Temperature: 55°F. Weather: Mostly Clear.

As usual we begin with a rant

Again, thank you very much, Father, for going back off the deep end and showing me just how callous you can be about things. It’s really telling that you were literally the last person to ask how I was after my procedures.

He didn’t show up to provide a ride, as he’d promised he would; luckily, I had already planned for this eventuality. My aunt also had a total flake moment; she’d sided with his “science is just a convenience and we don’t really need it” remark, and took personal offense that I hadn’t taken her offer of being over her place after the procedures and being there ore. First off, if she’d been where I had gotten my “sit around” ride, she couldn’t have babysat as she’d been doing all day; second, I don’t know the layout of her house; third, most importantly, she doesn’t have a car. The place would not have performed the procedure if I had not had an actual ride.

Both of those would have put me out $200.

Having backup in place weeks in advance wasn’t distrust on my part. It was fucking smart.

Meanwhile in Nowhereland

The procedures went, from what I hear, smoothly. The doctor had me knocked completely the hell out for both of them. I remember a needle of stuff in my IV that made my legs very heavy, followed by being wheeled into the room where the procedures and told to turn on my left side, but hey, what the fuck is movement, and, you know this bed is really feeling like a marshmallow like now?

The next thing I’m aware of I’m back out in the first room, the first doctor asking me how I was feeling.

I had…a lot of nonsensical gibberish there. I had no idea what was going on.

“Need a Coke?”

THAT, I understood. Three minutes into the Coke I understood things again. It was time for the information…

And the Verdict Is—

That I don’t have anything lethal! …that we know of. The doctor calls me with pathology results in two weeks.

That’s the good news!

The bad news is that SOMEFUCKINGHOW, on top of lifelong IBS I’ve acquired a case of GERD that has progressed so far that it has not only inhibited nutritrient absorption and retention in my body (hence the ridiculous weight loss), but also progressed far enough that it’s started wrecking the lower half of my digestive system, which is why the painful brick acid sensation in my guts—and the back spasms I’ve been having have been quieted by the Bentyl because they had nothing to do with my back: yes, it is in fact more of my gut attacking me.

My entire digestive tract has been reduced to one raw, throbbing mass of meat. We can’t call it an ulcer because that would imply a single isolated location of bad. It has no protection and can’t heal on its own. For the next five months I’m going to be on ridiculously strong medications that are going to reduce my stomach to a very, very non-adventurous blob. It’ll take five days for THOSE to kick in.

So far, so good…at least for the next two weeks.

Let's start with…well, how the hell does one describe THIS?

Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment.

Yes, I realize it seems that I start every other entry with that phrase, but I have a lot of doctors, and therefore there are a lot of appointments to be had half of the time. And I have to work to keep them all straight sometimes. It's a good thing that three of them are in the same building, or there would be some trouble. Anyway, the usual happened—poke, prod, measurements, weight's high, blood pressure's…actually, THAT was alarmingly low that day. We're keeping an eye on that.

I've mentioned once or twice that there's a problem with my system—peripheral neuropathy, that thing where your body's nerves are just sort of fried, misfire, and in general HURT A LOT even without provocation. The problem is, we couldn't figure out why it was happening, because I'm not diabetic. I don't have rheumatoid arthritis. I don't have MS. I don't even have your basic pernicious anemia, the B12 deficiency that would ALSO cause the problems I've been putting up with.

The last few months have been a game of Dr. House—work with a list of ideas, throw ideas at the list, throw as many medications as my constitution will allow at it, and see if it will work. Everything that we did that approach with had some problems with it—the annoying one, the time we thought it was shingles (excuse me, the time we HOPED it was shingles), the medication gave me the worst nosebleeds, and I had to drop it like a hot potato. It was unpleasant. What was MORE unpleasant was the fact that it took three instances of elimination process—dropping everything else I was taking at the time—to uncover it.

*record scratch*

I don't recommend that, especially if you're on a crapton of head-meds. It will Fuck You Up if you don't know what you're doing.

*music resumes*

Anyway, back at the doctor's office, I explain the NEW annoying crap that my system's been doing, plus the return of the stomach ulcer and the havoc it's wrought on my system in the interim. As I'm explaining the new neuropathy stuff, the doctor explains that Ulcer 2: Electric Bugaloo is because—LUCKY ME—I have severe IBS, and anything that could irritate my gut will therefore come with a free dose of the It Gets Worse trope. In my case, that means the ibuprofen that I had to take after the time I got shot wrecked my stomach a bit more hardcore than it would have otherwise. All I really can do right now is avoid any stomach irritants until it heals.

Oh, and THAT'S the good news.

Next thing that happens, doc orders me to stretch out on that cold table thing and starts prodding at places
To my shock, EVERYTHING IS RAW. (Especially the ulcer zone.) The bad leg goes twitchy when he gets to it, just like it did at the neurologist's office, which I explain when he jumps—it's a fairly violent twitchy, like if everything in the leg was a joint and he hit all of it at once with one of those reflex-hammer-things (I have no idea what those things are called).

It's at this point that the doctor informs me that now we KNOW what we're dealing with, and that there is no way my insurance is going to cover these medications.

"What are they?"

"Gabapentin, Neurontin, that sort of thing."

Fuck, I think. "That sounds like fibro meds."

"If I were you, I'd think about filing for partial disability, or medical, both if you can manage it."

Fuck, I think again. "What if I did and it didn't work?"

"Keep at it, make'em tired of seeing you, and as SOON as you even get a MAYBE," he says, "get back in here, because if we can't get this managed, it WILL get worse."

"Ain't gotta tell me twice."

So, what Friday boils down to is this: the neuropathy diagnosis was an UNDER-diagnosis with a dose of optimism, hoping that it WASN'T worse than that. What we're actually dealing with is fibromyalgia, which is a step ABOVE your garden-variety neuropathy—for one, it doesn't take the diabeetus to show up. Medicine knows jack shit about it, or what causes it, or why it hits who it hits. It doesn't kill, but boy will it make your life hell.

But there is an upside:

Actual content--interesting things, 100 Things, challenges, fic, original content, basically me NOT being a reclusive dick--will return on Saturday, October 19th.

Why then?

That's a day after I get back from my NEXT doctor's appointment.

The fact is, things keep getting worse. My leg has flared to the point where it feels just like the beginning, the muscle having wasted to the point where it is visibly thinner than the other leg. My arms and legs are a searing, burning pain throughout half of the day, my eyes are a painful, scrapey mess, and--the most annoying thing right now--motherfucking ESTROGEN. My brain is so scrambled, it's like the brainzaps are the norm now and sudden bursts of clarity are the brainzaps now. Friday, I'm hoping to get some answers.

I WILL answer to comments dropped here--kuro_pantsu, we need to work on a schedule for braaaaaaaaaains the thingy, and I figured out why my brain couldn't figure two things at once--that cocky bastard WAS a vet--FOR THE OTHER GUYS.

alkonost_storm, when I get back, we can eenie-meenie-minie-moe any RP to start up again and I am NOT allowed to argue. (TL;DR--I'm your bitch for the evening!)

EVERYONE ELSE whose handles I haven't memorized? SEND WHITE MAGES. ALL OF THE WHITE MAGES. EVEN THE ONES THAT AREN'T SO GOOD AT IT.

So apparently, the labs aren’t done yet. They tell me it’ll be about a week. However, we DO now have a name for my arms and legs going numb/burny at random moments. It’s this stuff right here. The kicker is, I don’t have diabetes mellitus, so there’s no apparent reason for this to be happening to me.

So now we just sit and wait for the labs to come in.

I occasionally jump in on things that my friends on Facebook have weighed in on. Today, a person was lamenting that their now ex-girlfriend has apparently gone on birth control (referred to hereafter as BC) when she apparently wasn’t before. The original poster seemed to be, to put it bluntly, rather butthurt about the whole deal: he bought into the conservative fallacy of being on BC = promiscuity.

In all likelihood, the odds are she was on it in the first place, so I took a devil’s advocate position on the whole thing, explaining that hormonal contraception is used not only for contraception, but also a form of HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for reproductive issues.

I for one went on birth control around the time right after seeing my now on-again first boyfriend: mostly because it would give me relief from the migraines. (What they don’t tell you about it? YOU GET MOAR BEWBS.) The fact that it gave me free license to jump his bones (didn’t happen, I kept getting cockblocked) was a bonus.

The point is, there’s more than one reason to go on BC. And that decision should be up to the woman in question. NOT a bunch of white-haired old men who think that the body has ways to shut down unwanted pregnancies as in the case of incest and [trigger word redacted]. The fact is, most of the government trying to regulate what we do to our bodies are men—who therefore have a barely-working knowledge of how making babies work in the first place—Todd Akin, anybody?—and don’t seem to bother with science at all. Look at the conservatives’ positions on the subject, and you see a lot of DIVINE VIRTUE and GOD’S WILL and ABOMINATION AGAINST NATURE and AGAINST THE HOLY WORD!

You don’t see…what’s it called—oh, right. SCIENCE. You don’t see the medical experts’ views. You don’t see doctors. You don’t see internists. YOU DON’T SEE WOMEN. Or at least, you don’t see women when you’re not looking inside of Mitt Romney’s infamous binders. Pretty much, the one segment of the population that has anything to do with this whole thing is being silenced. The right to do to our bodies what we want to do, even in cases of improvement of our own health, we’re stuck under the thumb of conservative pols and the damn Church.

And I’m not comfortable with a bunch of old men who won’t let girls join their club trying to tell me what to do with my own huevos internales at every chance they get.

An ancient institution should not be taking the place of a trained medical professional. Church, I don’t turn around and tell you how to massage your prostates. Don’t tell me how to make my ovaries behave, and DON’T go around sticking lighted wands all up in the Promised Land just because you think that a cluster of cells that has not yet even developed a rudimentary nervous system should have sole control over what I do.

That isn’t pro-life. That’s pro-birth. After the birth, where are these people? “Oh, we’re not going to provide assistance to you, you should have known better than to get pregnant in the first place. Oh, and spermicides and condoms and stuff like that is also the devil so no you can’t have it unless you want to go to hell and you don’t want that now do you, silly woman?”

We’re not baby machines. Stop treating us like baby machines. Get out of our laws. For fuck’s sake, start treating women like PEOPLE, you old dustbags. Until then, I’ll just travel about until I can get the medical help I need for my hormonal issue.

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Crap.”

Three short words in a tiny doctor’s exam room mean much more than I though they would.

( (MEANWHILE IN TEPHIRETH MY BODY...) )

So I think I’ve figured out how I’ve pulled that muscle in my arse. Mainly because I just did it AGAIN.

I finished futzing around with the space bags and let me tell you the space get was A-MAZ-ING. But the compression of size doesn’t do anything for the weight of the stuff. I finished hauling my tiny heavy linens and lay down for a second and a half to get my breath--

*Ka-chr—TICK*

“OW FUCKFLANS!”

Springing right the hell back up? BAD MOVE. Flat again in a beat.

“…great.”

This is the part where I vote in favor of coconut milk and cookies.