Since I woke up my first morning in England, I've been having pain in my chest, localised to my left lung. Now, this is problematic because breathing is painful, but since you really can't just decide to stop breathing, I'd been in pain for three days. So after yet another long night of not being able to sleep despite being exhausted, I decided that enough was enough, and paid my first visit to the Health Centre at Royal Holloway. Over the course of the day, I saw two nurses and a doctor, and had my temperature taken (I was running a fever of 38.5), my breathing listened to, my blood pressure taken, and finally, my blood taken. The doctor said she thought it might be a clot from flying on Saturday, which actually would make sense, but she seemed awfully unconcerned about it. Anyway, I got the results today, and I do not have a pulmonary embolism. That's very good. However, since the pain actually got even worse last night, the nurse prescribed me some antibiotics, so now I'm on those for the next week. However, I've only taken two doses so far, out of twenty-one in total, and I already feel better. And what's even more awesome is that the prescription only cost me 7.20 GBP. (I have to write GBP instead of the normal pound sterling symbol because my keyboard doesn't have it.) And that's without any insurance or anything. Yay for the National Health Service!
In other news, last night a few of my flatmates decided that the activity of the night should be to knock on my door and call my name incessantly for six hours. Now, I wasn't aware of most of this, but Stephanie, a girl who lives next door to me (also Canadian!) said they started at about 3:00 in the morning and went every half hour or so. The first time I heard it was at about 6:00, but having had a terrible sleep, I was still quite fuzzy in the head and thought it was something I was imagining. But no...sure enough, there were knocks and shouting galore until I left for the main campus at about 8:30. If I'd had a phone, I would have called security to get rid of them somehow, but I didn't have one yet, and my lung was bothering me so much that any change in body position was painful, so I didn't want to get out of bed and go down to the reception office. Mostly, I'm just baffled by the whole scenario. I can understand how an eight-year-old might get a laugh out of Nikki Nikki Nine Doors once or twice...but all night? And a group of freshers at uni? All I have to say can be summed up by this video. I hope they have scary nightmares tonight.
Today I went on a nice long walk down to Egham High Street, which is a quaint little road with a bunch of teeny shops. It was such a warm and sunny day, and so lovely. Alice, a girl I met today at my French Departmental Induction meeting, was with me, and we had a great chat and nice time. I was finally able to get a mobile phone. My account is still empty, but tomorrow I'll add some money to it so I can finally start calling people! That way, if The Great Nikki Nikki Nine Doors Fiasco is repeated, I can call security from my cozy cozy bed. Wouldn't that be satisfying?
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