women’s health retreat

Somewhere back in the spring, I signed up to volunteer at a women’s health retreat. There were some definite communication issues, but in the end, we managed to get everything straightened out, and I showed up at the right location (hooray!) at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I bring this up only because I was really proud of myself for being awake and functional at that hour (I’ve been severely lacking in sleep lately, but what else is new?).

Kosina and I borrowed someone’s van and went around town putting up signs to direct people to the right location. We did blood pressure screenings (seeing as how I’ve been doing this since 2008, I’m getting to be a pro! :P ) for the participants. Originally, we were going to switch halfway through so we could do finger sticks (to check for their blood glucose and total cholesterol), but the first years weren’t all that comfortable with taking blood pressures for people yet since they’d just learned it, so we just stuck with our original jobs.

One of the ladies was apparently a nurse for “a very long time,” so she was telling me about the medications she was on. (I’m not sure I ever learned that there were transdermal patches you could use to help control blood pressure, or maybe it just wasn’t stressed and I forgot about it.) In any case, she told me she’d come back to me later since she’d been running around all morning and it was probably a lot higher than it should have been.

When she came back, I re-checked her BP (it had indeed decreased) and she thanked me and said, “You’re going to make it.”

F: Thank you! I really hope so!
M: It’s your personality–I know you need the skill too, of course, but your personality really matters a lot. You’re going to be great at what you do.

She made my day. :]

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