Written 1/30/11
We had a discussion today about how children often don’t understand what we mean by certain medical terms. You ask them, “Do you know what urine is?” and they reply, “The opposite of you’re out!”
So there’s a definite lack of knowledge that makes communicating with them difficult sometimes.
Our speaker told us a story today about a little girl, about age 9, who got sick out of nowhere and came to the hospital with her family. After running tests, they found out that she had a rare form of cancer and required a blood marrow donor.
Turns out, the only donor they could find was her five year old brother. So they took him aside and asked him,
“Can we take your blood to help save your sister?”
And the little boy thought about it for a while, before nodding and saying, “Ok.”
So they bring him in, put an IV in him and start taking his blood. After a few minutes, he starts to cry. The Nurse, worried, came over to him and asked,
“What’s wrong? Are you in pain.”
The little boy shook his head and said, “No.” But he kept crying, so the nurse asked again,
“Then what’s wrong?”
Instead of replying, the little boy asked, “How long is it going to take?”
The nurse was confused, asking, “How long will what take?”
And the younger brother clarified, “Until I die?”
…I might’ve gotten a little teary-eyed.
To think, not only that the child thought that they were asking for all of his blood but that he was still willing to do it for his sister…Gah, it makes me all gushy and I made the effort to tell everyone else I ran into for the rest of the day about it.
During our lunch break, I got together with the ladies of the group and we sat at a Chinese restaurant sharing our stories and histories over honey garlic chicken and subs from Publix. Turns out, I was one of two girls in the group that wasn’t married, engaged, and/or otherwise attached. One of the women had four children and looked about my age, which is crazy since I can’t even remotely entertain the idea of marriage until I’m at least 27.
It was a nice bonding experience, especially since I’m likely to see most of them in the following months for the rest of orientation.
Of course, the niceness of my last day of orientation was marred by the very end of orientation, when I walked over to the car and realized that the battery had died. Epic.Fail.
It wasn’t too horrible a situation, but I’d never had a car, let alone had a car that broke down on me so I pretty much stood around like a retard up until the Father finally came to get me in my Sister’s car. He jump-started the dead car and suggested I drive my Sister’s, which turned out to be pretty much out of gas, leading me to attempt to maneuver through dead-locked traffic and praying profusely that the car didn’t die on me in the process…
Flash-forward a few hours later and I was in Ricky’s house along with Clarice and two men I’ve known since middle school, Seth and Hunter*, the latter of whom was on Ricky’s computer, avidly changing his Facebook status and writing less-than-appropriate-but-still-hilarious comments on our friends’ pages. Seth, the avid gamer he is, actually got me a game that I’ve been dying to play since my mom got an Xbox. I threw myself onto him like a monkey slathered in superglue and thanked him profusely, later playing the game til 4:30 am once I finally got home. In the meantime, Clarice brought over two Hayao Miyazaki films and we subsequently watched them, starting with Laputa: Castle in the Sky which Ricky couldn’t get over since the literal translation of the name is “the bitch” in Spanish.
Now, I like the Miyazaki films I have seen (Kiki’s Delivery Service in particular I really enjoyed). But watching both Laputa and Spirited Away with Clarice, Hunter, Seth, and Ricky was a fantastic trip. There were perverse and hilarious comments on every other scene and, what was likely supposed to be great films on innocence and imagination and soapboxes about politics and environmental issues, was reduced to crack cartoon films that we laughed our asses off to.
Ricky got us popcorn, Seth managed to get Clarice to play a few rounds of Street Fighter while we cheered for him when we played against online players, and Hunter creepily stroked my hair in the same fashion we’ve laughed over since we were 12 and started our running gag of him being a creepy white man picking up an Asian child-slave. (Yes, I realize that idea is not completely PC, but…)
It was fantastic. A great way to end a long day and an even longer week…
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