Blood and Dreams

Ladies and gents, I have survived the blood work. \o/

I always do, of course, but having to think about it, and this time fast for it, makes it something I dread. I suppose that being afraid of needles as a child made it difficult to handle them as an adult, even though I'm very good at thinking, "This is for my own good," and I've always had a skilled lab technician taking blood so that I don't feel it. The idea of the whole thing is what makes me light-headed. And considering how I had to wait for two hours at the clinic for my turn, and hadn't eaten a thing since seven o'clock the night before, I did rather well in there. No fainting at all.

My new doctor wanted to test me for a lot of routine things unrelated to the hirsutism as well, though I believe if a doctor wants to test for things like Cushing's syndrome and other thyroid issues (which can cause hirsutism, among other things) they can use glucose as an indicator and it would require fasting tests anyway. They had to take five darn vials from me! Still, I was so happy to finally have my number called that they could have taken as much as they wanted. I just wanted to get it over with. Mid-June was the soonest I could get an appointment to come in and discuss the results. So we shall see then.

What I thought was really strange was that the night before my blood tests, I actually had a dream about having hirsutism. I have never had such a dream that I can remember. Often I do have my excess body hair in my dreams which will prevent me from accomplishing something. For instance, when I'm anxious about an upcoming event, I'll often have one of my "bathroom dreams" which feature running through a labyrinth of public lavatories trying to find a stall I can use. But every available one will be clogged to overflowing, or have no door or walls, or not even be a toilet at all. The no-door-or-walls detail inparticular is a big difficulty for someone who would not only hate using a toilet in public, but is embarrassed by their body. Sometimes I find that men are using that washroom as well, which makes it worse. I always wake up before that dream can come to an end, thankfully.

And in other dreams, I've been obliged to seduce someone for the good of a cause, or have simply found myself overwhelmed by the charms of a stranger, and come to the point where he has every intention of removing my clothes. And that's when I remember: Oh yeah, I'm a fuzzball. And I'll put a hold on events with some weak excuse, and barricade myself in an ensuite loo to search frantically for something to remove my hair with. I'll scrape myself with someone else's hair trimmer, praying it works just enough, while the mood outside the washroom deflates into nothing.

How kind of my subconscious to be so anatomically correct.

But the night before I planned to go to the clinic for my tests I dreamed I was at a clinic for tests, but no clinic that I had ever seen. One of the bookshelves in the waiting area had at least two shelves full of books written by or about hirsute women, from purely technical and clinical to self help to autobiographies. After I had my blood test (which they had to take from my foot because apparently that's what you did in this dreamland when you had to take a lot of blood) I tried to hover casually around those shelves to commit as many of the books as I could to memory, without making it seem like that was what I was doing. I remember feeling very excited that there was so much out there for and about women with unique amounts of body hair, and optimistic that this clinic was a place that might specialize in hirsutism.

And as I was leaving, Bob Balaban (or rather, his character as it is in Gosford Park) looked up from his newspaper and began to follow me down the corridor, trying to make small talk. I wasn't sure if he had noticed me examining the hirsutism books closely so I was very evasive with him, until he invited me to a wedding and I had to stop and stare. I didn't know this man, and I couldn't figure out why he would do such a thing. He said his nephew was one of the groomsmen and didn't have a date (hey, this was a dream). This made slightly more sense to me for some reason, but then Bob Balaban said, "You'd get along well. He's a big hairy guy." I was ashamed and furious at being found out, and even more enraged that a complete stranger would approach me outside a clinic and try to set me up with someone on the assumption that we would hit it off because we might be considered unattractive by most people. And I remember winding up an arm to punch him or push him over, and then I woke up.

I wouldn't say the subconscious always makes an accurate reflection of the real world--I mean, adult blood tests from the foot? And shelves full of books on hirsuitism? So I'm not trying to share these dreams to make a point about society. But they must reveal something about living life as a woman with abnormal amounts of body hair. And I sure as heck found them entertaining after the fact. The things our brains come up with!