So, Wednesday started out well, if by “well”, you mean shoulders-deep in the toilet barfing your guts out. Yay, flu. This, of course, meant I could not go to class. Now, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to miss hanging out with Barb the CNA Instructor from Hell (it should tell you something that I’d rather spend the morning in an intimate gastrointestinal clinch with the toilet than with Barb), but it means I have to make up the last three days of clinicals at the end of the month. Fantastic.
     I also got a lovely phone call to start my morning, today. The phone rang, but by the time I got out to the living room to answer it, it had quit. I checked the number, but didn’t recognize it. As I was shambling back to bed, it rang again. I assumed it was voice mail, but fumble-pushed a button in my sleepy haze anyway, and realized I’d answered it. “Hello?” I said, clambering back into bed.
     It was my ex.
     Yeah, ’cause there’s a voice I want to hear while I’m all curled up warm and comfortable and sleepy in bed.
     He wanted to know if I’d claimed him on my taxes or anything when I filed this year, because apparently, he went to file his taxes and discovered that his social security number was already being used on someone’s tax forms.
     ”No.” I said. “I haven’t filed my taxes yet.”
     ”Oh. Okay then. Well, thanks.”
     I hung up on him and glared at the phone, dropping it on the night stand and grumbling to myself. Call me? Pfft. Call me, and then call back when I don’t answer? At ten in the morning? Jesus, I hate that crap. I have voice mail. Use it. I mean, in this case, if only so I can giggle at it and then never call you back.
     In other news, a man seems to be free of HIV after a stem cell transplant:

     ”The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”
     The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man’s leukemia, not the HIV itself.
     However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. The mutation cripples a receptor known as CCR5, which is normally found on the surface of T cells, the type of immune system cells attacked by HIV.

     This is fantastic news!