$100 Gas Bill

So I've been skipping a day here and there of the blogging challenge because you know, sometimes life gets in the way and I told myself I wouldn't stress about blogging every single day if there were days when there just isn't time.

But so you don't miss out on any seconds of my ridiculous life, yesterday's prompt was easy: a moment from our day. Here is an Instagram photo from the other day of a picture Ian bought from one of our six-year old neighbors for a dollar. It's been sitting on our kitchen table for days and a part of me just feels like I can't throw it away:

But anyway, I knew today was going to be a day I had to play along, because we are telling our most embarrassing stories. Now you might find this hard to believe, but I have a lot of them. One involves my one and only trip to the ER.

It was a Saturday morning around this time last year. I had just gotten done with a series of college exams and was back at my parents house for the weekend to escape a football weekend on campus. My parents were both out and about, so I woke up and went downstairs to make myself some coffee. As I was making my coffee, I noticed a sharp pain in my stomach. Not just a little pain, but a BIG pain that got worse when I breathed in and out. Obviously, I panicked because I definitely had appendicitis. And when I panicked, I got all hot and flustered and lightheaded and pretty much assumed I would keel over at my parents house alone and no one would discover me until hours later when it was too late. So I did what anyone would do in that situation: call my mom.

Well, my mom was thirty minutes away in the next town over at a quilt shop, so she told me to call my dad. She asked if I thought I needed to go to the hospital, and I said "I don't know. But it really hurts." So I called my dad who, like me, panicked and said he would be right home. My sister, who was with him at a giant book sale, said after he got off the phone he said "Put down your books. We need to go home--Brenda's sick".

So by now everybody thinks I'm dying. My mom called our neighbor to come over and sit with me while I lay curled up on the couch waiting for my dad to get home. I couldn't even make small talk because the pain was so bad. What seemed like an eternity later, my dad came in and said "Let's go to the hospital". We got in the car, and on our way there, I noticed that the pain had started to let up a bit, and as my dad kept asking me if I really needed to go to the ER, in my head I was thinking "maybe not", but we were already practically there. And what if something really WAS wrong? So no, I definitely needed to go.

So we get to the hospital, make our way to the ER, and my mom joins us. We sat there and I said hello to some people I knew who were also there because they had partied a little too hard the night before (oh, college town living). We sat there and waited and waited and waited until I was finally called to go back and rate my pain for the nurse. At this point, I'm gonna be honest, it didn't hurt anymore and I kind of just wanted to go home. I told the nurse it was somewhere between a two and three on the pain scale, and I was immediately banished to the bottom of the list. They led me and my mom back to a bed and made me put on a robe while we waited hours for the doctor to tend to the people who were actually dying first before finally making his way to me. While we waited, I had to call and cancel lunch I had planned with a former teacher, and if calling and explaining that you were in the ER for no reason wasn't embarrassing enough, the doctor finally came back. I described my pain to him, and without any judgement or scorn in his voice gave me my diagnosis:

"Sounds like it might have just been a little gas."

I will never forget the look on my mom's face when he told me we had just sat in the ER all afternoon because I had gas. I'll also never forget the text I got when she got the "$100 Gas Bill" in the mail a week later.

Embarrassing. I do apologize that this is the second stomach-related post this week, but come on. It's just too good and embarrassing not to tell.

Happy Friday, and especially happy birthday to my beautiful mother, who stands by me even through trips to the ER and embarrassing fashion choices when I was old enough to know better.