Why I Don't Like Mondays

Sunday nights are always sleepless for me. Monday mornings loom over me like menacing specters, dark and threatening. I hate Mondays... mostly. They generally end well, but they always begin with misery.

Today we had the "puff test," which tells the folks at the lab how much air I'm moving around. It generally ends with a woman in scrubs glaring at me over the top rim of her half-lens glasses as if I have conspired to breath inappropriately. We all call her Nurse Wratchet behind her back.

Next comes blood samples. If my favorite phlebotomist, Kabje, is working, this is a piece of cake. Sometimes they call Ahmed in... he's not a phlebotomist, but he knows every inch of me well enough to find one good vein that will sit still. I am on drugs, currently, to improve the poor quality of my veins, which have become brittle and don't work very well. They are tiny, move, and piss people at the lab off. More glares or looks of patient annoyance usually ensue. Hey, if I could do something to stop you from making me look like a heroin addict in the last stages of life I would.

Today was extra fun. MRI... which I can now fit into since I lost so much weight but for some reason the people who do MRIs like to speculate loudly about whether or not anyone over a size 18 will fit into the machine. They know I will, but somehow it empowers them to say, in a bad imitation of a whisper, "well at least you don't have to curl in on yourself anymore, that was a nightmare before you lost weight." Just in case, you know, there are any people left who weren't in on my size.

Cool.

Then it's an IV of drugs that make me sick, tired, and achey. Drugs the NEJM are speculating to be of little use, but the newer treatments showing promise are not available to us yet, so we suck it up. We're given the option of a nap in a dark room afterward.

Me, I came here in stead. My refuge, my reward for good (okay, semi-good) behavior in the face of ickyness, my one Monday solace: the Barnes and Noble cafe. I have, before me, my laptop, my Venti iced Quad Latte and grilled Asiago Cheese Pretzel. I have Sherilynn Kenyon's new hardcover. I have two geek magazines with free DVDs containing "loads of extras," and I have quiet. I have my work, the trilogy of novels that is finally-- FINALLY-- looking like it will have the life I dreamed for it. I have Ahmed showing up in an hour or two with my new prescriptions. He always starts out aggravating me with bossiness on Mondays, but always finishes with kindness.

Which is why, in the end (literally), I keep getting up and embracing my Mondays. I hate them in the terrified, tired, fed up moments before they begin. I suffer through the bad bits. But thanks to my man and my baristas, and my laptop... well it all turns out okay in the end.

And you just have to love a happy ending, even if there's no promise of "ever after." We take what we can and ride out the rest.