d already walked about 3 (in Ugg boots, by the way), we continue. And it gets chillier. And I have to pee (what the hell is new, right friends?) and there are a million people (maybe a thousand, whatever) surrounding me. We see a cute place to maybe stop and get drinks, but continue on to “make sure we get a good view.”

So we walk and walk and walk, like I mentioned, and our feet hurt, and we FINALLY end up at 41, and there are only about ten people there. Well that’s confusing, since this is the prime location to see the fireworks according to the ‘net. So we sit, and we start to freeze from that oh-so-fresh ocean breeze at 10:45pm, and I start to Google, and my cheeks blush, and I’m afraid to tell my husband that I have just diagnosed myself with dyslexia – Pier 41 and Pier 14 are two totally different locations, it turns out. And in the moment I realized I miscalculated by about 1.5 miles, all I want to do is be in my bed, or the hotel bed, or really anywhere but Pier 41. So we walk again. And it starts to feel much more “city-ish” as a ridiculous amount of police and fire and ambulance lights go flying by us, down the middle of two lanes and almost running over a handful of drunken pedestrians. And as we get closer, I get a little more scared. That “cute little place to get a drink” I mentioned earlier is now surrounded with CAUTION tape and those hundred police/fire/ambulance lights we just passed. Policemen are screaming at people and I suddenly feel like San Francisco is not so great after all.

We hurry down the road and finally end up at Pier 9, standing on the sidewalk freezing our booties off as we wait for the stupid fireworks to start. We’re both grumpy and tired and frozen solid and there are too many people, and oh yeah – we are SO not city people. But I do have to say, this was our first New Year’s Eve together, and the fireworks start, and I got my midnight kiss, and we had a pretty great view – fireworks right over the BAY Bridge (not the GG Bridge like I insisted in my ADIOS 2012 post… I suck).

And we walk back another 2 miles to the BART station down dark allies and past drunken chicks hanging out of car windows, screaming a random assortment of New Year’s cheers. And I’m pretty sure I saw some hookers, so that was new.

And we end up back at our hotel two hours past midnight, and we are thankful that we didn’t fall asleep on the BART, because that was a very realistic possibility.

And the next morning, I see on the news that a man was shot at the Pier 23 restaurant (that “cute little place to get drinks” we almost went to and later saw all the emergency crews at) and they couldn’t find the gunman in the mass amount of people on the Embarcadero (you know, exactly where we were chillin’ all night)…

Hi I’m Kaila and I hate the city.

 Our view from the sidewalk.

This was us in our warm, comfy, safe hotel room - if we had only known what we were getting ourselves into...