As some of you know, I'm participating in a clinical trial as a way of getting some much-needed money. The terms of my agreement with the company conducting the study are such that while I can share information about the study freely to friends and family, I cannot post any information about the study on the internet. Which is too bad, because it's actually really awesome and I love telling people about it.
What isn't awesome is getting stabbed with needles a whole lot.
Monday was the dosing day, so they took blood, which was fine, and then they tied to put an IV into my left forearm to dose the drug. The IV kept hitting a valve in my vein, and it seared and burned as the catheter kept hitting the walls. Then they gave that vein up and tried my left elbow, which worked, but also hurt.
Then we had to have two blood draws that afternoon, and I took the first of them in my left elbow, to try to spare my right as much as possible. That's what really fucked the vein up, which had already been abused by the IV. That created this bruise, which you see in this first picture that same day,
And then in this one, taken today. See how it's spread. It's totally badass now. I've had bigger bruises, but never any this red. It's from the vein bleeding into the surrounding tissue. It ached real bad the first day but now it's just cool to look at.
Then today, my poor right arm vein got sick of being poked, after being lanced for the third time in as many days, and so today the vein kept eluding the nurse, squirming out from under the needle, leaving me with this:
And so we had to go in through a vein in my right wrist, which smarted like the dickens. I won't have blood drawn again until Monday, so now my poor veins can heal up a bit.
Monday afternoon, I decided to eat dinner at Sushi Takahashi, as a treat for getting stabbed in a clinic for ten hours. Despite the "Open" sign being up, they weren't quite open when I came in, so I walked out onto the street to mozy for five minutes. As I walked toward Burnside there was a large, thickly-built drunk guy clutching an oversize budweiser can coming down the sidewalk at me. He had on dirty jeans, a dirty white undershirt, and a wrinkled striped shirt which was open and untucked. He wasn't muscular per se, but he had little fat on him, and yet his fingers were three times the width of mine.
As we neared each other, he seemed to stumble into my path, so I abruptly switched directions to make sure he had room to stumble past without collision. Then he made direct eye contact with me, narrowed his brows, smiled, then frowned, and walked directly up to my face.
He grabbed me by the collar and lifted me to his face, and demanded "You touch my shit? You touch my shit?!"
I really had my shit together as this was happening, and thank god I did, because it could have gotten really ugly if I'd done the wrong thing. This guy clearly wanted a fight.
I didn't show fear, and I didn't show agression. I gave him the most bored, uninterested look I could muster. I didn't say anything. I didn't move.
Just as I'd hoped, he was disgusted and disappointed, and not a little confused. He threw me to the side, muttering "get the fuckouttaher." His fist clipped my jaw as he tossed me aside, but it was clearly through clumsyness rather than intention. I walked away, not looking back. I had won. My strategy had worked, I'd kept my shit together when it counted, and I'd escaped a potentially violent situation unscathed.
The drunk asshole continued to hover in front of the restaurant, so I slipped around a corner and told the restaurant that a crazy drunk was in front of their place. Then I crossed the street to watch him get tasered and arrested, and he was gone! How disappointing. I wanted to see him try to punch out a cop and then writhe in the voltage. My sushi was good, though.
Here is the beginning of my post.
And here is the rest of it.
