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lebateleur Mar. 11th, 2025 07:37 pm)
lebateleur Mar. 11th, 2025 07:37 pm)...my terrible, horrible, (mostly) no good, very bad Saturday. (CW for medical/injury things.)
We woke up Saturday morning to discover the cantaloupe we'd left on our counter to ripen had somehow gone from "hard as a rock" to "deflated like a punctured beach ball and leaking foamy cantaloupe slime all over everything" in the space of about seven hours.
Though we did not know it yet, this was the universe giving us A Sign Of Things To Come.
I cleaned up the mess, got coffee, and did some tidying in preparation for Sunday's PPV before deciding to walk to my dance class...
...only to discover upon arriving that dance class had been canceled while I was en route. Oh well, I said to myself, At least I got some exercise in. (The studio is a 3.5 mile walk from my place). I called the GC, who gamely agreed to shake a leg to the metro to meet me at a used book popup on the way home.
Even on foot I got there about 20 minutes ahead of him and kicked around in the grocery till he arrived. The popup had doubled its prices for everything, but even so, I found two Routledge grammars (Intermediate Chinese and Modern Greek) and walked out a happy human.
We checked out a new Indian place that had amazing thali (so much food) and then decided to walk the two-odd miles home. Little did we know that it would all be downhill from there. Halfway back, we were heading towards a crosswalk when the next thing I know this dog a woman was walking towards us suddenly had its front paws wrapped around my waist and its teeth in my thigh. It got me good, through a double layer of denim work jeans and thick athletic pants.
The woman kept saying she wasn't the owner and this was her first time walking this dog. (Or walking a dog, which is what the GC heard.) I was freaking out--I was shivering and my brain just kind of shut down--and I just wanted to GTFO of there. We went home and I slapped some antibiotic cream and bandages on the bite.
Then we did some last-minute prepping and got back on metro to go play Session 2 with Newest D&D Group. It was an absolute blast (more on this in another post). Post bathroom break I told the GC, "It's getting really ugly and swollen and really starting to hurt. I think I need to go to the doctor tomorrow."
"What's getting swollen and hurting?" asked one of the players. "Is everything okay?"
"No," I said, "It's fine. It's just the craziest thing happened to me this afternoon..."
This player, btw, is a registered nurse. "Oh no," she said, after I'd told her about my encounter with Aggro Dog. "You have to call your doctor right now. You need to go to the hospital and get a rabies shot."
Well. Let me tell you.
I HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED THE POSSIBILITY OF RABIES.
On an intellectual level, I knew that animals here have rabies and that it's transferred via animal bites. But I hadn't put "I got bit by an animal" with "Now I might have rabies" until fellow player connected the dots for me. But never fear, because my brain quickly made up for lost time. Cue the mental doom spiral ("I have rabies and I'll be dead by the end of the month. The GC will be so lonely. I always knew I was going to die eventually but I didn't think it would be so soon. I didn't even bother shouting at the dog that murdered me." Etc.) Intellectually, I knew I would probably be fine, but emotionally, that was kind of the last straw. All the fear and stress came bubbling up to the surface and it was not delightful.
So we wrapped up the session and set off for Emergency Care. A block before we get there a DCFD guy came charging down the sidewalk toward us yelling, "Have you seen him? Is he up there?"
Apparently, someone had been hit by a car and was lying in the street somewhere. I really, really hope that they were able to find this person and get them the help the needed, but on a wholly self-interested level I am so glad we had not stumbled across that on top of everything else.
We made it there in good time, while multiple ambulances blazed past us on the heels of the DCFD guy, but as turns out, Saturday evening is not the best time in the world to show up at emergency care. I therefore got to spend a lot of time sitting on a hard hospital bed without cell phone reception trying not to listen to the doctors on the other side of the curtain talking about massive uterine bleeding, clotting, and removing the remaining material while reflecting on the fact that I had really Not Been Living My Best Life that day. Given the even more serious stuff they were dealing with, it was about 11:50 by the time a doctor was able to actually give me the vaccine.
Btw: holy crap does that sucker hurt. It hurts with the incandescent pain of hitting your elbow against a hard surface, only for the entire length of time it takes to inject 7 mg of vaccine into both ends of an already painful wound. 0 stars, do not recommend. Then I had to sit and massage the golf ball-sized swellings containing the serum into my muscle. (My stomach churned for the first minute or so, then it was...actually kind of cool.) Then I had to get another shot in my shoulder. (Luckily that one was just a "Meh, it's a shot" level of discomfort.)
We finally got out of there after midnight and managed to navigate the eerily and unpredictably 90 percent closed station (Seriously, Metro, we had a hard time figuring out how to get onto the platform when most of the entrances are closed and there's no signage or anything to tell you where you need to go; what are out-of-town visitors who may not speak English supposed to do?) to get home on one of the last trains running.
We collapsed into bed after 1:00 am...
...only to be abruptly jolted awake at 6:40 am (which was, as far as our bodies concerned, actually 5:40 am because OF COURSE daylight savings time had to happen on top of everything else) by three helicopters flying low-altitude, static circles over our neighborhood until after 8:00 am. To add insult to injury, this had already happened Wednesday morning, from 3:00 am to at least 6:00 when I dragged myself off to work. (It was only one helicopter then, but it was flying low enough to rattle the stuff on our bedside tables.) So we were triply sleep-deprived at this point. But as we were not going to get back to sleep with the noise and as we had to clean ahead of the PPV that night, we got out of bed and powered through.
So, yeah. That Saturday was one for the ages.
これで以上です。
We woke up Saturday morning to discover the cantaloupe we'd left on our counter to ripen had somehow gone from "hard as a rock" to "deflated like a punctured beach ball and leaking foamy cantaloupe slime all over everything" in the space of about seven hours.
Though we did not know it yet, this was the universe giving us A Sign Of Things To Come.
I cleaned up the mess, got coffee, and did some tidying in preparation for Sunday's PPV before deciding to walk to my dance class...
...only to discover upon arriving that dance class had been canceled while I was en route. Oh well, I said to myself, At least I got some exercise in. (The studio is a 3.5 mile walk from my place). I called the GC, who gamely agreed to shake a leg to the metro to meet me at a used book popup on the way home.
Even on foot I got there about 20 minutes ahead of him and kicked around in the grocery till he arrived. The popup had doubled its prices for everything, but even so, I found two Routledge grammars (Intermediate Chinese and Modern Greek) and walked out a happy human.
We checked out a new Indian place that had amazing thali (so much food) and then decided to walk the two-odd miles home. Little did we know that it would all be downhill from there. Halfway back, we were heading towards a crosswalk when the next thing I know this dog a woman was walking towards us suddenly had its front paws wrapped around my waist and its teeth in my thigh. It got me good, through a double layer of denim work jeans and thick athletic pants.
The woman kept saying she wasn't the owner and this was her first time walking this dog. (Or walking a dog, which is what the GC heard.) I was freaking out--I was shivering and my brain just kind of shut down--and I just wanted to GTFO of there. We went home and I slapped some antibiotic cream and bandages on the bite.
Then we did some last-minute prepping and got back on metro to go play Session 2 with Newest D&D Group. It was an absolute blast (more on this in another post). Post bathroom break I told the GC, "It's getting really ugly and swollen and really starting to hurt. I think I need to go to the doctor tomorrow."
"What's getting swollen and hurting?" asked one of the players. "Is everything okay?"
"No," I said, "It's fine. It's just the craziest thing happened to me this afternoon..."
This player, btw, is a registered nurse. "Oh no," she said, after I'd told her about my encounter with Aggro Dog. "You have to call your doctor right now. You need to go to the hospital and get a rabies shot."
Well. Let me tell you.
I HAD NOT PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED THE POSSIBILITY OF RABIES.
On an intellectual level, I knew that animals here have rabies and that it's transferred via animal bites. But I hadn't put "I got bit by an animal" with "Now I might have rabies" until fellow player connected the dots for me. But never fear, because my brain quickly made up for lost time. Cue the mental doom spiral ("I have rabies and I'll be dead by the end of the month. The GC will be so lonely. I always knew I was going to die eventually but I didn't think it would be so soon. I didn't even bother shouting at the dog that murdered me." Etc.) Intellectually, I knew I would probably be fine, but emotionally, that was kind of the last straw. All the fear and stress came bubbling up to the surface and it was not delightful.
So we wrapped up the session and set off for Emergency Care. A block before we get there a DCFD guy came charging down the sidewalk toward us yelling, "Have you seen him? Is he up there?"
Apparently, someone had been hit by a car and was lying in the street somewhere. I really, really hope that they were able to find this person and get them the help the needed, but on a wholly self-interested level I am so glad we had not stumbled across that on top of everything else.
We made it there in good time, while multiple ambulances blazed past us on the heels of the DCFD guy, but as turns out, Saturday evening is not the best time in the world to show up at emergency care. I therefore got to spend a lot of time sitting on a hard hospital bed without cell phone reception trying not to listen to the doctors on the other side of the curtain talking about massive uterine bleeding, clotting, and removing the remaining material while reflecting on the fact that I had really Not Been Living My Best Life that day. Given the even more serious stuff they were dealing with, it was about 11:50 by the time a doctor was able to actually give me the vaccine.
Btw: holy crap does that sucker hurt. It hurts with the incandescent pain of hitting your elbow against a hard surface, only for the entire length of time it takes to inject 7 mg of vaccine into both ends of an already painful wound. 0 stars, do not recommend. Then I had to sit and massage the golf ball-sized swellings containing the serum into my muscle. (My stomach churned for the first minute or so, then it was...actually kind of cool.) Then I had to get another shot in my shoulder. (Luckily that one was just a "Meh, it's a shot" level of discomfort.)
We finally got out of there after midnight and managed to navigate the eerily and unpredictably 90 percent closed station (Seriously, Metro, we had a hard time figuring out how to get onto the platform when most of the entrances are closed and there's no signage or anything to tell you where you need to go; what are out-of-town visitors who may not speak English supposed to do?) to get home on one of the last trains running.
We collapsed into bed after 1:00 am...
...only to be abruptly jolted awake at 6:40 am (which was, as far as our bodies concerned, actually 5:40 am because OF COURSE daylight savings time had to happen on top of everything else) by three helicopters flying low-altitude, static circles over our neighborhood until after 8:00 am. To add insult to injury, this had already happened Wednesday morning, from 3:00 am to at least 6:00 when I dragged myself off to work. (It was only one helicopter then, but it was flying low enough to rattle the stuff on our bedside tables.) So we were triply sleep-deprived at this point. But as we were not going to get back to sleep with the noise and as we had to clean ahead of the PPV that night, we got out of bed and powered through.
So, yeah. That Saturday was one for the ages.
これで以上です。