Beware! Vampires Are On The Loose!
Oct 12, 2017 2:19:00 GMT
Ozarks Tom, blackfeather, and 3 more like this
Post by Deleted on Oct 12, 2017 2:19:00 GMT
It all started with a dream.
In the dream a white coyote had killed my beloved black cat and was guarding his body. A red fox kept running up to the white coyote because it smelled my dead cat and wanted his corpse. The white coyote chased off the red fox twice. When I saw what was going on, realizing my cat was either in grave danger or already dead, I ran outside and confronted the white coyote. It lunged at me, but I grabbed a shepherd-hook like pole and began beating the white coyote off. The red fox then came up to me and I also used the shepherd’s hook on it.
I, however, successfully scared the wild animals away. When both coyote and fox were gone I ran up to my cat and found that he was indeed dead. However I saw no puncture wounds, but there was something wrong with his intestines. A white sheet was then wrapped around my beloved kitties body and I went inside, dazed, tormented, and cried over my loss.
I then woke up. It was Wednesday morning, October 4th. I rolled out of bed in search for my kitty; I found him sleeping on the seat of the Deutzfahr tractor. I brought him inside with me.
I couldn’t shake the dream, though. The Las Vegas shooting was fresh in my mind, and I felt like something else was about to happen; that my dream was symbolic. I told my family that there would be some type of blood shed in an ‘M’ state, like Minnesota or Michigan, but it felt more like Minnesota. I wondered if it would be a cop shooting a black man or vice-versa. It would be an isolated incident. It wouldn’t be 59 dead and 500 plus wounded it would only involve a few people. I knew that blood-shed would be involved, however. I just knew it.
But, despite checking the news, nothing was turning up that fit my premonitions or my dream. For me, life was going on like normal: I’d go and clean the doctor’s office every Wednesday and Saturday Night (or Sunday Morning, depending on work schedules); I would help dad throw wood into the cellar; I finished the mighty task of cleaning out the back storage room! I went to work Monday and got things prepped for my absence that Thursday.
While I was at work I learned about two patients Dr. _______ had seen in the hospital. The one was interesting: he was a truck driver and for the past few years had noticed he got dizzy on long drives. Well, this time he was out west and couldn’t drive back due to the dizziness. He called his sister and she drove out to where he was, picked him up, and brought him to the hospital where he was found to have a hemoglobin of 3.3!
As far as numbers go, normal hemoglobin for males should be between 14 and 18, and women should be 12 to 16. This man lost about over half his blood volume, probably closer to three-quarters! At the same time, Dr. ________ had another patient in the hospital with a hemoglobin of 6.
While my co-worker got things set up for these men to see hematologists, I went into the doctor’s back office and set a chart in front of her. The next patient was ready to be seen, and I was ready to grab the patient’s vitals whenever the doctor gave me the okay.
She looked up at me and, rather angrily, said, “You look anemic to me.”
It was very out of the blue. I just shrugged and said, “Um, probably.” I mean, she had been dealing with two very anemic gentlemen and I tend to run on the lower side due to the ulcerative colitis, so a hemoglobin of 10 or 11 would be no surprise to me.
“When was the last time you had blood work?”
“Uh, probably about two years ago.”
She shook her head.
I was suppose to get a yearly follow up appointment but my primary doctor’s office forgot to give it to me and I never scheduled another one. I was unhappy with my primary. He seemed preoccupied, like he wasn’t listening to me. I told this to my employer and she recommended another doctor, so I decided I would see him instead, but that would mean I’d have to make an appointment and wait in a waiting room for probably two hours. Ugh. . . . And the appointment could be down the road. IF I was anemic it would be better to know right away, and if it turned out I was at 10, even 9.5, I’d be referred to my employer anyway, because she is both my employer and my surgeon. (She diagnosed me with the ulcerative colitis, and after years of her knowing the family she hired me to work for her.)
So after all the patients were done, I went into her office and apologized for interrupting and if I could bug her for a moment. “Would you be willing to write me a script for the CBC?”
“Yeah, sure! I’ll just need your chart.” She was quite chipper about it, a surprising mood change from earlier when she was mad at me.
So she wrote a quick note in my chart and I wrote out my own CBC script and had her sign it.
“I’ll get it done tonight,” I told her and I was true to my word. I scurried to the hospital, got registered, made it to the lab within ten minutes to spare before they closed for the day.
Alright! That was done!
So I tell the story to Dad. It was so random, and the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in a while. “My coworker will probably call me tomorrow or later in the week with the results.”
It’s 8:30 pm or so when the telephone rings. I’m upstairs but I heard someone on the answering machine. I head down there and check the messages: “_____, It’s Dr. ____ when you get this message call me back!”
I immediately know my blood work came back with bad results, the doctor wouldn’t be calling me at home, this late at night otherwise. She left me no number though and I don’t have her home phone number with me at my house so I called the hospital.
“Yes, she just asked me for your number,” the receptionist said. She tried paging Dr._____ over head, nothing. She tried transferring me to her cell phone--nothing, she transferred me to her home phone and then she picked up.
“Your hemoglobin is 5!” she told me.
“OH!” And here I was expecting her to say 9. “Okay,” I said.
She spoke with Dr. P-- and his wife Dr. G-- who I decided I would switch to. They were concerned with a hemoglobin that low, although I’m young, I could still suffer a heart attack. They wanted me directly admitted.
Mom’s starting to flip out now, the way mothers always flip out. Dad’s all calm-like and says, “What was my hemoglobin when I got admitted? 4?”
Mom’s frazzled. I told mom, “You have to work tomorrow, just stay home, you can’t doing anything.”
Dad’s getting his jacket on and echoes what I say. “I can take her; it’s fine.”
Mom just stands there, deciding what to do, and I’m like, “Well, I got to get my stuff. Have your mind made up when I come back down.” I rush around and stuff clothes into my backpack. When I came back downstairs I found both my parents ready for me.
“I can’t just leave my baby. I don’t care if you’re twenty-five. I have to know what’s going on,” Mom said.
We get to the hospital and finally by 10:30 I was admitted and given a room. A private room, no less! Wasn’t I lucky? And who would have known that they’d give me the same exact room Dad was given twenty-four and half years ago. It was in that room my employer met me for the first time. I was only ten months old. Oh, and it was also a prisoner’s room--for federal criminals. The windows were specially reinforced windows; there was no Sharp’s container on the wall, the bathroom was separate, and even the light switch was outside the room.
Mom and Dad stayed with me for about an hour, but I told them there was no point in them staying longer. It’d be a while before anything was done and they had to work in the morning. Shortly after they left I was typed & crossed, meaning they checked my blood type. I was hooked up to telemetry. A nurse came up and asked me questions. A gentleman nurse, a supervisor named Todd, tried to run an IV. He harpooned me three times on my right arm, but couldn’t get any flow. He gave up, not wanting to waste any precious veins, and called someone from the emergency room to do it. She came up about half hour later and got a vein on the first try, but this time on my left arm. Which I was happy about because I’m right handed.
I couldn’t sleep a wink that night--not that anyone can ever sleep in a hospital. The night shift was hooting and hollering and laughing about vampires because another man was admitted to the hospital with severe anemia. What on earth was going on? Seriously, vampires must be attacking! It’s the only reasonable explanation.
At 3:05 a.m. I got my first unit of blood. The nurse came in and said she had everyone and their brother double check the blood. It wasn’t expired; it was the correct blood type; we were ready to go. As she was hanging it up, she read the label and said, “Your donor is from St. Paul, Minnesota.”
And then all of a suddenly a revelation flooded through my brain: blood loss in Minnesota; it would be an isolated incident; the white coyote; the shepherd’s hook, except I realized it wasn’t a shepherd’s hook I was using in the dream, it was an IV pole! I was trying to beat the white coyote of anemia off with an IV pole! But the blood loss from Minnesota was voluntary. Someone donated their blood and it had MY NAME WRITTEN ON IT!
It all made sense now!
But what of the red fox? What exactly did that mean?
Well, I thought the elements of the night were quite odd. I had an occult test done, vampires were on the loose, it was October, I had a nurse named Todd. And Todd is a popular name to use in regards to death because the German word Tod means death. But what I didn’t know was that in American, the name Todd actually means. . . FOX!
And Todd tried to run an IV line three times; the fox tried to attack three times, but both Todd and the Fox were unsuccessful.
I received in total three units of blood, two of the units were from Minnesota, but the nurses never told me who donated the third unit. After the first two, my hemoglobin was up from 5.3 to 8.1. By 1:30 pm on the 10th the third unit was finished, but they waited to do a CBC until Wednesday morning at 6:00am. My hemoglobin had then raised to 9.3. And my potassium level that was 3.2 had increased to 3.6.
All the nurses marveled that I was even able to function with a blood count that low. How on earth was I able to walk in to the hospital, let alone clean an entire storage room or throw wood down cellar? In retrospect, I can tell now how anemic I was. I was getting horrible headaches every day; climbing stairs was a dreadful burden, especially when I was carrying my 14 pound cat up the stairs with me. That left me pretty exhausted and my legs hurting pretty bad. I was sitting down a lot and moving very slowly.
The doctor believes that this has been going on for a while--probably since January! And my hemoglobin has been in gradual decline. In January I had started to lose my appetite which is a symptom of anemia, but as it got worse I ate less and less, exacerbating the symptoms until finally I was only eating morsels. Mom and Dad knew I wasn’t eating much. I think it concerned them a little, but I wasn’t losing weight. Honestly, if I ate 1300 calories in a day I was probably doing pretty good.
But the worse my appetite got, the more obsessed with food I was becoming. When Dad and I would go clean another doctor’s office, I was practically a raccoon, diving into garbage cans at work, fishing for any salvageable food. Which I did, once, with a Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffin. It was delicious.
The rest of the time, I just snagged loafs of bread or danishes of the table or stole food out of the fridge, whether I wanted it or not. (In my defense, they throw the food away so it was more like pre-dumpster diving; taking food before it ended up in the dumpster. And I did have permission to take anything brought in by pharmaceutical reps) BUT, I was becoming obsessed, always looking for a scrap of food anywhere I could.
It was an interesting experience, and I can’t help but empathize with the poor people of Venezuela. The lack of proper nutrition and desperation for iron was starting to cause me to have psychological symptoms.
I’m glad, however, my employer noticed I didn’t look well. She had been keeping an eye on me for a few weeks, if not months, but on Monday she wasn’t going to let it go unsaid. If she didn’t say anything, I would not have gone for blood work! If I didn’t go for blood work they wouldn‘t have found me anemic. If they didn’t find me anemic, my parents probably would have found me unresponsive in bed or on the floor. I had no intentions of getting checked out and after months of fatigue I thought my tiredness was normal. I lost touch with reality.
But I’m on the upswing now. I’m suppose to take Iron and Vitamin C three times a day, and I went out and bought a bunch of healthy food and snacks. I didn’t have the same desperate urge to steal food when we went cleaning tonight. Well. . .I did ask if I could have a Tim-Bit with the hope the secretary would give me the whole box, which she did!
But for the most part, I think I’m doing better. Monday I follow up with my primary and on Friday I’m scheduled to have upper and lower scopes done. Joy.
It was quite an adventure, but one that I hope I never have to go through again. Mom, in a very threatening voice, said she’ll make sure that it never happens again.
In the dream a white coyote had killed my beloved black cat and was guarding his body. A red fox kept running up to the white coyote because it smelled my dead cat and wanted his corpse. The white coyote chased off the red fox twice. When I saw what was going on, realizing my cat was either in grave danger or already dead, I ran outside and confronted the white coyote. It lunged at me, but I grabbed a shepherd-hook like pole and began beating the white coyote off. The red fox then came up to me and I also used the shepherd’s hook on it.
I, however, successfully scared the wild animals away. When both coyote and fox were gone I ran up to my cat and found that he was indeed dead. However I saw no puncture wounds, but there was something wrong with his intestines. A white sheet was then wrapped around my beloved kitties body and I went inside, dazed, tormented, and cried over my loss.
I then woke up. It was Wednesday morning, October 4th. I rolled out of bed in search for my kitty; I found him sleeping on the seat of the Deutzfahr tractor. I brought him inside with me.
I couldn’t shake the dream, though. The Las Vegas shooting was fresh in my mind, and I felt like something else was about to happen; that my dream was symbolic. I told my family that there would be some type of blood shed in an ‘M’ state, like Minnesota or Michigan, but it felt more like Minnesota. I wondered if it would be a cop shooting a black man or vice-versa. It would be an isolated incident. It wouldn’t be 59 dead and 500 plus wounded it would only involve a few people. I knew that blood-shed would be involved, however. I just knew it.
But, despite checking the news, nothing was turning up that fit my premonitions or my dream. For me, life was going on like normal: I’d go and clean the doctor’s office every Wednesday and Saturday Night (or Sunday Morning, depending on work schedules); I would help dad throw wood into the cellar; I finished the mighty task of cleaning out the back storage room! I went to work Monday and got things prepped for my absence that Thursday.
While I was at work I learned about two patients Dr. _______ had seen in the hospital. The one was interesting: he was a truck driver and for the past few years had noticed he got dizzy on long drives. Well, this time he was out west and couldn’t drive back due to the dizziness. He called his sister and she drove out to where he was, picked him up, and brought him to the hospital where he was found to have a hemoglobin of 3.3!
As far as numbers go, normal hemoglobin for males should be between 14 and 18, and women should be 12 to 16. This man lost about over half his blood volume, probably closer to three-quarters! At the same time, Dr. ________ had another patient in the hospital with a hemoglobin of 6.
While my co-worker got things set up for these men to see hematologists, I went into the doctor’s back office and set a chart in front of her. The next patient was ready to be seen, and I was ready to grab the patient’s vitals whenever the doctor gave me the okay.
She looked up at me and, rather angrily, said, “You look anemic to me.”
It was very out of the blue. I just shrugged and said, “Um, probably.” I mean, she had been dealing with two very anemic gentlemen and I tend to run on the lower side due to the ulcerative colitis, so a hemoglobin of 10 or 11 would be no surprise to me.
“When was the last time you had blood work?”
“Uh, probably about two years ago.”
She shook her head.
I was suppose to get a yearly follow up appointment but my primary doctor’s office forgot to give it to me and I never scheduled another one. I was unhappy with my primary. He seemed preoccupied, like he wasn’t listening to me. I told this to my employer and she recommended another doctor, so I decided I would see him instead, but that would mean I’d have to make an appointment and wait in a waiting room for probably two hours. Ugh. . . . And the appointment could be down the road. IF I was anemic it would be better to know right away, and if it turned out I was at 10, even 9.5, I’d be referred to my employer anyway, because she is both my employer and my surgeon. (She diagnosed me with the ulcerative colitis, and after years of her knowing the family she hired me to work for her.)
So after all the patients were done, I went into her office and apologized for interrupting and if I could bug her for a moment. “Would you be willing to write me a script for the CBC?”
“Yeah, sure! I’ll just need your chart.” She was quite chipper about it, a surprising mood change from earlier when she was mad at me.
So she wrote a quick note in my chart and I wrote out my own CBC script and had her sign it.
“I’ll get it done tonight,” I told her and I was true to my word. I scurried to the hospital, got registered, made it to the lab within ten minutes to spare before they closed for the day.
Alright! That was done!
So I tell the story to Dad. It was so random, and the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in a while. “My coworker will probably call me tomorrow or later in the week with the results.”
It’s 8:30 pm or so when the telephone rings. I’m upstairs but I heard someone on the answering machine. I head down there and check the messages: “_____, It’s Dr. ____ when you get this message call me back!”
I immediately know my blood work came back with bad results, the doctor wouldn’t be calling me at home, this late at night otherwise. She left me no number though and I don’t have her home phone number with me at my house so I called the hospital.
“Yes, she just asked me for your number,” the receptionist said. She tried paging Dr._____ over head, nothing. She tried transferring me to her cell phone--nothing, she transferred me to her home phone and then she picked up.
“Your hemoglobin is 5!” she told me.
“OH!” And here I was expecting her to say 9. “Okay,” I said.
She spoke with Dr. P-- and his wife Dr. G-- who I decided I would switch to. They were concerned with a hemoglobin that low, although I’m young, I could still suffer a heart attack. They wanted me directly admitted.
Mom’s starting to flip out now, the way mothers always flip out. Dad’s all calm-like and says, “What was my hemoglobin when I got admitted? 4?”
Mom’s frazzled. I told mom, “You have to work tomorrow, just stay home, you can’t doing anything.”
Dad’s getting his jacket on and echoes what I say. “I can take her; it’s fine.”
Mom just stands there, deciding what to do, and I’m like, “Well, I got to get my stuff. Have your mind made up when I come back down.” I rush around and stuff clothes into my backpack. When I came back downstairs I found both my parents ready for me.
“I can’t just leave my baby. I don’t care if you’re twenty-five. I have to know what’s going on,” Mom said.
We get to the hospital and finally by 10:30 I was admitted and given a room. A private room, no less! Wasn’t I lucky? And who would have known that they’d give me the same exact room Dad was given twenty-four and half years ago. It was in that room my employer met me for the first time. I was only ten months old. Oh, and it was also a prisoner’s room--for federal criminals. The windows were specially reinforced windows; there was no Sharp’s container on the wall, the bathroom was separate, and even the light switch was outside the room.
Mom and Dad stayed with me for about an hour, but I told them there was no point in them staying longer. It’d be a while before anything was done and they had to work in the morning. Shortly after they left I was typed & crossed, meaning they checked my blood type. I was hooked up to telemetry. A nurse came up and asked me questions. A gentleman nurse, a supervisor named Todd, tried to run an IV. He harpooned me three times on my right arm, but couldn’t get any flow. He gave up, not wanting to waste any precious veins, and called someone from the emergency room to do it. She came up about half hour later and got a vein on the first try, but this time on my left arm. Which I was happy about because I’m right handed.
I couldn’t sleep a wink that night--not that anyone can ever sleep in a hospital. The night shift was hooting and hollering and laughing about vampires because another man was admitted to the hospital with severe anemia. What on earth was going on? Seriously, vampires must be attacking! It’s the only reasonable explanation.
At 3:05 a.m. I got my first unit of blood. The nurse came in and said she had everyone and their brother double check the blood. It wasn’t expired; it was the correct blood type; we were ready to go. As she was hanging it up, she read the label and said, “Your donor is from St. Paul, Minnesota.”
And then all of a suddenly a revelation flooded through my brain: blood loss in Minnesota; it would be an isolated incident; the white coyote; the shepherd’s hook, except I realized it wasn’t a shepherd’s hook I was using in the dream, it was an IV pole! I was trying to beat the white coyote of anemia off with an IV pole! But the blood loss from Minnesota was voluntary. Someone donated their blood and it had MY NAME WRITTEN ON IT!
It all made sense now!
But what of the red fox? What exactly did that mean?
Well, I thought the elements of the night were quite odd. I had an occult test done, vampires were on the loose, it was October, I had a nurse named Todd. And Todd is a popular name to use in regards to death because the German word Tod means death. But what I didn’t know was that in American, the name Todd actually means. . . FOX!
And Todd tried to run an IV line three times; the fox tried to attack three times, but both Todd and the Fox were unsuccessful.
I received in total three units of blood, two of the units were from Minnesota, but the nurses never told me who donated the third unit. After the first two, my hemoglobin was up from 5.3 to 8.1. By 1:30 pm on the 10th the third unit was finished, but they waited to do a CBC until Wednesday morning at 6:00am. My hemoglobin had then raised to 9.3. And my potassium level that was 3.2 had increased to 3.6.
All the nurses marveled that I was even able to function with a blood count that low. How on earth was I able to walk in to the hospital, let alone clean an entire storage room or throw wood down cellar? In retrospect, I can tell now how anemic I was. I was getting horrible headaches every day; climbing stairs was a dreadful burden, especially when I was carrying my 14 pound cat up the stairs with me. That left me pretty exhausted and my legs hurting pretty bad. I was sitting down a lot and moving very slowly.
The doctor believes that this has been going on for a while--probably since January! And my hemoglobin has been in gradual decline. In January I had started to lose my appetite which is a symptom of anemia, but as it got worse I ate less and less, exacerbating the symptoms until finally I was only eating morsels. Mom and Dad knew I wasn’t eating much. I think it concerned them a little, but I wasn’t losing weight. Honestly, if I ate 1300 calories in a day I was probably doing pretty good.
But the worse my appetite got, the more obsessed with food I was becoming. When Dad and I would go clean another doctor’s office, I was practically a raccoon, diving into garbage cans at work, fishing for any salvageable food. Which I did, once, with a Tim Horton’s chocolate chip muffin. It was delicious.
The rest of the time, I just snagged loafs of bread or danishes of the table or stole food out of the fridge, whether I wanted it or not. (In my defense, they throw the food away so it was more like pre-dumpster diving; taking food before it ended up in the dumpster. And I did have permission to take anything brought in by pharmaceutical reps) BUT, I was becoming obsessed, always looking for a scrap of food anywhere I could.
It was an interesting experience, and I can’t help but empathize with the poor people of Venezuela. The lack of proper nutrition and desperation for iron was starting to cause me to have psychological symptoms.
I’m glad, however, my employer noticed I didn’t look well. She had been keeping an eye on me for a few weeks, if not months, but on Monday she wasn’t going to let it go unsaid. If she didn’t say anything, I would not have gone for blood work! If I didn’t go for blood work they wouldn‘t have found me anemic. If they didn’t find me anemic, my parents probably would have found me unresponsive in bed or on the floor. I had no intentions of getting checked out and after months of fatigue I thought my tiredness was normal. I lost touch with reality.
But I’m on the upswing now. I’m suppose to take Iron and Vitamin C three times a day, and I went out and bought a bunch of healthy food and snacks. I didn’t have the same desperate urge to steal food when we went cleaning tonight. Well. . .I did ask if I could have a Tim-Bit with the hope the secretary would give me the whole box, which she did!
But for the most part, I think I’m doing better. Monday I follow up with my primary and on Friday I’m scheduled to have upper and lower scopes done. Joy.
It was quite an adventure, but one that I hope I never have to go through again. Mom, in a very threatening voice, said she’ll make sure that it never happens again.
