A Very Brady Rant

I had to get blood drawn for labs. I went to the hospital at 9:30 one weekday morning. My thought was that it shouldn’t be all that busy at that time. I mean, people work, right?

Apparently not around here, they don’t because that hospital was crawling with people. Okay, so the people weren’t actually crawling but they were everywhere.

One dude in particular was especially antsy about the wait.

After I’d checked in with the receptionists and got my pager for registration, I sat down to wait.

This dude was sitting in a chair about ten feet from my little couch. His chair faced the registration doors. My couch faced him and the television that was mounted above and to his left.

The television was tuned to HGTV and they were showing episodes of A Very Brady Renovation. Yay! Except freaking Marcia Brady kept crying every time a new room was revealed. Chill the fuck out, Marcia!

This dude, though, damn he was irritating. He sat slumped in his chair for a few minutes, then he’d sit up straight and look at his beeper. Then he’d stand up and stretch, which always let to him clutching his right shoulder.

I was about to ask him if maybe he should be in line in the emergency room when he’d sit back down again, glance around to see if anyone was looking at him and then grumble under his breath.

I wanted to tell him to relax, watch a bit of A Very Brady Renovation and stop fidgeting. Obviously all the fidgeting was bothering his stupid right shoulder.

What was most irritating for me was that I had to look past him to watch A Very Brady Renovation, which meant that every time he looked my way, I knew it. I was never actually looking at him, because, duh, A Very Brady Renovation was on, why would I look anywhere else? But I knew he was looking and it was creepy as hell.

Thank Pete, (not Pete Brady, who used to be my favorite Brady brother until I watched Christopher Knight on his stupid reality TV show where he married America’s Next Top Model season cycle 1 winner Adrienne Curry. I think the show was called My Fair Brady, which, can we all agree is a REALLY stupid title for a REALLY stupid show? I only watched a partial episode on the Youtubes once but during that episode Chris was a raging dick to Adrienne and that made me detest him. And now, damn it, I guess I have to pick stupid Greg as my favorite Brady brother even though I can barely stand him because Bobby aka Mike Lookinland is just gross. That dude has NOT aged well at all. Oh, and by the way, Cindy Brady? The eighties called and they want their hair back.)

Ahem, where was I?

Oh yes, thank Pete that fidgety, creepy dude was called before I was and he left my line of vision. I was able to watch Marcia cry a few more times before my beeper went off and I got to go back and have a needle stuck in my arm. Good times; takes me back to my chemo days when I got stuck weekly. Ahh, memories. But wait, this time was actually different. This was the first time in all the times someone has stuck a needle in my arm that the person doing the sticking told me I have tiny veins. What? I have given blood my entire adult life, well, until I was diagnosed with cancer and had to be pumped full of chemotherapy, thank you so much. Now they don’t want my precious AB+ blood. So have my veins shrunk in the last two years? Is that even a thing?

Umm…I have no idea where I was going with any of this. Maybe there was no actual story here, except that the hospital was crazy busy and it wasn’t even because of Covid because if you suspected you had Covid-19, you weren’t even supposed to go into the hospital. There were signs all over the freaking place declaring that.

Alas, perhaps these days there is no ‘good’ time to go have blood drawn, unless you figure that anytime HGTV is airing A Very Brady Renovation is a good time to go so you have something to watch while you wait eleven hours from registration to blood draw is a good time to go. Then, well, check your local listing.

I don’t even know.