To be quite frank, I am sick and tired of hearing about people’s vacations and only hearing the fun parts. The parts that I find interesting are the parts that go wrong. For spring break, I went to Florida and the Bahamas with my parents and as every family vacation goes there were a few bumps in the road. Now don’t get me wrong, my spring break was great but as the extremely pessimistic person that I am, the rough parts of the trip are the ones I like to focus on. Grab your popcorn and get ready to travel with the Griswolds because this saga is about to begin…
Day 1: Getting home
As everyone who lives out of state knows, JMU is not easy to leave. Thankfully, we don’t want to leave that often but when we do several measures are taken to find a ride home. If you have a car then you are good, but if you don’t you will do some if not all of the following: post on zimride, post on the JMU rides Facebook page, ask around to find a ride home, and check public forms of transportation. Once you finally have a ride home you don’t have to worry, unless of course there are bad weather conditions.
If you live where I live, New York, you are well aware of “the winds” that occurred on Friday. Due to this, my bus home was delayed to Saturday, which for most people was not a problem… I am not most people. Saturday, I had a flight to catch so I had to be home much earlier than when the bus would arrive in New York. Immediately I freaked out a little bit, called my Mom (as I do in times of panic), and then called my friend who lives in New Jersey to see how she was getting home and if I could get a ride. Thankfully, my friend instantly said I could leave with her.
Day 2: Flight to Florida
As previously stated the reason I had to leave Friday was because my flight was Saturday afternoon. After finally getting home it turned out our flight was delayed a few hours. This wasn’t really an issue because it just meant we were less stressed and could spend more time at home. Fast forward to when we get to the airport everything is going great. The flight was fine but during part of it the lady behind me just started screaming which woke me up from my nap and just alarmed most the people surrounding us. When we landed we immediately went to the luggage pickup area to get our suitcases. Right away I spotted mine and grabbed it, but we could not find my dad’s so after waiting a while for it to appear, my mom decided to talk to the people in charge of the baggage claim for our airline. There, they tracked the suitcase and discovered that it never left New York.
As you can imagine we were all just confused as to why it was never loaded onto the airplane, but the airline insisted it could be flown in the next day and be delivered straight to where we were staying in Florida.
Day 3: Where it gets interesting
For a few days my earrings began hurting me a little and I was struggling to get them out. So the first day we spent in Florida I asked my mom if she could help me get my earrings out. After a moment of looking at the back of my ears my mom very calmly said that the backs of my earrings weren’t there and I knew darn well I never took them off. *cue freak out* When I found out the backs of my earrings weren’t where they should be, I decided to just take the earrings out from the front. Once they were out I felt my earlobes to discover that both of the backs of my earrings were stuck in my ears. After I kept bending one of my ears to try and get the back out, we could finally see a sliver of the silver backing. However, the other one was still not visible because my skin had grown over it. At this point I was incredibly embarrassed and felt like a fool so I start crying because the last thing I wanted to do was ruin our vacation by having to go to the hospital.
Now according to many google searches I made that day this was not that uncommon. So after a while of trying to get the backs out by ourselves, my family and I decided that going to Urgent Care would be a much safer option. When we get to Urgent Care we found out three things:
- They would not take our insurance
- The wait to see a doctor would be approximately an hour
- The doctor might not even be able to take them out and might just send me to the emergency room, but we wouldn’t be able to get our money back.
When we heard that we immediately just decided to go to the emergency room in hopes we would have better luck. Finally, we did. The emergency room took me in right away and the doctor had assured me that he had done this before several times. Except he did mention that it was his first time seeing both earrings stuck in both ears at the same time, so if there is a new episode of Untold Stories of the ER TLC is getting sued. Getting the backs out of my ears, was shockingly easy and painless.
After an eventful 3 days, the rest of my vacation was relatively calm. But I won’t bore you with those details. As spring break came to a close there was one thing left to do go back to school.