Well, that was pretty handy. A nurse (or possibly a technician) did come to my porch, as the neurologist promised. She was dressed in scrubs, but she wore her face mask as a necklace. I, on the other hand, wore my face mask as prescribed.
I was very impressed with the “sticker” style thermometer. The photo above shows the sticker she stuck on my forehead. After she said my temperature was 96, I tore it off and saw a green line dropping down from the 96 point to the centigrade scale. And then it faded. Like a mood ring, I suppose, in sticker form. It might be on the low side: I’m usually 97.
She did indeed draw three vials of blood, give me a retina test, and an EKG. It was not the fingertip EKG I expected, but a full-on EKG, with the little pasties on my ankles, arms, and all over my rib cage. The only difference is that the result showed on her iPad instead of a printout. Do they still have EKG printouts? I haven’t had one for ten years. Back in the day. Back in the day when they stuck one of those antique digital thermometers in your ear to take your temperature (how quaint).
I had already alerted the woman across the street that there would be some odd behavior on my porch Friday, so I wasn’t surprised to see her on her porch. I waved and she called back, “I’m here to see the show!” She didn’t watch for long, just the blood draw. She missed the EKG entirely, and that was the best part.
I did look odd when I did the eye test. It was the test where you rest your chin outside a box and it shows you a green neon crosshair inside the box, and you can’t blink while it tickles your eyeball with air. We had to put the box on the porch bench, which meant I had to kneel and crouch low to put my face in the side of the box. and yet with the EKG and this not one neighbor on the road or walking a dog even slowed down to see what was going on.
I could have done this all inside, I suppose, but the doctor referred to it as a “porch call” – not a house call — more than once. I felt it was wrong to ask her in.
She’s been doing this since even before the pandemic, driving around specifically to MS patients. Pretty cool. I imagine it’s available for all types of tests. Are there mini portable CAT scans? MRIs?
6 responses to “Drug Test on the Porch”
That is so cool! (except for the face mask as necklace, because SERIOUSLY FOLKS.)
I assume they did not have you take off your shirt in the front yard for the EKG? Probably? (I’ve always suspected that they could probably do an EKG by just shuffling the shirt around, most of the time, but no, shirt always off.)
Your house is probably very safe, what with the isolation-ing, but nobody knows how safe exactly someone else’s house is (because different people have, uh, different concepts of what’s totally safe), so I think not asking her in was considerate of you?
The sticker thermometer is really cool! I’ve seen home-use ones for kids – basically, you put a ladybug sticker on the kids’ forehead, and the sticker changes color (or something similar) with the temperature, and then you can keep an eye on whether they currently have a fever or not, at least approximately, without having to keep poking at them with a thermometer. This seems like it would work if kids did not tend to play with stickers and reapply them to furniture, but as it is, I am a bit dubious…
KC – she said “hold your shirt up” and I was braless so I lifted up my boobs and my shirt together. And I wonder if I could get a kid’s sticker and have it work on Gary. He has to play the big man if I try to take his temp. Maybe I could trick him with a sticker.
Interesting!
Unless Gary is unusually sticker-motivated, talking him into wearing a sticker seems like a stretch unless he *wants* you to be able to monitor him without interrupting him or waking him up, but hey, who knows? 🙂 You could argue that they’re a hot thing amongst the youngsters these days, or something like that…
KC – he just really hates having his temp taken. I think it makes him feel like he’s a baby? It’s always met with annoyance. I appreciate that when he’s really sick he always wants to be babied, and will consent to having his temp taken.
Ah! If it’s an under-the-mouth thermometer, then yes, long-held associations (plus the aggravating inability to talk until the thing goes off) would do it. But there are also the forehead wands and the ear ones? (presumably not presently available, but Someday?) Would those work?
KC – we have an old ear thermometer. Gary wants one of the crowdsourcing thermometers that tell the CDC what you’re tempaturenis so they can track pandemics and flus. Sold out last time I looked.