Ouch.

I got an HIVtestforvisapurposes yesterday. Yes, that's all one word. As in, "Hi, I have a 10:30 appointment for an HIVtestforvisapurposes." Sure as I was that I'd never see these doctors again, that they'd seen every STD imaginable, I had to let them know the test was just a formality. I wasn't that kind of girl.
The test ended up taking up much of my day. First there was all the new patient paperwork, then the two and a half hours spent in the waiting room (ask me anything about "Paulie," a movie about a talking bird--I've seen it one and a half times now) then the nurse taking down my height and weight, then the doctor sending me across the street to where the lab was, then the wandering around the hospital searching for the lab, then the lab receptionist with the press-on nails who thought "MS" was the abbreviation for Massachusetts. And as a reward for dealing with all this, I got to be stabbed in the arm, and drained of a test tube's worth of my blood.
And we wonder why people don't get tested for HIV more often.
At least I didn't get a lot of sexual history questions--that would've been the icing on my HIVtestforvisapurposes cake. I was kind of expecting an interrogation like the one Samantha on "Sex and the City" got when she went in for testing. It's probably just as well, as my sexual history is something that even long-winded historian David McCullough wouldn't be able to write more than a pamphlet about. I did get "Are you an intravenous drug user?" which I felt I didn't even have to answer. If my "no" to that question didn't convince the nurse, I'm sure she got the message once she took the needle out and I started shaking like a frightened kitten.