Smelling Salts and Spiders

I was doing a lot more inprocessing today at Eglin, since I'm now permanent party, and I had the WEIRDEST experience ever at the lab.  I've always been a wimp when it comes to needles...I can stick other people all day long with needles to draw blood, start IVs, give shots, whatever, but you CANNOT come at ME with a needle.  Noooooo way.  So when I went to the lab I knew I was in trouble when they needed FOUR tubes of blood from me.  FOUR.  Talk about a nightmare.  So of course I closed my eyes and when they stuck me, I got my typical hot flash and started getting woozy.  No big....just breathe, just breathe.  But the kid didn't know what he was doing and every time he popped another tube on that needle it jammed farther into my arm and it hurt.  Finally when he was all done and wrapped me up I put pressure on the site while he labeled tubes, and then all of a sudden the wave of nausea hit me.  I tried coughing to bring my blood pressure back up like they taught me last time, but I knew it wasn't working.  I told the tech that I felt like I was going to get sick, and he took one look at me and I must have been like a ghost, because he immediately called over the "sick chair" and four people rushed at me at once and all held me.  I closed my eyes to make the weird feeling in my head stop, and then all of a sudden I see a hand with a little white tube in front of my face, and SNAP.....the worst smell in my life!!  I started coughing and wrenched away from it because I knew what it was--it was smelling salts.  I've never actually experienced them up until then, and they are freaking gross.  The smell stayed in my nose for the next thirty minutes, and it made my eyes and nose buuurrrnnnn!!  The techs thought it was pretty funny how quickly I reacted though, so at least they got a little laugh out of it.


I hate getting blood drawn.




On a cooler note, we have a banana spider in our backyard. :)  He lives in our orange tree.  He's pretty dang cool, and he's eaten quite a few bugs for us.