:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Thursday, May 29, 2003 ::

Well, I hadn't planned to, but I went to the doctor's yesterday. Odd for me, yet there you have it. They did a rapid strep test, which was positive. The throat thing comes and goes, and turns out I've had strep for months. You can see the swollen glands in my neck. "I don't even need to do a test," she said. "You have strep!" I told her to do the test anyway. "Why have you waited so long to come in?" What could I say? I told her I'm a procrastinator (which I'm absolutely not).

She left the room to get a shot of penicillin. I sat on the exam "bed" looking at the snake light with its little plastic showercap. This, I'm certain is used for getting a better view of someone's "cookie", as it's angled in the direction of the hide-away stirrups. Well, guess what. They're never hidden from me, and I burst into tears with my son there in the room. "What's wrong, Mommy?" he wanted to know. I told him I was sick and didn't feel good, and sometimes people cry when they're hurting. He understood that, and I shut up as quickly as I could. Internally, I wanted to claw a hole in the wall and escape to the outside. This trashy little "doc-in-a-box" clinic room could almost be a carbon copy of the room where they took my first child out in pieces.

They brought the shot in and said I'd have to wait 10 minutes to make sure I didn't go into anaphylactic shock. My birthdad will die if he gets penicillin, so I wondered what would happen. They shot me in the butt and left my child and I alone in the room for 10 minutes. I was disturbed that they would leave my child in there with me. What if something happened? What would that expose him to? If she had asked, I wouldn't have let her take him anyway. I just wished that someone would have stayed with us so that if anything went wrong it could be dealt with before a little one saw his mommy's eyes rolling in the back of her head while she gagged and foamed at the mouth.

But nothing happened and, having been treated, I left the clinic with my baby boy and little more than a dull ache in my back side. (I am always amazed that stupid ailments like strep throat are treated without question yet I had to claw my way to treatment I simply wasn't permitted to have when my first child's life was at stake.)

As I buckled my son into his seat, lurking there in the back of my mind was the knowledge and memory of an horrific visit to a sinister clinic that killed my child and ruined my life. All things medical now trigger disturbing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, particularly things like stirrups and other such gynecological accouterments.

"Why have you waited so long to come in?"

Well, what could I say?

SICLECell@hotmail.com

:: ashli 11:00 AM # ::
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