Tuesday, June 21, 2016

I've Never Done Archery



In the words of Elizabeth Bennett (the pink bible version), "I do date. I do." However, as much as I'm sure everyone would love to hear the details of my dating life (I have some crazy stories I could tell you), this post is just about a time where I got taken to go archery shooting! This guy wanted to do something I could blog about so here it is. Turns out I'm not great at this whole blog thing though, so this post is a bit overdue.

Just getting started
We just went to a little indoor archery shooting place up in Orem. When we first showed up, we were the only ones there which I was grateful for. Not that I really have a problem with embarrassing myself (my sisters would probably say I'm never not embarrassing), but I figure the less people who I can accidentally shoot with an arrow, the better. The guy working gave me a little arm guard and a three-fingered glove-thing to make pulling the string less painful and then gave a super short tutorial about how to use the bow and arrow. When he left, I just stood there like okaaaay…I still have no clue what I'm doing.
Probably the first time most of the shots landed on the board.
One weird thing about me is that I'm technically left-handed but I do a lot of things, especially sports, right-handed. Amy actually has this weird thing against lefties, so I'll refrain from going off about how difficult it is to live in a right-handed world (love you Amy!), but basically I'm just kind of all over the place as to which hand I use. The guy there told me I was apparently right-eye dominant and so made me shoot the bow right-handed. I never tried the other way so I'm not really sure if it would have been easier or not for me. In any case, my first few attempts were COMPLETE fails. The arrow went about 5 feet before slamming straight into the floor. I just couldn't seem to pull it back far enough (the string was really stiff and also, I'm just really weak) and I guess I wasn't aiming high enough.

I even hit the center target
I ended up switching bows to one that I think was a little heavier, which was actually way easier to fire and was more powerful. Eventually, I got the firing thing down and then I was basically ready to quit my job and become a professional archerist (that's not actually a word but I'm using it anyway).

Basically a pro now
I never did fully get the whole aiming thing figured out. I ended up becoming fairly consistent - all of my shots would end up in the same general area. However, that general area would just happen to be nowhere close to a bulls-eye but that's okay, right? I felt like I had to aim way high and way to the right of where I actually wanted it to go but mostly it just felt like a guessing game. I was probably just doing something wrong because otherwise, I don't see how Robin Hood could possibly have had such precise aim.
Look how consistent I was!
All in all, though, archery really wasn't that difficult. It would definitely take a ton of practice to actually be good at it, but I'm not really planning on going hunting with a bow and arrow anytime soon so not a big deal.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

I've Never Been to a Professional Ballet

The high school I attended had students from the Virginia School of the Arts come part time. Apparently in Virginia, “The Arts” means ballet so my school was teaming with borderline anorexic females who could also snap my neck with their muscular legs. It is a terrifying combination.
In all that time, the only ballet I ever saw was the local community center’s “Nutcracker.” Even though I had a few friends in it who did very well, I decided I didn’t like ballet. It was boring and slow and no one sang or even talked!

The Virginia School of the Arts
Fast forward 10 years and I fancy myself a cultured snob. I love attending the theatre, I pretend to enjoy opera, and I watch art films and act like they don’t suck. I figured it was time to give ballet another go. Maybe if I saw a professional performance it would be different.
Ballet West in Salt Lake City is, apparently, a well-respected company. I looked at their season online and opted for an original performance of Beauty and the Beast. How can you go wrong with a classic like that?

This was not the show we saw. Unfortunately.
I guess I don’t really know what I was expecting out of the experience, but I know it’s not what I got.
To begin with, the show started at 7pm on a Friday. SLC is 40 minutes away and we left Provo at 5:45. Doing the math, we should have arrived in plenty of time to find parking, make our way to the theater, get situated in our seats, and enjoy the opening of the show.
Turns out, General Conference weekend + mission reunions + Friday rush hour + Utah construction + bad luck = a 90 minute drive to SLC. We missed the first act and I was not a happy camper. Road rage is something I struggle with anyway and knowing that this ballet I paid for was slipping away from me was the cherry on top of my stressed out sundae.

The Capitol Theater in SLC. 
We finally made it to the theater, parked, and rushed inside to find an enormous group of people waiting at the theater doors. Not only were there are fair number of people stuck in the same traffic, but a lot of regulars thought the show started at 7:30. Even a couple friends from our ward were there, having fought the same losing battle we had just emerged from. We waited the 15 minutes or so until intermission and then went in to find our seats.

I’m not sure how we swung it, but we were second row and the view was fantastic. We were not concerned about missing the first act since this is a fairly well-known story, but it turns out our lack of research did not do us any favors. This was not a professional, Ballet West show. This was a second-string and student performance meant for families. What does this mean? Well, it means that it wasn’t very good.

Some of the cast, bless their hearts.
The dancing was, admittedly, beautiful. I’m no expert and I’m sure they weren’t as good as they could have been, but I still enjoyed the choreography quite a bit. What I didn’t like, however, was the narration. In an attempt to make ballet more accessible to children, narration and dialogue were recorded and played over much of the action. Poorly written and poorly delivered, it did nothing but cheapen the experience for me. The three year old behind me, however, seemed to love it.
The best part was the curtain call sequence. Many characters we had missed from the first act came out to do a little jig as their bow and there were a couple who were incredible. I realized that maybe act one was better and we really had missed out on something good.

A disappointment. 
All in all, it was not a great experience. I discovered that I actually do like the dancing, just not cheesy narration. I believe that I will try ballet again, on a Saturday, with the actual professional company, performing a classic like Swan Lake. If I can. 

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

I've Never Been Pregnant: Guest post by Cat Holt

Guest Blogger: Cat Holt

Four years. 

Four years of waiting for this moment, the one where I can finally shout to the rooftops that I’m having a baby!! But for some reason, the moment doesn’t feel the way that I thought it would. It’s probably because of everything that has happened leading up to it.

My life has been amazing. I have family that cares to the moon and back about my husband and me. I have friends that I count as family because they have been by my side through those fun growing-up moments. I have a husband who only wants to take care of me and provide for my happiness. I have it all! Even a dog whose soft ears could be an entire post by themselves because I am that obsessed with him. But even with all of this, I still wanted more. I wanted a baby of my own.

Desiree, me, and Amy

So our journey began. My husband and I had already been married about a year and a half, and we thought that the time was right to expand the family. However, after a few months and still no baby, we decided to go to the doctors to see what we should do. Thus began the next 4 years. Those years started with, “Oh it’s common for it to take up to a year to get pregnant. We will run some blood tests, but there is no need to panic yet.” Then came the, “Well, we have run lots of blood work and everything looks great. Let’s make sure that your husband is okay.” When all was well with him, the confusion started to kick in. “Hmmm, maybe an ink test will reveal any blockages.” Nope, all clear. “Well, maybe your hormones just aren’t quite right. Let’s try birth control for a little while to see if that resets you. By the way, next few months after this are your best shot of getting pregnant.” Months came and went, no results. “The next step is a fertility drug, let’s give it a shot…OOPS, we overdosed you. Your next few days are about to be really painful.”

Me and my husband with some of our child-rearing friends

And on it went. Never anything new, just more confirmation that nothing was wrong. Nothing was ever wrong. But my life had turned into a guessing game. It got to the point where I almost wanted them to find something wrong so that we could have an answer. Do this and you will get pregnant! At one point, I even (almost) wanted to hear that it just wasn’t possible, and that I should adopt. At least that was an answer. It’s a hard answer and a scary one, but it’s something solid to hold on to. Plus, my husband and I were considering adoption anyway, even if we had our own children. There’s always room for another in a good home. Basically, I needed the monthly emotional roller coaster to end. Some months were unbearable, where I wasn’t sure I could handle this again. Others I just went numb. Why even try to feel? It doesn’t change the answer.

At around the 3.5 year mark of trying, my husband and I moved away to Florida so that he could go to Chiropractic school. We left all of our family and friends behind, and went to a new city that we had never even heard of before. We were hopeful that this was the fresh start that we needed. Maybe if we shed the stress of before, then we could have some positive results. Well, life set in and became crazy. Between my new job and his new schooling, we decided it was best to put the baby plans on the back burner. I didn’t even find a new doctor because I didn’t have time. Now, people say that when you just stop trying, that’s when the miracles happen. I want to clarify something. Yes, we put it on the back burner instead of center stage, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a single day that went by that I didn’t think about having a child. When something like that enters your mind and you have spent so long hoping, you don’t just forget about it.

Our pregnancy announcement

But it worked. After 6 months of living in Florida, I became pregnant. For a split second I thought that all my worries were now over! But then my over-analyzing brain kicked in. Why now? Is it the change in atmosphere? Stress change? Eating different? What was it, so that in case we ever want another child, I can know what to do!

Just starting to show

Then I went to the doctor. For the first time in 4 years, I was one of the girls that got to sit in the waiting room with my bottle of water beside me and a baby pamphlet in hand. But when I looked around the room, I realized that I didn’t relate to all of the other pregnant women around me. I related to that one girl in the corner, the one with her eyes downcast trying not to look at anyone. The one that can’t even bear the sight of the newborn beside her but hears every sound they make. Even though I had now joined the throng of soon-to-be mothers, I didn’t feel like one of them. I had spent so long as that girl in the corner, and only a few months as one in this new group.

But I didn’t know what to do...I still don’t. I know the pain of having someone come up to you and say that they understand what you’re going through, and it will all get better. How do they know?! They are pregnant! They have kids! They don’t know this feeling, right here, right now. Although I understand now how naïve I was, I still know that going up to a hopeful mother is difficult for everyone. We all react differently, and sometimes those reactions vary for a single person depending on where they are in their trial. I know that sometimes all I wanted to hear were success stories from strangers. But other times I just wanted to be left alone in my misery.

26 weeks
So now that I have a foot in both worlds, I want to help anyone I can. I’ve never been great at knowing the right words to say, but know this: I am happy that I went through those 4 years. They changed me in ways that I’m not sure anything else could have. My perspective on life is different now: I’m more patient and less judgmental. I listen to others’ stories instead of just trying to say my bit.

31 weeks
Although I have reached one milestone, I know that this is just the beginning of my story. I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m sure it is full of ups and downs. All I know is to just take life one day at a time, and always look for the good. 

Friday, February 19, 2016

I've never had part of my brain removed

Me excited for surgery - more
about this later
Yes, you did read the title correctly. It's not actually as serious as it sounds, but I'll explain more about what it is later. I kept this pretty much on the DL, so very few people outside my family knew what was going on. Also, while I'm thinking about it, let me give a disclaimer that I may or may not mention some gross details later, though I'll try to keep it within an appropriate spectrum. Amy always tells me I share too much…

The story begins last November. And I could go into detail about this awful week I had, but let's just skip to the point and say I got a severely abscessed tooth (a first). Nobody could figure out how or why this tooth got infected, but it did. I went to the dentist about 5 times in the space of a week, and my face swelled up horribly so I looked like Quasimodo (not an exaggeration). I do actually have a picture of it (I documented the whole experience, naturally), but it's not something the whole world needs to see. Sometimes when I want a good laugh, I pull up the picture just to look at it - I crack up every time (Apparently, my sister uses it for the same thing so I'm glad I could bring her joy as well).

Not my Quasimodo picture but this
 is when the swelling first started.
But, back to the story. Because my face had swollen up so badly, my dentist was a little concerned, so he sent me to an oral surgeon. The oral surgeon takes a pretty intense x-ray of my mouth and says that my dentist did everything right and the crazy strong antibiotics should eventually make the swelling go down. But then he starts asking me if I have trouble breathing out the right side of my nose and proceeds to tell me that it appears I have a large mass filling up my entire right nasal cavity. He was guessing it was just maybe a really large nasal polyp but told me I should probably get it checked out. 

So, then a couple of weeks later (once my face was back to a normal size), I went to see an ENT. He stuck a camera up my nose and showed me what it looked like. My first reaction was that this mass looked like what I thought part of your brain would look like. It looked kind of squishy and slimy and purplish and okay, I'll stop with the description. However, even after looking at it, he wasn't sure what it was, so he sent me down the hallway to get a CAT scan (those things are crazy expensive by the way). When my doctor came back from looking at the scan, he told me he wasn't sure it was a nasal polyp and it actually kind of looked like it might be connected to my brain just because of how high it extended. Unfortunately, the CAT scan wasn't detailed enough, so he sent me to get a brain MRI.

Me in my stylish hospital gown
At this point in life (about mid-December now), I start being all dramatic and since I hadn't told anyone else around here, poor Amy had to listen to me constantly talk about it. She kept trying to be reassuring by saying it's probably nothing - just a nasal polyp or enflamed tissue or something else inconsequential while I'm over here being like it's probably cancer and I'm going to die. Amy, I do apologize for being overly dramatic, but at this point, it was actually a possibility. It seems that the more research I did, the more convinced I became that it was a tumor, so maybe it's not always a good idea to research your own medical conditions…

In the meantime while I'm still having my freak out, I ended up having the MRI (my first!) which in and of itself was uneventful. I got to wear a super cool hospital gown and I was glad they only put me halfway into the machine since sometimes I am prone to being claustrophobic. The machine kind of sounded like I was being abducted by aliens and it took forever and a day (really, it was just an hour), but it was fine. They ran a bunch of rounds of images and then injected me with some contrast solution and then ran a bunch more.

My very official pre-op board
The eventful part of the MRI was actually getting to the appointment. It was at 8 am and of course, the one day I actually have to be somewhere very early and on time is when my garage door decided to break (another first). So I'm in the garage at 7:30 in the morning, trying to manually open it, which was an impossible task. Amy hears me downstairs grunting and comes to help, but to no avail. I'm on the verge of a breakdown right now because I'm already a little frazzled by the whole situation and now I'm stranded in my garage at 7:30 in the morning. But Amy is excellent under stress and she thinks of our amazing and beautiful friend Wallis who I promptly called and the timing ended up working out perfectly. Wallis was just about to leave so she just picked me up on the way out and dropped me off at the hospital. I was still frazzled and still not sure what to tell people, so I don't think I even told her why she was taking me to the hospital…

Just watching some tv before the surgery
Anyway, a week later, I meet with the doctor again (it's the end of December at this point - maybe a week before Christmas just to give you some time frame) and turns out it isn't cancer. It's a nasal meningocele - yes, that's an actual thing. Extremely rare though I was unable to find any real statistics about it. And I'll try to explain it here briefly, but just know that I still don't fully understand it. Basically, this mass in my nose was actual brain tissue that had leaked through a small hole (probably a birth defect) in the membrane that is supposed to surround and keep my brain in place. He said the mass was about an inch in diameter and was probably full of spinal fluid, which is not really something you want leaking.

Me in my really cute gown and shorts
He then informed me that I needed to get surgery and basically scared me into it by saying he would be hesitant to do any kind of physical activity for the rest of his life if I didn't fix this. There's a chance that nothing would have happened with it and I could have gone on my merry way and been fine. But, there was no way of knowing how quickly this mass was filling up with spinal fluid and growing so eventually it could have gotten dangerous for that reason. And also, if the mass was somehow ever punctured or torn open or I got hit in the face or anything like that, it could very realistically lead to meningitis, which is often fatal. So, surgery it is.

All ready to go
I got the surgery done in mid-January (my first surgery!) and I think I probably should have been more nervous than I was. I was honestly more excited to say I'd had surgery than anything because I'm weird and I was extremely happy it wasn't anything more serious than it was. My wonderful mother came out for the surgery and she was an angel. I don't know what I would have done without her because the recovery was rough. I could barely walk from my bed to the couch without feeling like I was going to fall over. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The morning of the surgery, we went over and they gave me a really cute gown and shorts to wear and they stuck an IV in me and then we just waited. Every time someone would come in they would have to ask me my name and birthdate to verify who I was, which gets old real quick. And they kept asking me to verify what surgery I was getting. The name of my surgery was something like "endoscopic removal of meningocele right side and repair of defect" so trying to spit that out every time was a beast.

Sleeping right after the surgery
Eventually they rolled me into a room where I met the anesthesiologist and he explained to me what was going to happen - how he would give me a little bit right now to relax me and then when I went into the operating room, he would knock me out completely. After I was asleep, they would stick an oxygen tube down my throat (gross) but they would remove it again before I woke up a few hours later. After that conversation, I honestly remember very little. Whatever he gave me at that time didn't knock me out, but it kind of felt like laughing gas and I kept almost forgetting that I was conscious. They gave me a magazine to look at while I waited and I think I just stared at the same page the whole time. Eventually, some guy rolled me into the operating room, and I remember them telling me to move myself over to the operating table, which I did and everything after that is gone. I must have been out so fast.

Next thing I remember, I'm waking up and I had an oxygen mask over my face, but for some reason, when I started coming to, I thought I was suffocating. I kept trying to pull the oxygen mask off my face because in my loopy mind, that would help me get oxygen. Someone ended up coming over and asking me some questions which I don't remember, but when I tried to respond, I became very aware that my throat was super swollen and it felt like it was on fire. I literally couldn't get words out because it hurt so badly - I kept trying to talk and all that would come out was some weird grunt sound like I was a caveman. That must have been from the oxygen tube being down my throat I'm guessing. Eventually I somehow got the single word 'water' out in at least a semi-understandable fashion and someone came over and starting spoon-feeding me ice chips.

Probably an hour or so after the surgery
I think the original plan was to send me home in a couple of hours, but I think I was not coming out of the anesthesia as well as they had hoped and I was bleeding more than expected so I was there for a lot longer than that. I had this thing that basically held gauze underneath my nose like a mustache and I was soaking it completely through with blood every 20 minutes. Eventually they did release me and they gave me lots of drugs - the antibiotic was the biggest pill I've ever seen (my mom cut it half for me because I'm a baby). And as a pleasant surprise, Cosmo the Cougar happened to be leaving the hospital right as they were wheeling me out. He held the door open for us and then as I got in the car, he gave me a silent cheer in the usual Cosmo fashion. I used to have a weird crush on Cosmo when I was a freshman (in my defense, he is a very attractive mascot), and when I told Amy this happened, she thought I had hallucinated the whole thing. Luckily my mother was able to back me up. He really was there!
Not cute but I needed a
good bleeding picture

The first night was…rough. I think my poor mother slept even less than I did and I'm not sure I slept more than an hour if that. She was constantly changing my gauze because I was still bleeding through it at rapid pace and refilling my water because I was guzzling it down (my throat still hurt so badly). Also, I should note that when I had left the hospital, my stomach hurt a lot and it was crazy bloated. I had just assumed it was because I had put so much liquid into my body between how much I had drank and the fluids they were pumping me with. But I found out this first night that wasn't what it was. Turns out it was completely full of blood and my body decided to throw it all up this first night. Apparently I had swallowed a bunch during or after the procedure and it had all just been sitting in my stomach this whole time, and I guess your stomach doesn't digest blood very well (I warned you it might get gross). But yes, I threw up straight blood and there was so much of it - no wonder my stomach hurt so badly. And my darling mother would just send me straight back to bed every time while she cleaned it up from everywhere. Luckily, that was only an occurrence throughout the first night and something I'd rather not experience again.

My mess of drugs and other medical supplies
The next few days were uneventful. Still didn't sleep much as I couldn't breathe and my face felt like I had gotten kicked by a horse but other than that, I was pretty much fine. And then Saturday comes (the surgery had been on Tuesday). By this point, the bleeding had finally stopped and I spent my first night without gauze strapped under my nose. But almost the second after I woke up on Saturday, I somehow triggered something and all of a sudden, my nose was gushing blood again. Most of it was running down the back of my throat and I was trying desperately to spit it out because I didn't want another instance of throwing up blood later) but there was so much of it. I was practically choking on it at times. I basically sat over the toilet and just let the blood spill out. My bathroom was starting to look like a murder scene. And so here I was like this for literally 2 hours (and that's the correct use of literally by the way). And then on top of this bleeding, I started to feel extremely light headed and dizzy. I could hardly stand up and that's when I decided to go to the ER. 

Just got to the ER
We drive down there, but then right as we pull up, I can tell the bleeding is starting to die down. Figures. After 2 1/2 hours, it stops when we get to the ER. But at that point we were there, so I went inside. The guy took some basic heart rate and blood pressure tests and asked me if I was nervous because apparently my heart rate was crazy high. And he also asked me if I was normally this pale (granted I am a pale person but I think 3 people asked me that while I was there). They took me to a room and hooked me up to an IV and by now the bleeding had basically stopped. The nurse pulled out a huge blood clot from my nose though it definitely broke off and the other half was still way back in there. They took some blood samples, and then they wanted to check my heart rate and blood pressure while laying down, sitting up, and standing up. The standing up one was difficult because by this point, I was so beyond dizzy. The guy doing the tests basically had to hold me up.

More ER - I'm not super loving life at this moment.
An ENT who was on call came and looked at me. It was a very unusual surgery and since this doctor hadn't been involved, he was hesitant to really do anything too crazy. There was a ton of packing and gauze up my nose to help control bleeding and he didn't want to mess with that at all. So he looked up my nose and cleaned out the blood. He stuck this suctioning thing in my throat and after several attempts and me gagging like crazy, he finally pulled out this humongous blood clot - I practically starting gagging again at the sight of it. The nurse standing there goes 'how could you even breathe with that thing?'. So if nothing else, going to the ER was worth getting that out because yeah, I couldn't really breathe.

Then my head nurse came back in and told me that the reason I was on the verge of passing out and was so pale and my heart rate was at 170, was because I was on the verge of being dangerously anemic. She said that prior to the surgery, my red blood cell count had been 14 and now it was at a 9, so it had dropped by over a third in 5 days. And from what I understand (I could be making this up), they'll typically do blood transfusions for levels below a 9. The way the nurse was talking, they probably would have done one if I was still currently bleeding but since I had stopped, they figured I was now stable. She told me to start taking iron supplements to replenish all the blood I had lost and eventually they sent me home.

Flowers from friends
And since then I've been good. It took about 2 weeks before I could walk up the stairs in my apartment without having to then lie down in bed for 5 minutes just to catch my breath. It was pretty embarrassing but also not really my fault. Doing pretty much anything would leave me panting like a dog. Even now, almost 5 weeks later, small things still make me crazy exhausted. My doctor did finally give me the go ahead to start exercising a little bit and after 4 weeks, he cleared out the packing in my nose so I can breathe normally again! Also, I had been told prior to surgery that I would lose the sense of smell in the right side of my nose but I didn't! My nose still feels like it's broken when I touch it and I'm still apparently really swollen up near my brain, but he says I'm healing well. Still not done with doctor's appointments, but I'm hoping the next one will be my last.











Monday, January 11, 2016

I've Never Donated Blood


I realize this is something that I probably should have done by now.  I don't love needles (but I mean, does anybody love needles?), but I'm not terrified of them either.  I've had my blood taken before and I get the flu shot every year like a responsible citizen.  But despite the millions of blood drives that have gone on around me, I've never signed up. 

I'm so excited!...Also, I'm pretty sure Amy
made fun of me for this picture.
So Amy, being the lovely friend that she is, went with me to give blood for my first time.  I filled out their questionnaire (which has all kinds of weird questions), and I passed with flying colors. They also did the finger prick which daaang that hurts, and long story short, I was cleared to give blood.

And here's where it turned into an unpleasant experience. 

The nurse couldn't get the needle inside of my vein.  She could see the vein but every time she tried to push the needle inside, instead of going in, it would just push the vein out of the way.  So then this other nurse noticed what was happening and he came over to try and had the same problem. He told me I had 'wiggly' veins.  They never actually took the needle out of my arm; they just sat there for what seemed like forever twisting it around inside of my arm.  I couldn't watch because it was making me queasy, not that I needed to though since I could feel everything they were doing. It didn't necessary hurt but definitely wasn't pleasant either. I was really close to just telling them to take it out and let me leave because it was starting to make me anxious. But then they finally figured it out and whoolah! blood started flowing.

Finally got the needle
in and now life is good.
Everything went just peachy for probably the first 3 quarters of the actual donation part.  But then, very suddenly, I looked up and the entire world around me seemed to be spinning. And then I could feel my consciousness waning and I panicked because I really did not want to pass out. I glanced around but neither of my nurses were anywhere in sight so I called out to the girl across the room and said, surprisingly calm, "I think I'm about to pass out". I think I told her just in time because by the time she came over, I was basically hyperventilating. 

The nurse laid me all the way back and put wet rags on my head and chest because I was burning up like crazy.  Then she made me alternate putting each of my legs in the air and had me repeatedly cough -- apparently that helps with the whole breathing thing?  She obviously didn't realize that I did not have enough mind power left to accomplish both of those things at the same time and she kept getting onto me for stopping one of them.  It seemed to take every ounce of willpower just to maintain consciousness -- how was I supposed to focus on two other tasks as well?

Look how happy I am
that I almost passed out.
One thing that I did think was a little weird since I've never really heard other people talk about having this experience, but practically my entire body went kind of numb.  It started in my fingers and toes but then it spread through my entire arms and legs.  Everything was that horrible tingly sensation but a million times worse than I had ever had it before. Maybe most people who get to that point have passed out by then? 

I don't think I had entirely rational thoughts during the last few minutes. I mean, mostly I was telling myself over and over not to pass out, but I do also recall at one point thinking "So this is what death by vampire feels like." Yep. A little weird and dramatic but probably accurate. 

You should all be happy to know that I finished without passing out, though (go me!).  And, overall, I am very happy that I donated. My blood was sent to Camden, New Jersey where I probably saved some lives.  However, given the circumstances, it will most likely be a while before I attempt that again.