The One Where I Think I am Having a Stroke

A weird thing happened to me the other day.

I was a work, reading through some particularly boring Clinical studies when I started feeling a tingling sensation in my left pinky finger.

At first, I really didn’t pay attention to it. I have really poor circulation in my hands and feet. If it’s particularly cold (and it always hovers slightly above hypothermic conditions in my office) sometimes my fingers will turn a lovely shade of white and I have to run my hands under scalding water until I don’t look like some half albino. I also don’t have a lot of feeling left in that finger due to the fact that I almost sliced it off last summer in a freak quilting accident.

However, the tingling continued. It started to spread throughout my left hand.

Ok , no biggie. The hand must have fallen asleep or I pinched a nerve holding my hands in a sort of bunny-sits-at-a-desk position. But not amount of shaking of my hand would make the pins and needles disappear. I must have looked like some sort of freak flailing around in the corner cubical.

Suddenly, my lip started to tingle.

Then my cheek.

Then my left eyesight became fuzzy.

That’s when I started to panic.

Either I was having my eventually psychotic break or I was having a stroke.
(It didn’t help that those Clinical studies I was reading happened to be about the adverse effects of stroke medications.)

For about five minutes, I thought this was the end. I was going to die. Here. At the office. Please don’t let my epitaph read “She died making sure those Clinical Studies were FDA approved.”

As fast as the tingling started, it was gone leaving me to spend my lunch break trying to figured out what the hell happened.

Did I have a stroke? I had to run to the bathroom to make sure the left side of my face hadn’t shifted south. Or was it just a figment of my hypcondriatic imagination. This wouldn’t be the first time some little twinge sends me to start writing my last will and testament. My senior year of high school, I was kept awake for three month straight with mysterious dry heaves and excruciating pain in my chest (Is 18 too young for a heart attack?). Turns out that my esophagus decided to call it a day and wear away. I got to live on rice and applesauce for a few weeks which led to me looking totally killer in my prom dress.

I guess, if I did kick the bucket I would have looked fabulous.

And It Starts.

I was afraid of this.

I get my act together and start this blog, and two posts in I get writer’s block.

I was all ready to write tonight. I got myself though the last three hours with the anticipation that I would churn out something incredibly witty and profound.

I’m in my writing sweats.

I have the TV set to some random ridiculous reality show for background noise. I have a chi tea in a CNN mug.

I’ve got nothing.

Well, now that I think about it, I do have something. Let’s run with this:

Last weekend, my parents asked me to come help box up my room . No, they haven’t decided to turn my room into exercise room, rather they were replacing the carpets and panting throughout the entire house. Therefore, everything had to be boxed up and moved into the basement. Besides want to help out my poor parents try to move the entire second floor down two flights of stairs, I found this a great opportunity to get more of my essentials that I desperately was missing here in Jersey. My books. Being a proud bibliophile, I have been going through total withdrawal. I missed seeing all my books organized neatly on their shelves. (Which also were going to be making the trip back to NJ. My make shift shelves looked like they were going to collapsed at any minute.)

So off to Central Pennsylvania I went, dragging poor Christopher along with the promise that we could bring back an extra dresser so that he could finally put his clothes in something where the handles weren’t falling off.

Long story short, my childhood was boxed up and spirited off to the basement. Sad Panda.

I found all sorts of interesting things that have been lost over the years to the black hole that exists in the back of my closet:
A holder for the new state quarters, lost somewhere between release of Utah and Oklahoma…
A middle school year book with photos cut out- presumably I cut out photos of people (boys) that I thought were cute and pasted somewhere else…
Half finished screenplays written by me and high school friends.

If someone was judging me by my taste in CDs, they would think I had multiple personalities. God, I have a lot. They pretty much ran the whole spectrum: from classic (Beatles), classical, total kitsch (Britney Spears) to downright crazy. Pure Disco? What the hell was I thinking? What induced me to buy this? How old was I? Obviously, I had to have bought this myself, because who in their right mind would give this to me as a gift?

Ok, so that wasn’t a total fail. I haven’t completely lost my gift…yet.

Why am I here again?

Things really do have a habit of working out in ways that you don’t really expect. Take my current situation:

I’ve moved to New Jersey. Voluntarily.

When I started College, I thought I would come out successfully employed. I would have a fantastic writing job in (insert glamorous cosmopolitan city), where I could have fantastically hip life writing about fantastically hip things.

Eh. Not so much.

If I had been told a year ago, that instead of working in New York at a publishing house/newspaper/magazine, I would have a job as basically a Pharmaceutical Editor, reading miles and miles of Clinical Studies, at a predominantly Korean company, earning barely enough to pay rent in the state with the highest property taxes, Past Me would have laughed for a good solid hour, then taken poor Future Me out for LIT Night, out of pity.

In order that the creative part of my brain doesn’t shrivel up and die and I feel like I am doing something hip with my life, I have decided to jump on the proverbial band wagon and start this blog.