Plate o' Shrimp

It’s official

It’s official

It is only 3 pm, I have an ear infection and it has already been a long day.

It started at 6:30 when I got out of bed with a sore throat and my earache much worse feeling like I had an earplug in my right ear. Anatomy lab started at 8 am. I was feeling that sense of disconnection and dislocation you get when you have a mild infection compounded with a mild feeling of being off balance because of my ear. I tried to review quietly in some corner with one or two people, and because I was feeling a little feverish and out of it. As I did so, I kept on picking out structures and asking my fellows for conformation because I felt as if I had forgotten the most basic information—“this is the brachioradialis right? And this is the pronator teres, so we should be able to orient ourselves to find the muscles of the forearm from here” This type of vocalization seemed to draw the roaming an normally welcomed roving instructors like flies, who would look at me and ask questions. I did my best impersonation of the RCA dog, leaning my bad ear in toward my right shoulder and tried to figure out if I actually heard the questions they were asking and mumbled something that I hope sounded coherent. This happened over and over today. One of the things that has impressed me the most about Saint George is the sheer number of very well qualified and gifted anatomy faculty who are constantly present in Anatomy lab. It is not uncommon to be able to work with a faculty member for an extended period of time with just 4 or 5 other people, and to be able to ask every single question and to go over structures in great detail. Today it just felt like punishment, not just because it is hard to be put on the spot but because I was very cognizant of an opportunity lost.
I left lab at 10 and proceeded directly to the student health clinic. They were very busy and it took almost 4 hours for me to see a very nice doctor who told me that I indeed had an ear infection and gave me eardrops and a prescription for antibiotics. Somewhere in that time I had used the bathroom, failed to check before I sat down and sat in some else’s pee. By the time I left the clinic at 2:10 I was late for the second of my four hours of daily lecture and still in my scrubs from Anatomy lab and feeling less than charming because of the whole pee thing, I got on the bus to go to the pharmacy to have my prescription filled and hoped it wouldn’t be long before I got home.
The pharmacist scolded me for not having my insurance card—and somewhere in some far reptilian corner of my brain I remembered that printing out my new student insurance card was one of the many things I didn’t get to before I left the states. She asked me if I was aware I had prescription drug coverage, when I told her no, she asked me why I had insurance. I only thought “So my mother doesn’t have to sell her house to pay for my medical care if I get cancer, and because SGU made me” But I was getting a little cranky by then. Luckily or unluckily the sting of paying the full $80 EC (about $32 US) instead of my $26EC co-pay was lessoned by discovering the pharmacy carried Milky Way Midnights. For the unitiated, Milk Way Midnights are the dark chocolate version of the Milky Way and are vastly superior to their plebian and more familiar cousins. I can tell I really don’t feel good because even though I am home having stripped out of my scrubs and showered cleansing myself from the unfortunate bathroom incident, I don’t really want it. But it is getting nice in cool in my little fridge, the ibuprophen I took should kick in soon, and the antibiotics I took are happily corsing through my arteries and veins making stronger more drug resistant microbes but no doubt doing the job of kicking out this infection. For entertainment I can go hang my scrubs out to air out on the balcony where they can disturb the line of sight of the folks paying $800 US a night for their surfside room next to the crazy Caribbean medical school. It feels good to be a rebel when you are cranky.

posted by Sa @ 6:13 PM