This past week my throat has been in a constant scratchy, burning pain. My voice has been sort of on and off, and I started to get a cough as well. It hurt to drink anything, and I was so fed up with feeling this way. So I decided to go to the Health Center and see if I could get an appointment.

Whenever I am sick or need to go to the doctors, I am pretty used to my mom being there to take care of me or to make an appointment for me, so this was the first time that I really had to take care of something like this completely by myself.

Luckily, since it is summer and the health center wasn’t too busy, they were able to squeeze me in. I sat in the waiting room for about 10 minutes before a nurse came out of the door and called my name. It pretty much played out like a normal check up at first. I took off my shoes and got measured and weighed, and then I went into a clean, white room and sat in a chair next to the nurse.

She began to ask me questions about any medications I am taking, and told me to describe to her what has been going on. I told her how I have had a pretty sore throat for the past few days, and the other night I felt like I had a fever because I got the chills and was physically shivering in my bed for an hour. I had no energy and felt like I couldn’t even stand up. That hadn’t happened since then, but my throat was still really bothering me.

After she wrote down my symptoms, she told me she was going to give me a strep test just in case. “Oh god,” I thought, “this better not be what I think this is.” Unfortunately, it was exactly what I thought it was. The nurse asked me to open mouth and then had to stick a very long cotton swab down my throat until I gagged. All I will say is I would much rather get a shot than do that, it is a terrible feeling.

Then the nurse left and told me that the doctor would see me shortly.

After about 5 minutes, the doctor came in, a blonde woman who looked to be about my parent’s age, followed by a younger woman who looked like a student. The doctor asked me if it was okay that her student intern was in here and would examine me as well, and of course I said that it was fine. The student then took over, asking me how I had been feeling and entering my answers into a computer, and I gave her the same spiel I had given the nurse. She then told me to come sit on the higher chair with a long wax paper sheet on it. The doctor looked into my nose, ears, and mouth, and told me that my throat looked a little inflamed, but nothing more than that.

Then I sat back in the chair, and the doctor checked my strep test results. Luckily, my test came back negative, and she told me that it is not my tonsils either. In the end, I really just caught a sore throat that had been going around, and she told me that the best thing to do was to keep doing what I already had been. Keep taking advil, eating cough drops, and getting plenty of rest.

I left the Health Center glad that I had gotten myself checked out, and that it was luckily not anything too serious. It was a very new experience having to do all of that myself without my parents there, but it also gave me a sense of independence.