Just Give it To Me Straight; Will This Effect My GPA (Grand Plan to Age in relatively good health)?

Medical tests confuse me.  Not the try-to-get-into-medical-school-so-you-can-spend-the-next-decade-of-your-life-not-sleeping kind of medical tests.  And not even the “Better 1… or Better 2?” kind of optometry tests (though those kind of confuse me, too; I always suspect that I am being tricked and neither one is better, they are both exactly the same.  Coincidentally, my contact prescriptions seem less accurate every year, and I go twelve months seeing things in a blur because I am afraid to admit to my optometrist that I lied when I said #2 was better in the hopes of making the test end more quickly.) No, I am talking about the extract-some-bodily-fluids-to-send-to-a-lab kind of tests.  When you think about it, it’s my poor bodily fluids that are actually being subjected to these pop quizzes for which they never had the opportunity to study.  So, I guess it’s not the tests that confuse me – just the results.

“Mrs. Cap’n Firepants? I’m just calling to tell you that your test results were negative.”

“Oh my God!!!!!  So, I do have cancer?”

“Umm, we weren’t testing you for cancer. Just for kujdjidlkjkdjf.”

“Oh my God!  So, I have that? …Uh, what is that?”

“No, I am trying to tell you that you do NOT have it.”

“But you said the results were negative.”

“That means you don’t have it.”

“But shouldn’t that be a positive thing, that I don’t have whatever it is? Are you one of those glass-half-empty-people?  Because maybe you shouldn’t have this job if you are going to be spreading your gloomy outlook on life to perfect strangers.”

“This has nothing to do with my optimism or pessimism, Mrs. Cap’n Firepants.  It’s medical terminology.  When what you are trying to find in the test is not present, then you say it is negative.”

“So, are you saying that you wanted to find this in my blood?!!”

“I need to make some more calls, Mrs. Cap’n Firepants.”

“Wait!  Are you positive the test was negative?”

“I’m hanging up now.”

I breathe a sigh of relief that I apparently do not have kujdjidlkjkdjf.   And then I remember that I was kind of hoping that I do have it because it isn’t fatal, can be fixed by taking a pill a day, and would explain why I am such a terrible person.

So, now I am positive that I am feeling negative.

This may explain why my gynecologist’s office just leaves an automated message about my Pap Smear every year.

My bodily fluids would have totally rocked this test.
photo credit: dullhunk via photopin cc

Advertisement