Time for another installment of this Wednesday/Sunday night series!
Picking up from last time –
I wore a dress to Big Kidney Day, complete with a belt and a little half sweater thing (aka an outfit totally inconvenient to get in and out of with multiple layers, plus a buckle, and a back zipper, and all that jazz).
I wanted to look oh so normal and whatever. (Since the psychologist had specifically mentioned my outfit in my 1st attempt at OSU, I wanted to make sure nothing so simple worked against me this time.)
The first thing up for the day was a chest x-ray.
(A fasting blood draw would’ve been first. But I’d saved myself a precious morning half hour by getting the blood draw when I turned in my 24-hour urine collection over a weekend. So, I got to start at 8:30am instead of 8am. Awwww, yeah! What a nice little treat. (Though since I wasn’t really sleeping well, that didn’t matter quite as much as it usually would have. Still nice, though!))
As I got ready for the x-ray, and was taking off the belt on my dress, I was quietly feeling resentful that I felt so pressured into dressing up for this day. I also felt like a complete and total fool, because who wears a dress with various parts to this kind of day at a hospital? I feel like instead of saying, “I’m put together,” it more said, “I don’t understand what various occasions call for. I should be in jeans and a t-shirt right now. But no, I’m overdoing it.”
And maybe I was overdoing it. Just because the psychologist at OSU said it was abnormal to wear pajamas, she didn’t say I couldn’t have kept it casual. Maybe jeans were the way to go. Oh well. The dress was fine. Everything was fine. We all lived to see another day.
My chest x-ray was just a normal x-ray run by some more nice people. “Take a deep breath. And hold it. Turn this way. Turn that way.” etc.
It was over before you knew it, and then it was on to the coordinator education session.
The packets that had been mailed to us included bus options on how to get over to the education session. However, it was less than a mile away. So I just enjoyed a lovely walk.
In fact, that was the only feedback I gave when they asked us to fill out a form on how to make that part of the day better. I said I’d like it if the default instructions said to walk, but that if you needed a bus you could take this one – instead of just saying, “take this bus.”
It’s a small thing. And everybody got there. And we’re grown-ups, completely capable of looking up how to get places. Still, they really wanted to know any ways in which they could improve. And I thought that small one might be nice – to always encourage the option that helps us get more steps in our day.
And this is where I’ll pick up next time.