The Epic Parking Garage Adventure

I am long overdue for a blog post, guys. I was trying to get some issues resolved with Bloglovin' before posting again, but obviously they're just going to ignore me, so I'm going to continue to post, and argue with them separately. It's stupid to let a few people riding the short bus bring down the blog. And boy do I have stories for you guys.

In the last post, I mentioned my mom and I had ourselves an adventure last Friday. Don't worry, I took notes, and now I am fully prepared to regal you with the entire story, all the details in between involved. Ready? Okay!

Last Friday was the day I made the trek to the headache doctor to see why I was getting those severe pains in the back of my head. The first two times they happened, I fully believe Melanie/Krissy was responsible for it, only because of the events surrounding what happened. When I started getting them constantly, and they started to feel just a little different, I knew she had triggered something else going on with my body by accident. I refrained from telling the doctor any of this. I thought not getting committed would be fancy.

Long story short, the doctor was able to deduce several of the medical problems I'm having to a very complex kind of migraine. They can cause anything from false seizures, to stroke like symptoms, to parts of the body becoming numb, to passing out spells, to never feeling like I have a clear head, and slurring of speech. For the first time, it seemed like someone had a possible answer for what was going on with me. He was also able to explain some of the really erratic, crazy symptoms I've had that no one else could, and nothing was clarifying itself in tests for said symptoms. He still believes I have autoimmune problems, but he thinks these headaches are a huge part of what is keeping me from being able to live my life. He feels this stems from a severe serotonin imbalance in my brain, although there is no accurate way to test for how much serotonin my brain is making since the body absorbs it so quickly.

The doctor was direct, confident, and informative. I learned long ago to not get my hopes up about anything, but I also don't dismiss anything either. I will try anything to get better. Imagine my surprise when he changed out some of my medications and I actually started to feel better. It's such a luxury, you guys. I've only been on them six days, but so far I've actually been able to think past my nose, feel awake, not slur words, and feel more like myself. I haven't felt like myself in a very long time. We'll see how they work in the long run, but I'm hoping and praying that this solves a large piece of my health puzzle, or at least enough to allow me to go back to work. Fingers crossed.

After the appointment we were doing what any other person in a hospital would do. We were trying to get the heck out. This is where the epic adventure begins. We got into the elevator, intent on going down two floors to phlebotomy to get my blood pulled. Upon getting in the elevator, we were greeted by an overzealous security guard, who was a little too excited about the Super Bowl. He got off on the next floor down. We were also on the elevator with a man who was afraid to go to the airport that day, because he had to fly somewhere and they were having a huge Super Bowl party at the airport. He was going to the garage.

For the record, Pittsburgh lost the Super Bowl and the public schools still let the little suckers have a two hour delay the following day, because the Super Bowl is apparently more important than education. It's like how the schools close here for the first day of hunting season, but I digress. Only in Pa.

We got off at our floor, leaving airport man behind, only to find that the phlebotomy lab was closed...in a hospital. Confused? We are, too. Because we had planned on using the restroom in the lab and there wasn't another one on that floor, we had to go back up to the floor we came from, go to the bathroom, and then head down to the garage. I know this doesn't seem like it's important, but it ate about seven minutes of our time, which will be important soon.

When we arrived in the garage, we couldn't figure out what it was that we were supposed to do with our parking ticket. In the other garages, we take our ticket to the gate and pay there. However, there was a machine for parking tickets inside the little room the elevators were in inside of the garage. Did we pay there? Did we go to the gate? Did we cry? We looked the machine over and it seemed to only want to take our regular parking ticket, and not the validation ticket we had gotten from the doctor's office. Add that this garage was shared with a hotel next door of whom didn't have validation tickets, and we were confused. We may or may not put too much thought into things.

While we were debating this, a man around one hundred and ninety years old came along with his family and proceeded to use the machine effortlessly. We watched him intently, realizing we were getting shown up with modern technology, by someone who could be our grandfather and great grandfather. It was awesome. He was the cutest old guy ever.

One hundred and ninety year old guy left and we approached the machine to flawlessly repeat his process. That's when my mom started to wonder if we couldn't do what he just did because his validation ticket was white and ours was yellow. I did what the old guy did anyway. It worked. For the record, the directions on the back of said validation ticket regarding how to validate your parking...they were wrong.

As we were leaving the little room with the elevators and ticket machine, the same man we had been in the elevator with who was afraid to go to the airport, came walking into the room. He then proceeded to ask us how to use the machine. Apparently he had spent the last twenty minutes wandering the parking garage for some help. As soon as we showed him how to use the machine, he looked at us and the tickets of which the machine spit back out at us, and asked us if if made a difference that our validation ticket was yellow and his was white. Yep, that happened.

We weren't done being stupid yet. When we went to leave, we couldn't figure out which machine to put our ticket in saying we paid, to lift the gate. There were three. One was for the hotel, one was the one we needed, and one was for something or another that we never figured out. As we're both focused on finding the right place to put the ticket, the security guard, the same overzealous one from the elevator, nicely pointed out that the gate was open.

The morals of the story.

* Old guys will always beat you with technology. Not literally, but he'll show you some of his mad skills.

*We fail at paying attention.

* We should watch our backs when we get in elevators. We haven't seen the last of our fellow elevator patrons.

From the hospital, we realized we were hungry, hungry hippo hungry (bonus points to whomever knows what show that line is from), and went to get something to eat. During lunch, a family of three came in that made us nebby and curious. The bride seemed to be a mail order bride, which I have nothing against, as long as the women are being treated right. Either way, this got us talking about how average the guy was and how gorgeous the girl is. My mom decided we should buy us some mail order husbands. I think I'll pass. Do they even have those?

My mom was back and forth over what she wanted to order. The one thing she really wanted had mushrooms. She hates the look of mushrooms, but if she accidentally eats one she doesn't mind the taste. I told her to get it without mushrooms. She proceeded to tell me one always slips in there. Conspiracy theory.

Yesterday, we spent an entire shift, as the staff would put it, in the store buying my mom new clothes. She happened to try something on a hoodie and then proceeded to say, and I quote, "It just adds to the humongous." I told her I was going to draw a hippo wearing a hoodie with that caption, however, I find that even my advanced drawing skills are unable to tackle that one. If anyone wants to go right on ahead and draw that and then share, I won't object. My mom is waiting to laugh at it.

There are certain days where you just get awarded for a good deed. Yesterday, I was my mom's clothes hauling and opinion bitch. Today, I got it back tenfold in the form of irony on The Price Is Right. I don't usually watch this show, but I was glad I caught it today, because the big guy in the sky knew my sense of humor and the show just played on that.

First there was a lady called down whose last name was couch. I don't have the maturity for last names that are also things. My real last name is Byrd and I don't have the maturity for it, either, so I think that's fair. The first thing I said to my mom when she was called down was that I hoped she made it onstage and got to play for a couch. One person later, she made it onstage. Her prize? A couch. She didn't win, but that really didn't matter at this point. I was in love with the irony.

A few people later, all four possible contestants were bidding on a line of skin care products, bath gels, and otherwise girlie stuff. I told my mom I would fight the flaming gay guy for the skin care products when he won them. He won them. He was far too excited about this. It was great. Forget a game show, this sucker was a comedy.

One last thing that has nothing to do with anything else, I'm sincerely disappointed in Lifetime TV. An interview on AOL revealed that the network never asked permission of the parents of the victim to write about their daughter's murder prior to making a movie about it. They didn't even know it was being made until commercials started rolling, revealing the story of her murder. Also, the network never retrieved permission from the alleged murderer to do the story about her either. How low do you have to be to do something like this; to write a movie about people without asking their permission? To dredge up the last moments of someone's death and splash it across the screen for the world to see, making a family mourn all over again. Both parties are seeking legal action against Lifetime, so for that reason I won't bring up what movie it is. Google "American student murders roommate in Italy."