Puff Fish and Needle Laughs

I haven’t been feeling too great for the past week and half. I finally started feeling better this afternoon and am hoping I continue to feel better. Last night was the first night I didn’t have a fever over 100 in about a week and half. I did go to the doctor last Thursday and got some antibiotics. Those antibiotics made me puff up like a puff fish (which btw, I think would be cool to own one…just not as cool to look like one) so I stopped taking them over the weekend.

I live in an area that is amazing about providing sign language interpreter and my family doctor actually refuses to see me without an interpreter present. Anyhoo….I had to have some blood work done. So, I went to the other room and sat down and waited for the nurse to jab me so she could get 3 tubes of my precious blood. I could tell that this nurse wasn’t used to interacting with deaf patients. She just didn’t seem comfortable and seemed unsure (c’mon, us deaf people aren’t THAT scary……).

I was trying to distract myself by reading the comics on the walls until I realized the nurse wanted my attention. I then looked at her and was expecting her to say something. Instead, she just stared at me with this cheesy grin and waved at me literally 6-10 inches away from my face…exactly the way adults wave at babies while saying “hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” with a really high pitched voice. She said nothing else to me the whole time I was there.

Sometimes moments like these rub me the wrong way and sometimes they just crack me up. I almost found myself in a laughter fit while sitting there but I was able to gather myself. I smiled back and looked at the interpreter….I let a giggle or two slip. The nurse then turned around and did the exact same thing to the interpreter. The interpreter and I had to avoid making eye contact the rest of the time we were in that room otherwise we would have started laughing. Trust me, you do not want to in the middle of a laughing fit when you’re about to be stabbed with a needle.

We weren’t laughing at her per sec but more at….the random stuff I get as a deaf person from people who are so unsure how to act around deaf people. You just never know when it will arise and how it will arise. Half the time it just catches me completely off guard.

Now I know how babies feel when adults wave to them like that. I would like to apologize to all the babies in the world I’ve waved to like that. 😉

Btw, my friends signed a Get Well card for me! That sure put a smile on my face!! 🙂