PPD TEST.

Yesterday I left school early to go get my PPD test. The last time I tried to go they were closed so I went to my doctors to get a form I needed to get filled out, so that the PPD test was the last thing I needed to get done. The PPD test is a test to see if a person has tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused my bacteria. Tuberculosis kills one person every 15 seconds. Crazy, right?! A person can get TB by breathing in mucus particles from the air. You can only get it from breathing in the bacteria not from touching someone or their clothes and it commonly effects the lungs. The symptoms of TB are kind of the same as when you have a cold. You can become tired, weak, lose weight, fever, and night sweats. If it gets worse, you can start to cough, have chest pain, cough of mucus or blood, or have trouble breathing. Because I'm going to be volunteering in a hospital full of people, it's very important to make sure I don't have TB so I won't spread it to other people. If left untreated, a person will just waste away. I don't think I recall having any symptoms like the ones I named above so hopefully I
Person with TB

don't have TB. The way the tested me to see if I have TB, is by injecting PPD (purified protein derivative) into my forearm. They use your forearms because there are less veins. This shot hurt, well burned. Usually when I get shots,
Infected lung with TB.

they burn for about a second while the chemical is going inside of you, but this one burned longer than the usual ones. When she removed the needle, the area in which she injected the PPD looked like a mosquito bite. It was weird, I thought she did something wrong, but that's part of the procedure. It went down eventually and now the area is just red. How they determine if a person has TB is by how the area of the injection reacts. It's not determined by redness, but by size. If it gets big or about 5mm long, then I'd have TB. If it doesn't change or if it grows to 2mm then I don't have it. It's determined two days after the injection, so I have to go back on Friday. My injection doesn't seem to be getting larger even though it's only been a day since I received it, but I'm hoping it doesn't change because who wants TB? NOT ME!