What’s belonephobia? It’s the fear of needles and sharp objects. I’ll explain later.

Yesterday, I finally dragged myself to the student health center to get some asthma meds. Not being able to breathe’s been downer for the past few days. I had a 9 a.m. appointment, so I arrived at 8:45 a.m. However, they didn’t call my name until 9:30.

I never thought that I’d miss the giant bureaucracy of the the Big Orange Screw, but it was efficient, and you could anticipate it. Sure, it took forever to get UT to do anything and there were miles of red tape, but the established procedures worked. AU seems to be the opposite. They’re completely disorganized and inefficient. Thus far, the student health center seems to be the epitome of inefficiency.

When the doctor finally saw me and realized that I’ve been operating under decreased lung functions for a while, she was rather angry that the front desk didn’t send me back immediately. She wanted to stop and administer a breathing treatment, but I told her that I had a nebulizer at home and would rather wait to do one.

For those of you lucky enough to not have impaired lungs, a nebulizer or breathing treatment mixes liquid dose of a bronchiodialator (emergency inhaler) with oxygen, and you have to sit there for about thirty minutes breathing in the medicine. It’s a hookah for liquefied steroids.

Knowing that I had to walk home, I insisted that I wait to do a breathing treatment. Asthma drugs are extremely potent and a couple of puffs of my inhaler makes me loopy, so a breathing treatment is the equivalent of downing five or six apple shots. (That’s for you, Mrs. M.)

I finally got some scripts for the drugs that I needed and wanted to hightail it home for my date with the asthma hookah, but the front desk reminded me of a little hold on my account.

The socialist utopia known as the District of Columbia, requires that all students under the age of 26 show proof of their immunizations. It was a pain to find copies of my immunizations and, then I found out that I lacked two–tetanus and hepatitis B.

Since registration is coming up soon, I decided to stop resisting and get the shots. That’s where the belonephobia came in.

There aren’t that many things that scare me. I admit to screaming like a little girl when I run across mice and roaches, but two things absolutely terrify me on earth–needles and the sight of blood. Just writing those words makes me sick to my stomach.

There are several colorful accounts of my experiences with needles and blood, and I post that Lost-worthy backstory. They honestly are traumatic. For example, that few times I’ve attempted to give blood, I’ve passed out on the table before they ever inserted the needle. Seeing the bags of other people’s blood made me ill. Watching Grey’s Anatomy makes me nauseous, and Discovery Health is blocked from my cable line up.

At this point, the Health Center’s ineffienciency reached a new high point. AU can’t just administer the shots. You have to sit down with an immunization coordinator and discuss your records before they put you on the waiting list to actually get the stupid things.

Since I’d already been there for two hours, I used my wheezing to my advantage and got moved up in the queue for the shot consultation. Otherwise, it would have been another hour of waiting to go through the first hoop.

The immunization guru was pissed that I was put ahead in line and was rude. Then he couldn’t find my records, which made me mad. He finally located them and told me what I already knew, what Mom from the South had told me and what my primary doctor at home had written down, I needed tetanus and hepatitis B.

Now I did need the tetanus shot. My last one was in 1999 during my senior year at Berean when I slashed the knuckles of my right hand open on a metal door and had to get stiches. (Several of you are laughing at that memory. Should I post that story?) However, the Hep B vaccine was debatable.

Since I have no plans for getting a tatoo, sharing needles for illegal drugs or engaging in high-risk sexual activities, I have a zero chance of getting Hepatitis B. Tommy Lee has hepatitis B. Does my life in any way resemble that of Tommy Lee’s? Hence my objection of getting a Hepatitis B shot.

The District of Columbia apparently overrides my objections.

Then, I discovered that Hepatitis B isn’t just one shot like tetanus, MMR, polio or anything else. It’s a series of THREE boosters taken over several months.

Each shot is $65.

The expensive health insurance policy that AU requires you to buy? It doesn’t cover the boosters.

$200 bucks to prevent a disease that I have no chance of getting! There go the new boots that I’ve been eyeing this season.

It seems that my miserly attitude towards money is stronger than my belonephobia because I marched back in to the waiting room and literally fumed until the nurse called me for my shots.

I was still angry when she pushed back my sleeve on my left arm and administered the tetanus shot.

I was still angry when I realized that I’m left-handed and needed to get the shot in my right arm.

I cooled off when I glanced at the table and saw the huge syringe holding the Hepatitis B vaccine.

That’s when my stomach started doing somersaults, and I fell foward in the chair with my head between my knees.

Apparently, you have to be sitting up to get shots, and the nurse wasn’t very kind about it. She pushed me back up, told me to sit still and advised me to start breathing again in order to relax.

I just sat there envisioning dollar figures in my mind and the really cute knee-high black boots that I’ve been coveting. An eternity later, she reached for a band-aid and let me go.

The nice thing to know is that the Health Center told me to come back in on October 29 to get my second booster. Happy Birthday to me.

Oh, and I should be able to do relief work in Africa easily now. Good to know that the state of public health in DC is similar to that of Africa.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Gamma Sig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.