Being freaked out as a child...

This is a strange picture to illustrate my point here, but it will all make sense as soon as I get a chance to explain. This picture was taken the first week in November 2007 after I had to get a ppd...or to the lame man (myself) another freaking TB skin test! Who am I kidding here. This super freaked me out that the doctor wanted me to take this test.

I went into the student health center just because I had some extra time. I was only taking an online class and it wasn't keeping me too awful busy. I had just left Jacob Lake. I had health insurance and I figured I might as well use it. Strange, i know. I hate doctors. (well all except for that one ER doctor who i met one time when i was little...his name was Dr. smiley! haha back to the story) Well when I was living in Virginia around 89 or so our whole family went in and did the routine get stuck to see if you have TB thing. Well apparently whatever the lingo may be....tested positive, had a positive reaction...I'm not sure. All I knew was that I was driving home with a little bump on my arm thinking I was super diseased. I can't really recall all of my parents conversation on the drive home but I do know that it left my horrified. I was thinking that I had no idea what Tuberculosis was but from the sound of it I was going to have to be taken away to some far away prison and locked up only to have people bring me my meals and slide them under the door! Seriously! I still have that awful vision in my head of having to be quarantined or something. But in reality what i really was now was faced with was being an 8 yr old that was required to take medicine everyday because of a stupid bump that showed up on my arm that I SWORE was just a mosquito bite...and I promised would go away. (and if you will take note of the picture it sure does look like a mosquito bite of mass sizes) It was torture for the next ohhh I'd say 8-9 months. I had to either take a cup full of this nasty tasting liquid medicine that i could barely stomach or a pill. Well the liquid was too much to handle. SOOO it was time for me to start to learn how to take a pill. Man alive! Why was that the hardest thing I ever had to do in my 8 yrs of living. I think it was a whole family affair. I'm pretty sure it started with gagging and ended in crying for at least a few good weeks. Then every once in awhile it would be crushed into a very very large glass of orange juice that I really hated the taste of all the sudden. Its kind of funny that I can remember as much as I do from this time in my life. I think we only lived in Virginia for a couple of years but I have so many memories of that place. So anyway, somehow I made it through those months of torture and remembered the doctors saying I was never supposed to take another skin test again. I would have an awful reaction to it. I was only supposed to do a chest x-ray to check up on the TB. Well so when I went in to the health center in November I was slightly freaked out and was having awful flashback of bad childhood memories of who knows what was going to happen if it took that dang test again. I had had enough trouble with it the first time I did it. AND well actually I just went in to the doctor asking for a chest x-ray because I knew I had never had it checked since the first time. I was actually thinking...man is this really the altitude doing crazy things with my lungs or do I have some kind of TB festering around in there. Well as it turns out...They did the skin test. it came out positive or whatever like i knew it would. The doctors thought I was scared about it being positive. I knew it would be, I just was wondering why I had to do it again when I told him I had already tested positive a long time ago. There was a HUGE bump on my arm for a couple months. kind of annoying. AND...then they gave me the x-ray. It was just the altitude of Rexburg that made me not able to breathe. Okay that and probably a little bit of being out of shape. But I had just spent 3 months previous to this time at a higher altitude (HELLO GRAND CANYON) and hadn't had as many problems. My body probably just hates me for moving from climate to climate so much. Ok so the real end to this story is that I never had to be quarantined. I faced my fear of doctors and shoot! now I work at a hospital. What am i thinking? Now its just nurses that I'm not so sure about :)