I recently went to the lab to go get myself checked up because I've been feeling a bit different lately, almost like I'm about to fall ill. So I had gone to the lab to run some tests to know what exactly is wrong with me, and just before I go any further, can we just take a minute to talk about how expensive these things are?
When the doctor told me how much I needed to pay for the test, I remember asking myself how something as important as this could be so expensive, making it almost impossible for the common man like myself to afford it.
Anyways, after I was done making the payment, I was directed to a lady for her to take the sample she needed for the test. The moment she pulled out the syringe that she would be using to take my blood, I found myself thinking back to the year 2017.
That was the year I would have done my first real healthcare checkup, that is if my dad hadn't stopped me. You see befire then, I've never really being to the hospital or had any reason to even get close to a syringe. I remember the last time I got injected was a tetanus shot after a rusty nail had pierced my leg, and that was a long long time ago.
So the year 2017,a friend of mine had told me that she was working at a lab and I remember just making a joke of how I would love it if she gave me a free test, and surprisingly she had agreed. The only problem with that was that she wasn't a trained nurse or a professional in any way... She was either a secretary or an assistant at the time (I can't remember).
Anyways, we both had agreed that I would take the test, we had set a time and date, but luckily for me, about a day or two to the agreed date, I was talking to my dad and it slipped out of my mouth that I was getting ready to go get a test in a few days time.
I probably can still remember the look on his face when I told him that. He had immediately shut the whole thing down, telling me of the many things that could go wrong if someone who isn't a professional tried to inject me with a syringe, and then he had ended it with a story about a kid who got injected with a used syringe by a chemist, and the kid ended up contacting HIV....apparently the story went all over the country back in the day when it happened.
That was all I needed to hear to know that I definitely wasn't going for the test anymore.
Now that I do think about it though, it's crazy the amount of risk I was about to take back then, even though I didn't know how risky it was at the time.