So I'm home on break but before that, I had the worst days at school that I felt I just had to share.


The Wednesday before finals, on the 10th, I had a slight fever starting from late evening. By slight, I mean 99.6. Now, that sounds like nothing except that I had already taken 2 aspirins earlier for the splitting headache I had. And if you know anything about aspirin, it's supposed to block pain and reduce fever.

I would've skipped my class in the morning in favor of nursing my sick body back to health, but unfortunately, the only class we had that morning was mandatory. As in, they took attendance. AND I had to be in business casual and my white coat for the class. So in the morning, I checked my temperature again and it seemed fine. I forgot my hat as I was running out so the walk was really, really, really cold. Something like -2 with the windchill. Not pleasant for my ears.

As I get situated into my seat, I notice that my hands were tingling and going numb, and I felt kinda nauseous. I figured it'd go away after a while and tried to pay attention to the lecture, which was actually quite interesting. Then, the tingling sensation spread up to my head and down to my stomach and then legs. I started getting dizzy and my field of vision kinda started to darken. I could no longer control my fingers, which made note-taking quite an ordeal.

Have you guys ever gotten up really, really fast after lying down for a while and kinda black-out a little from the blood rushing out so suddenly? That's how I felt, except I was sitting and the time was extended from a few seconds to 45 minutes. It was the scariest 45 minutes of my life. After that feeling started disappearing, the nausea came back. I threw up into a garbage can right outside my lecture hall and barely got to the bathroom in time to throw up again. By the time I came out, the lecture was over and everyone was exiting the lecture hall.

I went back to my place and took a nap 'cause I had my mentor meeting that afternoon from 1:00-5:00. When I woke up, I felt much better and still had no fever. I thought I was good to go.

No. No such luck.

As soon as we entered the first patient room, I started getting that tingling feeling again all over my body. My vision started to black out again. I could barely stand so I started leaning on the counter. After a minute or so, my vision disappeared completely and I started losing my balance. The next thing I know, my mentor's asking me if I'm okay and I remember shaking my head. She guided me to the patient examination bed, and my body kinda just followed automatically, and she told me to lay down for a while. So embarrassing. Blacking out in front of my mentor AND a patient.

I spent the rest of what should have been a learning/shadowing experience taking up a patient room and having my mentor's assistant take care of my. She took my temperature, BP and blood glucose levels, pumped me full of orange juice and then sent me home. I suck at life.

On Friday, a bunch of us friends had a Christmas/Pre-finals potluck. There were a lot of delicious foods but I could only eat a little 'cause for some reason, my stomach felt really weird. Later on, I threw up everything again and could only keep down some water and sparkling grape juice, and only barely. I basically didn't eat anything more for the rest of the weekend because of these ordeals.

Did I mention this was right before finals? Some of the worst few days of my life.

On a completely different note: thanks to Sakurai Sho (of Arashi), I am now completely obsessed with the song "Nobody" by Wonder Girls (the Korean pop group).