#16: One of the many reasons why my mother is BRILLIANT

I have asthma. As such, about once a year I get pretty sick with asthma attacks, which means taking nebulizer treatments every few hours for a few days. It looks pretty intense if you've never seen it before, but really isn't.
   Well, when I was nine, I got a bad attack from a school soccer game. Inhalers did not work, and after a couple of days of treatments, those did not work either. We went to the doctor, who immediately told us I needed to be hospitalized. We will skip the trauma I had and feeling like I was going to die.
   After the initial fears had past, it was apparent that this was not to be an overnight stay. That weekend also happened to be Halloween. And so, to make lemonade out of lemons, my mom came up with something genius: the went to the pet store and bought 5 live goldfish. Then, with little convincing, asked my nurse, Peggy, if we could have an unused IV bag. The goldfish were placed into the IV bag, which was promptly hung next to my real IV bag. At first glance, it appeared that my body was being pumped with goldfish water.
   Then, Nurse Peggy decided to take it a step further. She called up the woman who was in charge of bringing in the hospital's medical supplies. Upon opening the door to my hospital room, she cried, "Look what they did!!"

   The woman about had a heart attack right there.

  The next 2 minutes sounded like this: "Oh my GOSH!! You poor thing!! How could they do this!?..."
It was all I could do to not bust up laughing right there. Eventually, my mom looked at me and asked, "Should we tell her?" The woman stopped ranting, had that deer in the headlights look for a brief second, and then began cracking up when she realized the whole thing had been a joke.
    For the remainder of my 5-day stay, the goldfish display spread around the hospital and periodically  doctors would peek in my room just to see it. We were famous. :)
  To this day, one of my most favorite photographs is a polaroid of a little girl with oxygen tubes up her nose, her mother and nurse on either side, and a bag of little orange fish swimming innocently around in a hospital IV bag.