So yeah,

I went to the hospital to visit my mom after she had surgery, not that she would be in the hospital long (just overnight after surgery earlier in the day), just because it’s nice to have visits since the hospital isn’t a fun place.

Well, after a few minutes in the room, I was in trouble. Not seriously, the air just felt heavy to me, I was feeling dizzy. I needed to get out of there so I excused myself. I, however, excused myself a few minutes too late. I managed to get out of the room and promptly passed out for a few seconds.

They moved me to the ambulance bay (basically the half step before being fully admitted) and did a quite blood sugar and blood pressure test (I had mentioned a lack of sleep and not eating anything all day as possible reasoning due to the last time I passed out was after not eating for 12 hours prior to giving blood for a blood test). Well, apparently my heart rate seemed low for someone who hasn’t actively done cardio activity (like hiking the mountains) for a couple/few months and they wanted to take a blood test to make sure there was no problem.

Well, the blood sample I would have been fine with, but they also gave me an IV to help hydrate me. An IV I wasn’t told I was getting. This prompted me, after getting it to have a mild panic attack. I wasn’t looking during the blood sample collection because I. HATE. NEEDLES. And that’s when they put it in. And I had that fucking thing in my arm for over an hour, maybe an hour and a half, while they blood work was run. I was unhappy about this.

Some history - I’ve always hated needles. I’ve been slowly getting better about getting shots and having blood drawn, but it’s a VERY rare occurrence that I do not actively seek out. I’m overdue for a tetnus shot for all the work I do with rusted metal in archaeology. IVs are worse though. Not only are they not over quickly, I had a really bad experience with one when I was young. When I was in 3rd grade (so I was 8 or 9 years old), I was hospitalized with pneumonia. Now, since I was in school and was going to be missing it for a good week, they asked me which arm I wrote with, maybe be able to do homework in the hospital. Being right handed, they checked the veins in my left arm/hand for use for the IV. Not great. Checked the right arm to see if it would be better. Yep. Okay, a third fucking stab to put it in. I was being held down at this point because I wasn’t having it.

Thinking about it after this trip, I’ve always had trouble looking at IVs and tubes and stuff related to a hospital stay since that. When someone, especially a kid, hates needles and you spend several minutes stabbing them when they already feel like shit from being ill for several days, you do not instill them with good memories.

I had forgotten most of this until getting the IV now. This is probably why I passed out in the hospital room, seeing my mom hooked up to stuff and getting sense memory of the smell and being in a hospital room and everything. It overwhelmed me.

Essentially, the nightmare of going into the hospital to visit someone and then getting poked with shit yourself was something I got to live and not only have to experience in a dream.

The plus side is that the blood work came back clear. So that’s good to know since I don’t regularly visit a doctor. My largest concern is any billing I’m going to get from this because I don’t have insurance. So yeah, the visit made the comic even later and didn’t help my feelings with hospitals. If anything, they brought back some ill feelings about them.