Archive for May, 2011

Dark forces are arrayed against me to prevent me from travel

Published at May 21, 2011 in Health, Misbegotten health care and Travel. 2 Comments

In the past year and a half, I have had to cancel/postpone/reschedule three trips that were purely for pleasure:

1. I was scheduled to go to Barcelona in March 2010, but my uncle passed away;

2. I was scheduled to go to Amsterdam in May 2010, but the volcano happened; and

3. I was scheduled to be in New York right now, but my body betrayed me.

Work, family and jobhunting-related trips?  I can take those, fine.  It’s the pleasure trips that elude me.

More on the body betrayal: I didn’t actually bork my liver by getting dehydrated.  Instead, it turns out I have a stone lodged in my common bile duct, and the dehydration pushed it from being happily asymptomatic to being symptomatic.  And once these things become symptomatic, they can back everything up and you’re looking at jaundice, liver shutdown, and life-threatening infections.  Fortunately, my doctor caught me before I left, or I might have been at the ER in Bellevue.

I’m scheduled for a procedure to have the thing removed on Monday.  It’s a pretty non-invasive procedure, in which a scope is inserted via a tube down your throat to peek up your bile duct where it empties into the esophagus.  If they can grab it there, they will; or they’ll cut a small hole in your small intestine and let it drop out there.  There’s a small chance it won’t work and they’ll have to open me up, but chances are good it won’t be an issue.  The biggest complication is pancreatitis, which is extremely painful and sucks very much.  In fact, that’s what Sugarplum had when she stopped eating and her liver went toxic.

I’ve already had my gallbladder out, 24 years ago, due to stones (I got to keep them after the surgery; they were HUGE).  I’m one of the lucky 10% whose bodies just love making stones even after removal of the gallbladder, and when there’s nowhere like the gallbladder for them to collect, they hang around in the bile duct once they get too big to pass through.  So I’ll have to be careful of this in the future (though maybe it’ll be another 24 years before I have to worry about it again, and by then I’ll (hopefully, if it’s still around) be on Medicare).

In the meantime, I’m waiting for my procedure and watching for signs of becoming bright yellow and having shaking chills. Woohoo!

And once again, I’m very glad that this is all coming to a head when I actually have health insurance.  I don’t know what I would have done had I still been uninsured; probably take antacids and hope for the best.  Then turn yellow and die, probably.

I do not like the Cone of Shame

Published at May 15, 2011 in Junebug. 1 Comment

See this look?  This is a look that says, “Keep that fucking Cone of Shame away from me.”

Really. Keep it away. I won’t lick my sutures, I promise.

Junebug’s knee surgery (and teeth cleaning!) went very well and came in a couple of hundred bucks below estimate.  She’s also surprisingly mobile; I would have thought she’d be limping around for weeks, but she’s managed to get herself on and off the couch and bed, and motors along quite well when I take her out.  She’s also got the three-legged pee squat down cold; not for nothing does she have such muscular thighs.

It gets worse

Published at May 15, 2011 in Health and Vanity. 2 Comments

So, the dehydration? Has fucked up my liver.

I was doing okay until Thursday, when I woke up at 4 am in agony.  I felt nauseous and was doubled over in pain; though I got to the brink of vomiting, nothing came out.  I had to take Junebug to the vet that morning, and had several meetings lined up, so I had to go into work.  But I felt completely poleaxed.  It wasn’t just that I was in pain and nauseous; I wasn’t really functioning mentally.  But I got through the morning by clutching a bottle of sports drink (fortunately, I’d just bought some hydration/electrolyte tablets at the running store, and they helped immensely) and left early to go to my doctor.

Which I have, now.  A doctor.  Because I have insurance.

Anyway, my doctor was actually on vacation, so I got his cranky partner, who seemed skeptical that I had identified my internal organs correctly (he asked me to show him where my kidneys were when I said my kidneys hurt, and didn’t seem to take my self-diagnosis of liver pain seriously until he palpated me and discovered that one edge of my liver was unusually firm.  He sent me off to the lab to get some blood drawn and advised me to keep hydrating and make sure I ate.  The next day, he called me with the results: my kidneys, urine, salts and potassium were all fine, but my liver enzymes were elevated.  I should come in to the lab again for a liver panel, and the ultrasound people would be calling me for an appointment, after which I should go see my doctor again.

My brother, who’s a fire-rescue EMT, sees a lot of dehydration on his crews, especially during wildfire season.  He tells me this is pretty typical, given the beating my system just took with the dehydration, and will pass.  I just need to rest, keep taking in fluids, and eat whether I want to or not.

And in the meantime, I can’t exercise.  Which means no half-marathon next Saturday.  I’m still picking up my t-shirt.

Well, that was a great way to spend a Sunday

Published at May 8, 2011 in Health and Sports. 1 Comment

I had my last long training run before the half marathon, 11 miles, on Saturday.  It went really well, though my mouth was terribly dry the whole time (probably due to taking a Claritin) and my legs started cramping at the end.

On Sunday, I woke up feeling fine.  I had some yogurt and raspberries with coffee for breakfast.  About an hour later, I started feeling crampy.  I thought maybe the yogurt had gone off, or I was cramping because my period was coming.  I went to bed, but things only got worse.  My kidneys started feeling sore.

Protip: if your kidneys start hurting, DRINK SOME DAMN WATER.  I didn’t, for quite some time, because unlike on Saturday, my mouth wasn’t dry.  I even thought it was appendicitis.

I got to the point where I thought it would be a good idea to get some medical attention, so I called my insurance company to see where I could go.  They gave me two urgent care centers, both of which were closed.  An ER visit would run me $100 for a copay and probably take all damn day.

I finally got some water, and that helped the cramping, so I drank more.  And I went out and got some Pedialyte.

So I guess I’d gotten way more dehydrated yesterday than I’d realized; I’d consumed two 20-oz. bottles of water and a 20-oz. Gatorade during the 2 hours and 23 minutes I ran, so I thought I was adequately  hydrated.  I probably didn’t realize how much water I was losing because in this climate, I don’t really sweat (or more likely, I still sweat buckets, but it just evaporates instead of hanging around soaking my clothes and running in my eyes).  Also, this hadn’t happened on any of my other runs.

I’m now mainlining water and Pedialyte, and I’m peeing again, so that’s good.  I will pay much closer attention to my hydration on race day AND the day after race day.  That was hellish.

I guess this is how you know

Published at May 4, 2011 in Cali, Life with pets and Dipshittery. 1 Comment

I got an eviction notice yesterday.  I’m not entirely sure why, since my landlord hasn’t called me back. But I suspect it’s because the neighbors complain every time Junebug farts.   And every time that the dog next door barks, which is somehow my fault.

I spent the month of January and part of February leaving a voice-activated digital recorder running in the apartment when I was gone.  With only one or two exceptions, the length of the recordings were between 8 and 16 minutes.  Over the course of 9-12 hours.  Which also included me and my dogwalker announcing the time, traffic noise, leaf blowers and lawn mowers, and the cat meowing.

The property managers met with me, met with my neighbors, reviewed the materials I gave them (a month’s worth of recordings plus a huge memo) and told me everything was fine.  That was the last I’d heard from them until now.

It’s now official:  I hate this place.  I can’t leave for at least another year, but I hate this place.

UPDATE: I just got off the phone with the property manager, who of course won’t tell me much because they want me to come in.  But I highly suspect that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.  Why?  Because he denied that he served me with an eviction notice, then when I said it damn well was an eviction notice BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT SAYS RIGHT ON THE DOCUMENT, THAT YOU’RE TERMINATING MY LEASE IN 60 DAYS, he sort of cavalierly dismissed it as “just procedure” and “I don’t know why it was done.”  This is of course after an entire fucking day in which he didn’t bother returning any of my increasingly frantic phone calls asking why I was being evicted.

As I suspected,  it’s about the dog.  Why he has to send me an eviction notice to get my attention instead of, oh, PICKING UP THE PHONE AND CALLING ME I’m not quite sure.

But I’ve decided I’m going to take them at their word.  They want to send me a termination notice?  Fine.  My lease will terminate within 60 days and I will be moving out by the end of June.   They can pay for the movers.

And I still hate this place.

In which my eyes roll out of my head

Published at May 1, 2011 in Dipshittery. 6 Comments

You know, not everything is “triggering.”   If you’re so sensitive that you find disagreement triggering, you should probably stay off the fucking internet.  Because while it behooves us to avoid some of the major triggers, like violent language, rape imagery, abuse, etc., if your triggers are idiosyncratic and esoteric, you should maybe take it upon yourself to avoid putting yourself in situations where they might be tripped.

Also? I hate to say it, but maybe Kos had a point about the “sanctimonious women’s studies set.”  It appears that the strawfeminist may be real.