So Ici has been blogging daily since the new year started. I know that doesn’t sound like much (since it’s what, the 4th?), but that would be more posts than I’ve done in the last 6 months.

So I decided I should post something. And once again I have absolutely nothing to say.

Let me think.

I’ve lost 89.2 pounds. And I should want to talk about that. But I don’t find I have a lot to say. I’ve switched from eating to shopping, which I really can’t afford. I have actually discovered I like clothes shopping, but there’s no point in buying a lot of clothes because I’ll just get too small for them. I do like the change though.

Work is getting really stressful because we’re getting ready to move next month. But there’s not really that much to say about that either.

Life is good, my relationship is good, the electric bill because of all the reptiles is obscene, and I spent too much on Christmas, but it was a lot of fun.

Christmas was rather amusing… My dad’s family was wonderful. My mom’s family was a train wreck. Even though there was no actual family gathering planned for that half the family, names were drawn. Apparently I was the only person who actually figured out how to get the presents to the people my girlfriend and I were chosen to give gifts to. My mother and her sister have decided that my cousins no longer get to be in the gift exchange because they didn’t get gifts from them this year. Please note: they have screwed other people in the gift exchange before, this was just the first time it was the two of them.

My girlfriend got screwed too when my uncle got her a gift, but then told her it would cost her $50 to have it. Then when he tried to install it, he broke one of the plastic pieces on her car. In the end the installation didn’t work out, so he never really gave her anything. (I told him what to get her: a bloody Starbuck’s gift card. Those make her obscenely happy.)

But really, other than the fact that my uncle is a tacky little fucker, none of this is that big a deal; most of this just shows the bad blood that happens to be running through the family right now. Funny. All the deaths in my dad’s side of the family brought everyone closer together. Grandma’s health issues seem to be slowly tearing the family apart.

I should care, I really should, but I don’t. Whenever I get sucked into doing anything with that side of the family I usually regret it, and this slow degradation means I never have to see them all in mass. Frankly, it just seems like a bonus.

New Years was special: my girlfriend got the flu on New Year’s Eve, The main sewer line backed up on New Years Day, and last night’s storm blew a chunk of the fence down in the back yard. But A is better now, and we don’t have to pay for the fence or having Roto Rooter come fix the sewer line.

And may I just say, I was pleased with my Roto Rooter experience. They said someone would be here in an hour, the guy was here in 20 minutes. He had the house back up and running in 30 minutes. It was very nice.

I don’t really have any New Year’s resolutions. I do have 2 goals though:

1. No unplanned hospital stays.
2. Fewer trips to the emergency room.

Granted they’re not exactly things I can control, so perhaps it’s more of a wish list. But a girl can dream.

Happy New Year, y’all!

I guess that question would make more sense if I actually updated about the shit that has gone down since September.

Last we spoke I’d declared war on August and was desperately grateful it was over…

Oh. My. God.

I just realized all I posted was a few lines about the fast.

Nothing about all the shit that’s gone down since I turned 32.

Oops.

The ironic part is it’s spiraled so far out of control that most of it feels like ancient history. Honestly, I think Furina visited about three years ago, not less than two months ago.

So… Since the beginning of August of this year I’ve been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, been put on a fast (lost 44 lbs in 6 weeks which is *insane*), seem to have ditched the diabetes via the fast, got rid of the sleep apnea by losing 44 lbs, had a 6 week period, had a DNC and endometrial ablation as treatment for the 6 week period, and got a shit load of blood clots as a result of the out patient surgery, resulting in multiple bilateral pulmonary embolisms.

Say that 5 times fast.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, pulmonary embolism means a blood clot trapped somewhere around a lung. They usually don’t form there, but migrate there. Their presence slows the flow of blood going past the lungs so even though your lungs work fine, you run out of breath because you can’t get enough oxygenated blood out of the lung area to the rest of your body. Bilateral means both sides, in this case both lungs. Multiple is self evident. So basically I have (or at this point, perhaps, had) multiple blood clots interrupting the blood flow around both lungs. This is not the same as cutting off the blood flow. That’s when you die. (See exhibit A: my father.)

Apparently your body can, over time, break the clots down. But to prevent the little pieces of clot that break off from forming new clots, they put you on blood thinners. As of Monday my blood was 4 times thinner than normal. (That’s overkill. It’s supposed to be between 2-3 times thinner. They’ve scaled back my blood thinner.) I get my blood tested about twice a week while they try to get this where it’s supposed to be.

I haven’t been to work in weeks. It’s been so long that I’m actually starting to miss it. I’m supposed to be applying for SDI, but it’s sort of a paper work nightmare, so I have to have yet another doctor fill out yet another form. In the meanwhile, I have given up every fucking vice I have ever had except for gaming. Between the fast (which I am still on, they even let me continue it while I was in the hospital) and the blood thinners, I am no longer allowed to: eat food, drink alcohol, drink caffeine, smoke, or go in hot tubs. Now would seem like the time to discover recreational drugs, but those are verboten as well. That’s where the question of “Where the fuck do you go from here?” comes into play. Vices are more than just a habit or an addiction; they serve a purpose. My addictions function as stress relief. Besides the fact that I have no idea what to do with myself, there’s the issue of I have no idea how to relax without these things.

When I explained this to a coworker who called to see how I was doing, she remarked “I’m glad your getting healthy.” If I could have reached through the phone to smack her, I would have.

But the statement has sort of stuck with me.

If I am getting healthy, even if it’s somewhat involuntary, I suppose it’s time to learn healthy relaxation techniques. (And talk about involuntary. I’ve reached my goal for the bariatric surgery, but I can’t have surgery for 6 months because of the clots. So my doctor wants me to stay on the fast for 6 more months. 6 more months!)

I guess there’s not much more to say. I mean, there’s tons more, but it kind of doesn’t matter at this point. Hell, at this point, I’m not sure what does still matter. And I guess that’s the really big issue. This is supposed to be life altering. And it is. But I don’t quite know how much my life has been altered. So I feel a little lost.

Life is insane, it must be coming up on Samhain.

Yesterday the combination of three days of no real food and the start of my period resulted in a catastrophic meltdown. My girlfriend found me in the kitchen sobbing and laughing hysterically, completely unable to stop. She was very sweet about it, and gave me a hug, fed me lunch, and put me down for a nap. Some days you just need to be babied.

Today I woke up feeling great. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far it hasn’t. I actually feel good. You have no idea how odd that is. *I* had no idea how odd it was until I realized it was happening. I don’t think I realized how crappy I felt before.

Oh, and I found unsweetened Scharfenberger cocoa powder, which I am allowed to add to my shakes as it meets the criteria of sugar free, caffiene free, and fewer than X calories per serving. It was expensive, but god was it worth it. Really amazing chocolate flavor is exactly what their chocolate shakes needed.

I do hope the stress dreams about eating food I’m not supposed to end soon. Those are a little weird.

So, I’m not quite hysterical, but tonight I have my first meeting for the Metabolic Nutrition program, which is where I get all my stuff, and starting tomorrow, I believe, I quit eating.

As I said, I’m not quite hysterical, but I suspect I will be in another 6 hours or so.

So, I love the new doctor. She was exactly what I wanted: kind, patient, familiar with the process I need to go through to get this surgery, competent, well spoken, and able to suggest options based on what I told her. No wonder she’s so damn hard to get an appointment with. But oh my fucking god, is she worth the wait.

The whole appointment went so well I came out with a smile on my face, and actually looking forward to my follow up appointment next month.

Until I called my mom and told her about it.

Don’t take that as “I called my mom and she told me how it sucked, blah, blah, blah.” Nothing of the sort.

It’s just that while explaining to her what my doctor and I decided was the best course of action, I suddenly realized what it was that I agreed to do.

That would be a 6+ month supervised medical fast.

That’s right boys n girls, in honor of the green hair, I’m gonna spend 6 months learning how to photosynthesize, or at least that’s what I’m planning on telling my coworkers if they ask.

(Oh, yeah, last night I dyed the hair teal, except the green dye kind of seriously over powered the blue. But it’s really pretty none the less.)

Still, the idea of essentially not eating for 6 months is damn scary. Except for the times when I just sort of wonder if I can functionally quit eating for the rest of my life because then I wouldn’t have to think about what I can or can’t eat. There’s a seriously warped appeal to that idea.

And before anyone freaks out completely, yes, this will be doctor supervised. Weekly doctors appointments and lab work to make sure I’m okay. It’ll be weird, and horrifying, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be pretty insane for most of it.

But somehow I’m still sorta looking forward to it.

So yesterday I had a “consultation appointment” with a new doctor, and after $10 and an hour of waiting, I spoke to him for 5 minutes. He does sports medicine and urgent care. He doesn’t know jack shit about bariatric surgery and how to get it. The good news is that he was completely up front with this information, and didn’t dick me around hemming and hawing about the whole thing. That beats the shit out of the last psycho bitch I saw. But I shouldn’t have had to go in for an appointment to find this information out. I specifically told the person I spoke to on the phone what I was looking for and this was the best she could apparently do. I’m just a bit annoyed by that fact. On the other hand, he gave me a possible name, and it’s one of the names the clinic gave me before. (The clinic gave me some suggestions after I’d already scheduled the appointment I went to yesterday.)

It’s hard, half the staff seem genuinely incapable of giving me the information I want, and the doctors are literally inaccessible outside these appointments. But there has to be a better way to get this information.

Oh and I found out how much I actually weigh. That was…. special.

mood: wavering somewhere between “blah” and “annoyed”, with occasional “mad cow” tendencies.
music: Black Eyed Peas – Anxiety

I feel like I should post something because things have happened since my last post, and that feels like a shitty place to leave off. But I don’t really feel like posting either.

The day after talking to the clinic, I was able to get some recommendations for doctors to try, and on the 30th I have a consultation visit with one of them to see what he has to say and how I feel about him. This is a good thing.

I need to call at least one other doctor and make an appointment I suppose, but I can’t quite bring myself to care.

I don’t seem to care about much these days. In fact, I think I’m sort of depressed.

Unusual because there’s a LAN party tomorrow.

Maybe that’ll help bring me out of this.

Mood: blah Music: the ticking of the clock. Only one hour of work left.

In which I discover that there are worse things in life than Kaiser.

So after watching the afore mentioned documentary, I started looking up more info about Lap-band. One of the things I found was that the John Muir Weight Loss Surgery Center performs the surgery. This is great. My insurance allows me to pick my doctor, but based on the location of the doctor, I get assigned to a medical group. I happen to be assigned to the “John Muir/Mt Diablo” medical group, which seems like things should work out nicely.

I spent a lot of time reading their web site, and finally got up the nerve to fill out the online form requesting more information and a screening interview. The site informed me that it could take 3 – 5 business days for them to get back to me.

2 weeks later I still hadn’t heard from them.

They talk about the assorted support staff you can see there, but it’s by referral only. So I decided to make an appointment with my doctor.

Now, I’ve never actually met this doctor before. I had decided I wanted a woman doctor, and there were only three to pick from in the John Muir/Mt Diablo medical group. And one of them wasn’t accepting new patients. I flipped a coin and selected Dr. Teresa Rudlowski. Next time I’m picking tails on the coin toss.

Last time I tried to schedule an appointment with this doctor, I discovered that she works in Concord only 2 days a week, and the rest of her time is spent in Fairfield of all places. As I recall, her office was unable to give me a referral to a doctor that my insurance would cover. (They gave me several referrals. They just all turned out to be 1) retired or 2) not in my medical group.) Still, I’d never actually met the woman and decided to schedule an appointment anyway. HUGE mistake.

It took two weeks before they could see me. And some time between when I scheduled the appointment and actually had the appointment I managed to lose my Pacificare card. (oops.) I didn’t realize I didn’t have it until about an hour before the appointment. So I did the only thing I could think to on such short notice: called Pacificare and asked what my ID number was, and for any other information they thought my doctor’s office might need.

To illustrate how incredibly impressive this particular tactic was, let me just point out that I spent the entire damn day having panic attacks about this point. I didn’t go to work that day because I just couldn’t cope. So I don’t think the part where I forgot to write down the Pacificare phone number was a gigantic oversight. Except it was. When I got there, they needed to call Pacificare to request some info, and couldn’t because 1) they didn’t have a computer, and 2) they’d mislaid their Pacificare directory. Seriously. No computer. The doctor didn’t have one in her office either. I don’t know how a doctor’s office makes it into the 21st century in the bay area without a computer, but somehow they’d done it. The appointment went downhill from there.

I filled out obscene quantities of paperwork, dredging up all sorts of fun familial medical history. They then put me in the exam room, which had all the amenities you’d expect from a 1960’s East German medical exam room. The doctor, an older, white haired woman with a heavy German accent came in, and sat next to me, briefly perused my paperwork, ignored the page where I wrote down WHY I CAME TO THIS APPOINTMENT, and began muttering about how I needed a full panel of lab tests. None of this did a damn thing to make me relax.

Eventually I started ignoring her muttering and tried to tell her why I was there. (Including the fact that sometimes when I stress out, my heart does this weird thing where it can’t seem to beat for just a few seconds, before finally taking a beat and continuing normally. It happens once every few months, usually in stressful situations. It happened 3 or 4 times while I was in her office.) I mentioned that I wanted a referral to the Surgery Center. I mentioned that I wasn’t sleeping well at night. I mentioned the heart thing. I mentioned that I was *having* the heart thing right there in the office.

She then murmured something about knowing a woman who got an apartment next door to a gym and who worked out an hour a day. She ignored the heart thing. She mumbled something about a neat new drug that had just come out for sleep issues and mentioned something about me doing a sleep study to check for sleep apnea. She then started telling me that I had to lose 30 pounds to get the referral. (no, I need to lose 30 pounds to get the surgery. I know they make you lose weight before hand, to prove that you’re willing to work at this. The surgery helps, but you still have to be able to put in effort. That’s fine. But I should be able to talk to these people without having to lose 30 pounds to learn more about the fucking procedure.) The problem was, she didn’t have a scale that went up high enough to weigh me. And rather than tell me where I could go and get weighed, she suggested that maybe Mt Diablo would have a scale, and perhaps I could stop and ask them. Seriously.

By this point I’d been there more than an hour, and was SO stressed that my period, which had finished a few days before, started again. I think the proper term is hemorrhaging. The cramps were hellish, and the rest of the visit was spent in excruciating pain (for which they could give me NOTHING?!?), while I kept out pacing my damn tampons. I kept having to go to the bathroom again and again to deal with this problem, while the nurse, who conveniently forgot to mention that I’d need to be providing a urine sample when I asked to use the bathroom BEFORE my appointment, kept shoving urine sample collection cups at me and giving me dirty looks when I said I was sorry but that I didn’t need to go.

The only plus side to the period nightmare was that it stopped the irregular stress heartbeats. I’ve never done that twice in one day, let alone 4 or so times in 20 minutes.

In the end she couldn’t figure out how to refer me to, well, anything. She couldn’t give me a referral to the Surgery Center, she couldn’t give me a referral to the sleep study, she couldn’t give me a referral to the Cardiac center to check my heart. (Instead she had the nurse try to use an EKG machine they had, but the machine just kept complaining of a paper jam, so they asked me to come back another day to have a tech who was out try it. Yes, because I had SO MUCH FUN on my last visit.) She couldn’t even give me a referral to a fucking dietitian. The only “referral” she could give me was to an Ob/Gyn for a pap smear. Except I don’t actually need a referral from her to get a pap smear. I’m allowed to call and make that appointment on my own.

In the end, she gave me an extensive panel of lab tests, and a prescription for Ambien, and that was only because I refused to leave until she gave me something for the not sleeping, and since she can’t figure out referrals, it’ll have to be chemical.

I’m not going back. I canceled the appointment to return for the EKG, and I’ll be getting a new general practitioner. What a nightmare.

Mood : pissed off Music : Soundtrack to the Sam & Max Freelance Police games