What I've been up to...

Wednesday: Mental health post-JCAHO survey vacation day. Sleep until 10 am. Put away clothes. Sleep. Clean under the bed to store painting. Sleep. Spring cleaning (yes, I'm trying to get a jump on things). Sleep. Check mail. Become annoyed that I have not received my medical reimbursement cheque. Call company. Cheque sent out on Monday. Sleep. Wake up at midnight, celebrate influx of paycheque by going to ATM, then Walgreens, and getting Paxil, cat food, dog food, protein bar, caffeine-free Diet Coke, and half pint of waffle cone ice cream.

Thursday: Back to work. Attend hand hygiene inservice explaining our upcoming evaluation of alcohol sanitation gels. Read e-mail. Try to discover source of muffin and candy bar care package left in my chair while off. Take early lunch so can be fueled for blood drive. Stop by lab and beg latex-free tourniquet so that the phlebotomist doesn't have to use a blood pressure cuff on me.

Go to blood mobile. Wait in line. Chat with coworkers. Go through screening. Fill out much paperwork. Discover for first time that I am postive for CMV. Not sure what that is. Keep asking people. Finally find out it's sort of like mononucleosis, not usually a problem unless you first get it when you're pregnant, but they won't give my blood to infants or people with immunosuppression. Okay. Seventeen years later I think I now know what my boyfriend and I had that never would test positive for mono but kept each of us sick for about a semester with mono symptoms and led me to have an eye infection, kidney infection, and my last bout of strep. Caught it in January of 1986 and didn't feel well till June. Sometimes wondered if that could have triggered my fibromyalgia. Hmm...Epstein-Barr-like. Isn't that one of the suspects for chronic fatigue? Anyway, good to know it probably won't cause more mayhem. I'm O positive, and we have a blood shortage, so I fill out paperwork and then go to get stuck. Go through the special screening questions, including some new ones, including being a military dependent. Turns out never getting out of the USA a plus. Pulse 78. Blood pressure 110/65. Is your BP normally that low? Sometimes. Wildly gesticulate to woman who is about to open latex glove box while trying to talk around thermometer strip. Temperature 99.2 degrees. I'm latex allergic. How am I supposed to stick you? I can stick myself if that would help. Oh, no, I need gloves just to touch your skin. She goes off in search of purple nitrile gloves. They only come in small. She grumbles and sticks me. Much blood. She tapes gauze around my finger and puts blood in what looks like a Copper Sulfate solution. Amazing! It sinks! She hands me the bags and paperwork and calls "next"!

Much waiting. Must have right-armed chair. One phlebotomist to take care of ten people in line. Finally, my turn. I am latex allergic. Oh. I brought my own tourniquet. Tourniquet applied. Much feeling for vein. Iodine applied. Search for gloves. Big man. Big hands. Cannot get in purple gloves. Co-worker runs to lab to get bigger gloves. Tourniquet tight. Sigh. Gloves applied. "Let's hope I hit the vein on the first try. I can't feel my fingers in these gloves". Ah, reassuring. Hits vein, though it hurts. Begin pumping. Thank God, first try. Pump. Pump. Joke. Talk. Needle taken out. Swab everything down. Read paper for a few minutes while recover. Paper tape around arm; blue stuff has latex in it. I have a drink and a cookie, then toddle off.

Discover that I have been in the bloodmobile for nearly two hours. It is now snowing. Find that while I was gone my boss couldn't find me, paged me, generally panicked over a piece of equipment that isn't my responsibility and an assignment that I'm doing as other, non-library-related to help out. Funny, two different people say they never heard me paged. I am really tired of my boss getting flustered. I feel like I should send her e-mail when I go to the bathroom. Here we had all these e-mails urging us to donate. I don't think anyone else complained. She just comes off as if I'm derelict of duty when I'm in the office almost all the time and the one time she looks for me she can't find me. It wouldn't take a genius to figure out where I was--and I didn't realise how long I would be or I would have told her I was going out to the bloodmobile.

I call tech people who change toner in equipment. I ask tech if we can make it clear that they are the ones to call. He sticks a sign and has his Director send out an e-mail to everyone to that effect. Maybe that'll help. I ask for clarification on other task. Person wants it weekly. Higher priority than I was led to believe. Apparently my boss was doing my performance appraisal and asked that person about this task. Grrrrr....wish people would communicate better. Believe my performance appraisal will really quite suck, unjustly so. :( Spend rest of afternoon printing out the stupid surveys that are so danged important that they can't give them to a secretary to do.

Dwana and I escape at 5 and go to Fazoli's. Have a nice dinner. Check mail. Still no cheque. :( Nearly $400 in limbo! We go into my house and talk, talk, talk, until almost midnight. She loves my cats and dog. Darius gets introduced after I pull him out of a closet. Gay cat? :) Later he comes out and rubs against her. Weird. Maybe he's finally getting a clue that people can be good to him. Gee he's only 11. She didn't mind the state of the house at all. I didn't get all weird about someone being in my house. Go figure. We had a nice visit. The couch is long enough that two people can sit with their feet facing each other and talk. Take off bandage. Arm badly bruised. Dwana exclaims. I tell her this is normal for me. She says her mother (a nurse) would chew someone out for that. I told her he said that I had a good vein but most people were afraid of using that one because it's so close to an artery. Again, reassuring, no? She laughed. Said that's why it probably bruised so badly--it's on the side of my elbow rather than the middle. Dwana had talked to her husband earlier and he was working late so we were in no big hurry. She had told her husband she was bringing him Fazoli's. Finally at 11:50 he calls and says "I don't want to rush you but I am hungry." Heehee. He's a pretty understanding hubby. My ex would have whined if I'd been just a half hour late with food.

Very tired. Glad that Friday is Jean's day, and well, Friday. :) Brain is now quite mush. May play Sims. May sleep. Bye now. Perhaps next time will use bigger sentences again.