Administering an Epi-pen

So who wants to smuggle me Cafe Rio?

Or who knows if I can get it in the Salt Lake Airport…causing i’m having a withdrawal.

But in all honesty, we find out Thursday or Friday if we have our Visas, and if we have our Visas, we leave Monday!!! AHHHHHHH!! This is so crazy!! I can’t believe it!!

As some of you know, when I get super excited for something or super nervous about it, I have a hard time sleeping, so one night this week, I had a little while to think about lots of things. One of the places my thoughts went was to pre-mortality. Now what I’m about to say isn’t doctrine, but it’s fun to think about haha. Imagine you were sitting next to your friend in Heaven, waiting to get your letter that had your plans of your life for when you came to Earth. Mine said that I would be born and raised in the Gospel, with a great family, in America, and I was so excited! But then I looked over at my best friend’s assignment. It said, that they would be born in Taiwan, without knowledge of the Gospel, and in an eh..okay family situation. They looked up at me with tears in their eyes and made me promise them that I would find them and share the Gospel with them. That’s why I’m going to Taiwan on a mission. haha cool!! So then the other part of this was in relations to the challenges we face on Earth. When we were in Heaven, do you think: we were assigned all our trials with no say, we choose them all for ourselves, or we volunteered in place of those we love so we could protect them and they wouldn’t have to go through it? I like to think it’s a mixture of all of them because, “If not me then who?” I love thinking about these questions and love having the mindset that there are people waiting for me. I really hope I can find them and fulfill my promises to them! Random thoughts from Sister Andersen on a Monday haha hope you all find some joy in them!!

We had a few scary things happen in our zone this week, and I am very grateful that I am a trained EMT. I’ll talk about a specific experience from Wednesday. On Wednesday, we were coming back from lunch and were going to stop at the residence hall so that we could brush our teeth before heading to class. When we walked in the door, one of our newest sisters (they’ve been here for a week at this point) came sprinting towards me going, “WE NEED YOUR HELP!!” She was on the verge of tears. As I went chasing after her, we ran past their bedroom where her roommates were searching frantically and into the bathroom where her companion was sitting in the bathroom trying to make herself throw up. She made the motion of needing an Epi-pen injection (She couldn’t talk because her throat was swelling closed and she was having a really hard time breathing). So I went running back to her room, where one of the roommates had finally found the Epi-pen. As I was quickly learning the story of how she accidentally ate a cookie with walnuts in it, and she is deathly allergic to nuts, I tossed one of the roommates the [cell] phone and said call the front desk, put in on speaker phone, and tell them to call 911. I delivered the Epi-pen dose and then proceeded to tell the 911 dispatch everything that went down. (This was the first actual Epi-pen I’ve ever delivered!! 😱) I waited with her, watching to make sure she was okay, and wasn’t going to need another dose, until 911 got to the dorms and took her and her companion to the emergency room. I then gave the Branch President a phone call and told him to meet them at the hospital. It was a very scary experience for all of those girls, but the good news now is that she is perfectly okay and back to being a safe little missionary.