vampire

I read the news at work every day on msnbc.com, usually starting with the Entertainment section and ending in Health. The entertainment news is my favorite because celebrities are always up to crazy shit and the stuff they get caught doing never fails to amuse me. I’m not a jerk who gets off on the misery of others, it’s just that sometimes I get a little bored at work. I work for a pharmaceutical company. The most exciting thing to happen at my work in the last six months was the product recall on the buffers we use to standardize our pH meters.

The best week I’ve had at work in a long time was when Britney was going through her public breakdown. Every day was a present, from the paparazzi photos of Brit waving home pregnancy tests around in the air through a drug store window, to the videos of the poor girl being loaded into the back of an ambulance on her way to the psychiatric hospital (to have her fucking head examined because what kind of person in their right mind doesn’t understand that in order to kidnap your own children and get away with it, your hideout destination needs to be a little more clever than A BEDROOM IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HOUSE). 

And health. I force myself to read this stuff because how else am I going to find things to fret over? The medication I’m on gives me horrible nightmares and if I don’t feed my subconscious now and then with truly frightening things, then I will continue to have nightmares about losing my child and accidentally killing my husband and the new one where I’m traveling to New York, except I get on the wrong flight and end up in outer space completely unprepared. I’d much rather dream about real-life scary things like pharmaceuticals in my tap water.

And the other reason I’m a little obsessed with health news is because I am trying to keep an eye on the blood. Specifically any medical news that implicates blood transfusions in the spread of any new diseases. I don’t think it’s normal to be this concerned over something that shouldn’t really be too risky, but I’m a pessimist at heart and I bet all the people who received transfusions of HIV positive blood in the 80s were told the same things about risk that I was told in 2002. I have a sick feeling that at some point it will be discovered that certain cancers can be spread through blood or there will be a new virus with a brilliant incubation period like HIV that hasn’t broken out yet, and I just want to know right away.

Sitting here healthy and alive, I can boldly admit hating the fact that I’ve had a blood transfusion. Which is pretty stupid because when I’m honest, and force myself to remember how I felt lying in that bed in the hospital, suffering through what felt like the worst hangover of my life, and how much better I felt after only a few minutes into the transfusion, well, that is when I make a vow of vampire…ism…cy…?

What I mean is that if it ever came to that again, and I knew I’d feel better if only I could get a little more blood into my body, lock down the blood bank and guard your veins because it’s ON.