A customer comes through my son’s checkout line.

Customer: Are you judgmental?

Son: I scan stuff and put it in bags.

(His Mama didn’t raise no dummy)

My fiancé and I go to a popular theme park near where we live to celebrate being together for nearly 3 years (we had had our first date here). We go on a popular flying ride and he takes his hat off just in case. Not even 10 minutes later we realize we don’t have the hat anymore and wander back and talk to the ride greeter.
She calls up to ride platform if they had any hats turned in but no luck. She said it’s possible no one rode that seat to see so we chat with her until the current ride ends and the staff can check the ride cars for any hats left behind. Still no luck. As she’s explaining to us how to put in a lost and found report so if the hat is recovered we’d be contacted, a man and his child walk up to us all.

Man: was it a red hat you lost?

Me: yes, it was

Man: oh, it was in my seat when we got on so I threw it off.

All of us stood there stunned as he walked away without another word. I still have no idea why he didn’t just leave it or give it to an employee after the ride and decided that throwing it off was the best option.

Sadly we never got the hat back which was a little heart breaking because, as stupid as it may sound, it was sentimental to my fiancé since he bought it on our very first date and I had pointed it out that day. But we did get a good story out of it and we laugh now at how we lost it.

It was shortly before my 25th birthday, and I was swamped. A great deal of soon-to-be-ex friends had gotten caught up in a cult-like scam, and I was doing tons of legal research to prove it was a scam. Stressed out and exhausted, it took me a few days to notice I wasn’t feeling great. Normally I’m always hot, and this was the beginning of July, instead I’ve gotten colder and colder. One day I wake up shivering, with tingling in my arms and legs, and my skin looking a bit blue. Neurologically everything is fine. My strength is good.

Freaking out, I talk with my mom. (We live together to care for my autistic brother.) I’m young, and while I’m definitely overweight, I’m otherwise in pretty good shape, or so I thought. We go over my symptoms. Neurologically everything is fine. My strength is good. I’m just cold with poor circulation in my extremities. Unfortunately, it’s the beginning of a long holiday weekend. Because we live in small town with a really crap hospital, a trip to the hospital would be a long and elaborate event and include dragging my brother along. We presume this whole thing is a short-lived, stress-driven episode and decide to wait it out for a few days.

Now my mom has heart issues that doctors have dismissed. We’ve found some good use for high-quality herbal medicine after it saved my life when the doctors dismissed my grand-mal seizures. As such, my mom was taking a low dose of otc nattokinase, a soy-based blood thinner used medically in Japan and other places for many years. (It’s actually in trials right now for the FDA, and is expected to replace most fibrin medications in a few years because it is much safer.) Because my symptoms were obviously circulation-related, we put me in the nattokinase as well.

By the time the new week rolled around I was feeling somewhat better. I wasn’t blueish and the tingling had gone way down. I was still running cold though. Because we still thought this was a weird stress thing, and it was getting better we just left it alone, I relaxed and decompressed, and kept up with the nattokinase. I also cleaned up my diet, which hadn’t been the best. Bit-by-bit I felt better, until I woke up Friday morning with bad vertigo. Scared, we ran to the hospital 30 minutes away. I was told it was no big deal, and all regular blood tests came back fine too. I got sent home with meds that didn’t work, just gave me horrible headaches for a couple of days before I realized they were the culprit. The vertigo just wasn’t going away though, and after a couple of weeks, I got in with an ENT. They confirmed the diagnosis but told me the advice to try not to trigger it was the exact wrong advice. Triggering it would rewire my brain and get it to go away. That wasn’t fun but thankfully worked. Now, I was just left with wearing winter clothes in the summer, while previously I was likely to wear summer clothes in the winter.

We didn’t have a good GP, and I was managing with diet and nattokinase. I did notice though that the bottle had you start on a high dose, and then taper off to a low dose. Any time I tried to taper off, my symptoms would get worse. Also, thanks to my energetic cat and my being clumsy, I knew my blood wasn’t thinner than normal. So I stayed on the higher dose. Late fall brought a bad case of food poisoning for everyone in my family, which wiped us out for some weeks. Right after, we all got bad colds that lasted till Christmas. With all this, I started to have palpitations. Back to the doctors, who ran some tests, didn’t find anything, and told me they were “benign palpitations.”

January brought bronchitis and weird pains in my neck and head, including right where my carotid and jugular were. Now I was really freaking out. We looked around and found a doctor at a top hospital a little over an hour away who said she was open to holistic healing. Pretty much I just didn’t want someone to dismiss the nattokinase that I felt was saving my life.

I went up prepared. I had a list of all supplements including vitamins that I was taking. I had everything neatly typed up and printed out. I explained I was on a blood thinner that should have me bleeding out my eyeballs, but I wasn’t for some reason. (At that time the FEC did recognize as a blood thinner and warned people about.) I told her all of my symptoms. She listened, looked at my documents and sent me to run some tests, including an ultrasound of my throat. After blood work and the ultrasound, she said everything looked fine, my thyroid was fine, and I can go home. Wait, thyroid? Yep. I told her my weird pains were on the sides of my neck, and she had the middle of my neck scanned because I shouldn’t be able to feel my carotid and jugular.

I asked about the blood thinners and found myself in a dialogue loop. “Your tests are fine. You’re fine.”
“So this nattokinase doesn’t do anything and I can pop them like candy?”
“NO! You’ll bleed to death!!!”
“I AM popping them like candy, but I’m NOT bleeding to death? Why not?”
“Your tests came back fine. You’re fine.”

I persisted. I got her and other doctors to give me more tests, including a three-day heart monitoring test. Everything came back negative. It was a resident ENT that finally told me the neck pain was probably the sheaths around my carotid and jugular that were inflamed and painful. That can happen. They don’t know why, but it doesn’t impede blood flow so while it’s painful, it’s not a real health issue. At least that made me a bit relieved.

I also have a sleep issue, almost certainly hypersomnia, so because I was getting everything else tested, I also got an apnea test done. It came back with a false positive because the damn doctor made a big girl with big boobs like on her back. I had 80 events, 77 on my back. I don’t sleep on my back. So that was another waste of time and money.

Eventually, by being really good with my diet I managed to get all the symptoms to go away, except for my temp running cold and needing to be on nattokinase. I gave up on those doctors and thought since I’m managing well enough, I’ll just manage on my own. I’ve since moved to a big city, but the doctors aren’t great from what I can tell. The few medical people I’ve told get stuck in the same dialogue loop about my blood thinners. If my numbers are good, then I MUST be good, right? Even If I am taking a ton of strong blood thinners. Thanks to my cat, and clumsiness I’m quite sure my blood is still in the normal range. In fact, my mom who takes 1/3-1/6 of the amount I do on nattokinase bleeds a decent deal longer than I do with the same nick. I’ve even gotten a tattoo and haven’t bled anymore than others would, (I might have lied on the form about blood thinners because I really wanted that tat, and it had been enough years living with this thing that I knew it was safe. I did cut down on my meds a bit though 24 hours ahead of time just to be on the safe side.)

Doing my own research I’ve narrowed down what I have to a handful of possibilities, most being genetic clotting disorders. I had found a new doctor. An herbalist who was legally a doctor and could prescribe tests and such, hoping he’d be smart enough to understand basic logic. But then Covid hit. Being high risk, we’re all staying home, and an answer will have to wait for another few more years. Honestly, I get that my situation is rare, and having found a good treatment that the doctors are unfamiliar with makes them skeptical of what the tests might mean, but being told I’m just crazy with something like this is both nerve-wracking and very frustrating. Doctors, please, please listen to your patients!

(Today I was assigned to be on chat at work. Usually it’s quite a nice thing, since the customers are fairly quick with their questions and are polite. To make it faster for us to answer the customers questions, we can usually see, what they are writing. It does make chat easier and can give some funny incidences with the customer writing one thing, then deleting, and writing something else instead. Quite fine. Not so much this time…

The chat started normally with a common issue of a missing refund (we sometimes have to do them manually for different reasons). That was solved quickly, but then the chat continued…)

Me: “Was there anything else, I could help you with?”

Customer: “Snap and age?”

Me: *Pretty sure, where this is going, but keeping it professional* “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I’m following you…”

Customer: *writes, and I can read it* “horny…” *he deletes it again, writes and sends instead:*”Snapchat?”

(Now I do just want to close the chat asap and get rid of this troll, but I am forced to keep it professional.)

Me: “I’m sorry, but I do not give my personal informations to our customers.”

(This customer is persistant….)

Customer: “Age then?”

Me: “I’m sorry, but I do not give my personal informations to our customers. Was there anything else I can help you with, that is related to your account with us?”

(After that the customer just closed the chat. Thank you very much for that lovely message as my start on the workingday.)

This happened about 8 or 9 years ago when I took driver’s ed. When they teach you on the road you start each lesson by dropping off the student from the previous lesson home.

One day, I get in the car and drive the other miserable teenager to their house, which is through several residential backstreets. I back out of their driveway and the instructor tells me the speed limit is 15MPH. As I drag along the street, hoping that no one who lives in this area needs to leave it any time soon, a squirrel runs in front of the car. I don’t have to break hard to stop, so I stop and wait for the squirrel to decide which side of the street it wants to be on. I check my mirrors and I’m clear, so I’m not worried about anyone behind me.

For the driving instructor, this was apparently the wrong move. He said if someone was behind me they could have hit me. I said it would be up to the hypothetical car behind me to be driving at a safe distance and brake in time and I would NOT be hitting a squirrel! By the time we were done arguing the squirrel had run off and the lesson moved on.

That day he told me parents that I refused to listen to his instructions and had an issue with authority. Luckily my parents thought it was hilarious he was making a big deal over a squirrel and said I did the right thing. They still occasionally tease me about it, though.