It all started while riding in the Community Action (CA) van with my Habitat for Humanity cohorts. We were still in the name-memorizing, ice-breaker-playing phase of our relationship, and I was ready to make a good impression.
I was sitting in the front seat with one of our leaders and was in the middle of a pleasant conversation when it happened.
As casually as possible, I asked if anyone had a bag. No one heard me over the chatter, and I wasn't eager to make a fuss, so I quietly picked up a snack-sized Ziploc bag from the floor of the van and placed it to my lips. When my leader realized what was about to happen, she asked me if she should pull over. Once again, my politeness got the best of me, and I told her that it was "no big deal." The moment I started gagging into the miniature sandwich bag, however, she knew that she'd better pull over fast. She stopped just in time, and when I'd finished being sick on the side of the road, I jauntily hopped back into the passenger seat as if nothing had happened. I hoped that none of my new friends had just seen me heave in the road, and, in my mind, ignoring the situation was the best way to proceed.
This wasn't the end to my illness, however, and after a few more episodes, it was time to call in the experts. After contacting a doctor, the consensus was that I probably had food poisoning and should definitely be taken to the emergency room. I tried in vain to convince everyone that I had been magically healed and was ready to go back to Trenton, but the decision had been made. I was going to spend my first day at Princeton in the hospital.
After an hour in the waiting room, I was put in a bed, and a nurse came to draw some blood. Here's a little secret about me: I'm absolutely terrified of needles. Here's a little secret about the nurse: She had absolutely no clue how to take blood. These two traits did not mesh well. As she quite practically excavated my right arm with the needle in search of a vein, I gasped and squirmed. My companion, one of my CA leaders, frenziedly interviewed me about Quakerism - I went to a Quaker high school - in an attempt to distract me from the quarry that was formerly my right arm.
"What do you mean you can't vote?"
"You ... aaahhh ... have to ... uuurrrggghhh ... come to ... eeerrr ... consensus!"
I spent the next six hours hooked up to an IV and the next two weeks with a six-inch bruise on my forearm. It was so gruesome and large that my CA group took to guessing what color it would turn next. I agonized as I shook my new classmates' hands in the following weeks, worrying that they would take the giant bruise as the mark of a rare skin disease. I was confident that I would be known as "that girl with the freak-show thing on her arm" for the rest of my Princeton career.
Fortunately, a three-quarters-sleeved T-shirt hid my bruise well, and I found that my story made a dramatic first impression. While my first day at Princeton was, in essence, horrendous, I was lucky to have experienced it. After all, what else can happen to me now? (Well ... plenty.)
But if I had been worried about living on my own, I now knew that I can handle whatever comes my way, so somehow, my initiation to Princeton via IV was a blessing in disguise.
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