WARNING:  Only read on if you don’t mind reading about blood, and have a great deal of time - it’s a book.

You know something is drastically wrong with the world when the highlight of my day is work.

I posted earlier about my skin biopsy (a shave biopsy to be exact) and how it was having some bleeding issues.  I made it through most of the night at work until it was about a half hour before it was time for me to leave.  I felt something dripping down my back again.  My heart sank.  Sure enough, I reached around and my hand was just covered in blood.  Covered.  In.  Blood.  And yes, I’m sitting at my desk at the time.  I grab some Kleenex and wipe my hand off and shove a bunch on my back beneath my shirt and hightail it to the bathroom.  What’s sad to me is that during this fiasco, while worrying that I was bleeding to death, I still found time to worry about trying to hold my shirt down as far as possible in order to not end up showing the entire cleaning staff all of my rolls.  Such is the life of the overweight girl.

I get to the bathroom and remove the Kleenex which is, you guessed it, soaked.  I grab paper towels and wipe at my back as much as possible.  And, of course, as soon as I enter the bathroom, a cleaning lady follows me in for a while.  It doesn’t matter that I’m hemorrhaging, I’m still not going to take my shirt off in a public bathroom.  Plus, I only had small bandages left to cover it, and those just weren’t going to cut it anyway.  I wiped it down as much as possible from what I could reach and wadded up a bunch of paper towels and held it to my back, hoping that while I couldn’t really reach to apply pressure to the location of the biopsy, that at least I could keep it from dripping down and ruining my favorite pair of pants.  I head to the room just a few steps down the hall and call my mom to figure out what the hell I should do.  It’s interesting how at times like these we still want our mommies.  Or, at least I do.  She’s a trooper, though.  She had just fallen asleep and has to be up at 4am in the morning.

I go back to my office, close up shop as fast as I can, leaving much of it in a state of disarray and holler to my co-worker that my back is bleeding and I needed to go and high-tailed it out of there.  She probably only saw a blur.

I held the paper towels to my back for as long as I could, until my arm cramped up, and then stuck the edge of them underneath the band of my bra.  And prayed.  Somehow I made it home, but when I did and we were able to get a look at what was going on, my mom and I decided it would be best to go to the ER.

The hell that the ER is, I have to say that that was probably the quickest trip I’ve ever had there.  When I’ve taken my parents, we usually wait for about 3, 4, 5, 6 hours just to get taken back.  Luckily, there were only 3 people ahead of me tonight, and I was taken back within 20 minutes.

And that’s where your fearless writer, yours truly, bawled like a baby.  Okay, I did a lot of crying tonight (beginning at work), but you haven’t experienced anything until you’ve experienced the pain of having a wound cauterized.  Oh Holy Mother of God, I thought I was going to scream.  He kept asking me if I was okay, and all I could do is sniff and shake a bit and give a tiny little nod (but what a whopper of a lie).  He was sweet, and apologized several times, but it sure didn’t make it feel any better.  I guess it did the trick, though.  We’ll see.

After doing the cauterizing (God how I hate that word), they let it sit for about 10-15 minutes just to make sure it had stopped the bleeding and luckily it appeared to have succeeded.  I have to say that I have severe empathy for the cowboys in those old westerns who had to have their wounds cauterized.  And how the hell they did it themselves I’ll never know.  Such is the power of Hollywood.

I’m still in a lot of pain and while I’m exhausted (2 hours of sleep last night), I don’t see me getting much more tonight.  Hopefully a bit.  Of course, the wound is both on my dominant side and on the side I normally sleep.  <sigh>  I also have to be up early to call a couple of doctors and beg my dermatologist (who it normally takes months to see) to squeeze me in on Thursday.  Did I mention that after they made sure that it had stopped bleeding, they put the mother of all compression packings on it?  I have to leave it on for 48 hours which is going to make bathing interesting, but then it got that much worse when I got home and looked in the mirror and realized that I now look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Oh, and did I also mention that as soon as I got home, I went into the bathroom and immediately, within seconds of each other, both bathroom light bulbs burned out?  Yup.  As I’ve said before, sometimes I think God is just messing with me.

Right now, I’m so tired and in so much pain that I just don’t give a shit.  I was dropping stuff right and left all over the place and just leaving it.  If you saw my house right now, you’d think heathens live here.  Okay, it’s probably not much different than any normal day.

It’s a little crazy, but it’s moments like these that I really miss my brother.  We were always such a close family, and while we did drive each other nuts, we were always there for each other when it really mattered.  Shortly after he died, my mom and I were talking about him and all of a sudden, we started seeing bunnies and rabbits everywhere!  They were all over the place; it was crazy.  So, she and I have played this little game that when we see a bunny, it’s him thinking about us or him trying to show us that he’s here with us.  When we walked out of the ER, you guessed it, bunnies galore!  They were everywhere!

Okay, this has obviously gotten too long and has been expanded into way too much detail, but now that I have it off of my chest, maybe I can actually get some rest.  (And try not to think too much about how much this visit is going to cost me financially.)

I hope you’re happy, healthy, and at peace wherever in the world you may be.