Observances

Today a woman (and I use that term loosely) approached me while dancing a lemur-like dance, with her arms waving in the air as she seemed to leap and fling herself with her hips, all while singing. Others in the room were heard as if their speakers were on a two or three, and her voice was booming at nine, causing me to recoil. It took effort not to protect my ears, as my hand instinctively wanted to do. My eyes decided to make up for it by blinking so rapidly that it nearly caused me to have a seizure. She roared and laughed out this story about how her parents only ever played 50s music when she was growing up, some 25 years after the 50s I should add, and she still loved it to this day. In fact, things in life all somehow corresponded back to various songs in her memory bank, and often she is overcome with the need to sing the appropriate song for the occasion.

All I could think about was how I would really like to punch her right in the nose.

You do not behave this way in public, and you certainly don’t walk up to a group of complete strangers singing, dancing like a rhythmless white girl, and then telling everyone around about your childhood music experiences, and how they turned you into a raving lunatic.

She was way too goddamn happy. Drugs? Mental illness? In need of a good ass kicking? Some pampered princess who has never experienced life? What? What makes someone this freakishly happy? Whatever it is, we must seek the cause and kill it. People like her shouldn’t be allowed to walk around behaving this way. And if they are truly this happy, they should be forced to keep it to themselves.

Singing when there’s no music? Um, no. This is why people like me hate musicals. Only deranged, drugged or damaged people do this. Dancing, and very badly at that, when there’s no music? Even worse. In public, surrounded by strangers? Oh boy. Stand back. And then telling them half your life story? Euthanasia is the only option.

Happy, loud people who share too much: hate them.

* * *

On Monday, I had a series of appointments with multiple doctors scheduled back to back to back, and the first took far less time than anticipated, so I found myself driving around Bannockburn, Illinois, wasting time until my next appointment.

Bannockburn lies among the other North Shore suburbs like Highland Park and Lake Forest, notorious for their wealthy residents. I’m not a huge fan of the rich. I worked in Highland Park too long and was treated so poorly by much of the clientele that I have a bitter taste in my mouth each time I drive through the area, even 13 years later. However, I had time to kill and I decided to take a gander at how the rich and famous live.

Do you know what? Most of those houses were fugly! Big, square, obnoxious monstrosities! Some had these hideous metal sculptures in their front yard, as if to give passersby the impression that the owner had avant-guard flair, which translated to me as a wealthy version of pink-fucking-flamingos. Tacky. My eyes threatened to sprain from rolling so much. Who the hell takes themselves this seriously? There were some gorgeous homes, don’t get me wrong, because not everyone who has money is totally in love with himself and is trying to persuade others to feel the same. How insecure can you be? Why would you live in a home that has only three windows and is shaped like a psychotic architect tried to incorporate every conceivable shape into different rooms in the same house? I couldn’t help but laugh.

It made me realize that we aren’t so different from the rich. They’re just as moronic and garish as we are, trying hard to be noticed. The only difference is they have more money.

Yet I did notice a few more differences.

For one, they had hardly any for-sale signs. If you drive through my neighborhood, there are easily two or more houses for sale on every block, and these don’t include the ones that sit empty, nor do they include the ones recently foreclosed. Everywhere you look, homes are for sale by me, and they remain for sale for months on end, until the signs rot and fall over on the lawn. So, unless the rich sell their mansions in a way that doesn’t include public signage, it seemed to me that the folks in Bannockburn aren’t struggling with the same economic problems we are.

Another thing I noticed was the street names. Tennyson, Keats, Kipling, Malory, and Shelley. No matter how ugly your house is or what nasty metal atrocities you install on your front lawn, you are automatically filled with self-importance when you live on Bentley Drive. This is in direct contrast to my ‘hood, where we live on streets like Misdemeanor, Pimp and Smack. There is no Masters Lane in my town, no matter how you interpret that. And there is no Martin Luther King Drive in the wealthy areas. There is no irony there. It’s just kind of sad.

Something that gave me a little bit of comfort was the fact that gas is a full dollar per gallon higher in Bannockburn than it is an hour away by my house, which is still 20¢ per gallon more than our neighboring states. Go ahead and speculate on what drives gas prices and if we ever should’ve been paying more than we are now, which is still too much.

* * *

While visiting my favorite doctor, I had a little conversation with him about drugs, because the meds I’m on are causing so much trouble for me. The anti-malarial drug is a chemo med, so in addition to the digestive disruptions, nausea, hair loss, fatigue, bruises with no known cause all over the body, and muscle weakness, the medication somehow interferes with whatever it is that tells the bladder to hold the urine until it’s full, so I have to pee about every 2 hours, around the clock, day and night. Boyfriend Extraordinaire thinks I’m having hearing loss as well, though I’m not convinced of this yet. All this doesn’t even touch on what the steroids do, which I’ve actually become accustomed to suffering from at this point. My doctor shook his head and was grateful that my other doctor discontinued the Plaquenil and gave me a diuretic to help with the fluid retention in my neck, hands and feet. However, he warned me that the diuretic will make me pee even more, which I thought wasn’t possible, but he was right.

He looked so distraught about my side effects that I felt I had to comfort him a bit.

I said, “Meh, all drugs have side effects. What I don’t understand is why are they all negative? Why do medicines make you nauseated? Or make your hair fall out? Or make you have to pee every 90 minutes? Why don’t any of them have a single GOOD side effect… like… whitening your teeth… or… making your boobs perkier?”

He laughed and said, “Oh, wait! There’s Rogaine! That was designed for something else and someone started noticing that people were growing their hair back.”

I replied with surprise. I had no idea Rogaine had other intended purposes.

He continued, “And there’s Viagra!”

I piped up, “Oh yeah! That was a cardiac medication, wasn’t it?”

“Yep, a cardio-pulmonary drug that had this interesting side effect. Hehe, and then they just changed the dose by a few milligrams, and charged A TON more money for the specialized dose, and that’s what Viagra is today. A total marketing scam!”

“Ugh, of course,” I moaned.

“I get male patients who beg me to prescribe it and say it’s for their pulmonary problems so that they don’t have to pay the high price for it, but no, I can’t do that.”

I giggled and said, “Darn, you should, and stick it to them!”

Then I paused, thinking of the great pun I unintentionally made and we both started laughing again.

I have faith that this doctor does not live in one of those geometric homes with sharp protrusions of oddly shaped rooms, tiny windows, and unsightly sculptures on his lawn. He’s way too cool for that.

* * *

Tonight, the premiere of “Celebrity Rehab” aired and I am already emotionally invested in some of the addicts. I desperately want Rodney King to do well, make friends, and have a good life. Steven Adler, I’m afraid to see where things lead him because he looks like he’s too far gone to save. I want the rest to do well, of course, particularly Jeff Conaway because I can’t stand the idea of him being back over and over. However, there are two characters (and I use that term accurately) who are going to make me have violent outbursts just watching them. Jeff’s girlfriend is one of them, and I actually hate her so much that I wish she’d just overdoes already and be out of the picture. The other is Gary Busey, but I think that if he hangs out for a few more days, the rest of the people are going to kill him. THAT will be a good episode to watch! Dr. Drew might even join in, and my crush on him will only intensify. Damn this show for hooking me all over again!

Pre Vacation Freakishness

My vacation is just 3½ days away and I’m panicking. Part of it is because I only have enough money to cover the motel room for the week we’re there, and the gas to get us there and back. That’s it. We’re going to have to raid my refrigerator and pantry for food we can bring and microwave in the room, because we can’t even buy Subway’s $5 foot-longs for sustenance while we’re there. There will be no souvenirs, no rides on boats, no romantic dinners, no paid parking spots, no smooshed penny machines, and absolutely no driving around town more than necessary. There is no wiggle room. There is simply no money.

Another part of the panic is that I’m still not feeling well, and while many of my medication side effects have waned, I’m experiencing new ones that are pissing me off something awful. My muscles are getting weaker and weaker, to the point where my arms tremble and threaten to give up when I brush my teeth. It takes an hour to blow dry my hair because I can’t turn my brush through my hair more than three times before my wrist feels as if I’ve been kneading dense dough all morning. Walking up the 13 stairs of my house makes my thighs shake with frailty, and recently I’ve started having lower back pain, which I’ve never had in my life. I can’t do dishes, I can’t stand for any length of time, and sleeping is not something that comes easily anymore. Today the pain in the backs of my shoulder blades started, and no matter how much I massaged the muscles, it would not go away.

So, what exactly can I do on vacation without money, and with muscles that are burning and so weak that I can’t even walk up a flight of stairs anymore?

It’s freaking me out!

But, I will not let this stop me! Foliage color reports are predicting peak color in the Hiawatha National Forest to be this upcoming weekend and next week. I gambled and picked the perfect week to go! And since the we’re entering into a depression, the likes of which we haven’t seen in almost a century, I don’t know if I’ll ever get up there again. Plus, I just went to the store to buy something utterly essential, knowing I had very little money in the bank, and the total came to $3.01, but my debit card was denied for insufficient funds. THAT’S humiliating. Then I opened my wallet and thought I only had two singles, one for a Coke for each day at work for lunch until we get paid on Thursday, but there was an extra dollar and I was able to pay for my purchase with cash. THAT’S a sign! A sign from where or whom, I don’t know, but if a magical dollar can appear in my wallet when I need it, I can conclude with confidence that magical dollars can appear in my wallet in the future as well. I believe in magical dollars. You know? Like the kind they print up that have absolutely no basis whatsoever on anything but faith in the monetary system. Like magical dollars that will bail out our banks, who have been cheating and conniving and lying for so long that it’s finally catching up to them, and suddenly there’s squillions of dollars to help them out of this crisis. Magical dollars are everywhere. Let’s just hope that the American people keep believing in them too, or pretty soon we’ll have our own tulip mania, only ours will be called dollar mania.

And what this all boils down to is that I shun the signs telling me to stay home and save my money, which is scarce enough, and choose to go far away, draining all my savings and remaining open credit, all for some colorful leaves.

Sometimes, when I think about it that way, it freaks me out. So I try not to.

But the day wasn’t a total downer.

I’m working on improving our dog book collection, and Marina suggested I find books on the unofficial poodle mixed breeds that are popular, like goldendoodles and schnoodles.

Let me first say that I cannot say shih tzu without giggling. Then I started reading some of the other poodle combinations and I was in hysterics.

Do you havapoo?

Do you affenpoo?

Is it a serious case of lhassapoo?

Can you only afford chi-poo?

Have you ever had to jackapoo, perhaps with your cocka-poo?

When you try too hard, is it a shar-poo?

Or do you have delicate pinni-poos?

Does you mommy criticize your papipoo?

Do you have bossi-poos?

Are you the kind of coworker who has a poo-chin?

Are you shy and prefer to pekepoo?

Do you sometimes try to hold it too long and find that laughing causes an eskapoo?

Or are you a proud person who embraces their poo-ton?

Go ahead and look them up. They’re real.

And people think having a dog named River because he pees a lot is nasty. At least he’s a pee-vert and not a poo-vert.

Pizza Destiny

Hi. I’m a piece of pizza.

A piece of frozen pizza that Happy Villain cooked with great love and tenderness, adding her favorite spices and some Romano and Parmesan cheese to, but I don’t mind the enhancements. I consider them accessories. It’s not insulting. She cooked me up perfectly in the oven and I was primed and ready for her to ingest me and put me to use. You see, I come in this form so that the human body can break me down and use my parts to fuel her body. It means I’m destined for great things.

All was going well at first. She chewed me just the right amount of times, washed me down with a huge tumbler of cold water, and stomach acids were starting to release my true power in her belly. I was excited. This was my moment to shine. I was going to be sent to her cells to power her great machinery, and hopefully she’d do something really special with the energy and nutrients I provide her. Only, something else far more powerful than me, and even more powerful than Happy Villain herself, had other plans.

A quinine derivative medication followed me into the belly, as well as an antibiotic that doubles as an anti-fungal. Right away I knew something was dreadfully wrong with this human. Digestion all but came to a halt. There were belly quakes and spasms of muscles beyond where I could see, and Happy Villain seemed to be dizzy and fighting off the urge to vomit. She did well, the trooper. I certainly didn’t want to be expelled that way. Ugh.

A few hours went by and somehow most of me made it past the stomach, although some of me was still lingering behind in the unhappy soup of stomach discontent. Happy Villain fell asleep and thought digestion would be aided much by the prostrate positioning and slower metabolism. She did toss and turn a lot, but that’s because she still has a vicious sinus infection and double ear infections.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I made it to her intestines.

OHMYGOD, what a mess! That damn antibiotic she’s been taking is causing them to bleed, and things are looking mighty irritated in there. That anti-malarial medication is seizing up her guts, turning everything in the bowels to mush, and forcing it all out before it can truly be absorbed. This was not looking good for me.

At 4 am, it was like all hell broke loose. There were cramps coming from every direction, and her body heated up to a frighteningly high feverish state. I was cooking all over again, and this time it wasn’t good. She was sweating profusely and rocking back and forth from the pain in her abdomen, not sure whether things were going to come out the top or bottom of her, but I heard her begging for whatever was inside her to please come out. I felt bad. It’s not me, I shouted! I would never do this to you! I’m meant for bigger things! I don’t think she heard me.

Twenty minutes of her sweating and crying in her bathroom finally led to a mass exodus of everything she’s eaten since she was about two months old. She lost it from both ends, and part of me landed in the tub, while part of me went into the toilet. At the same time! That was wild! And my parts sat there for an untold amount of time while she sat trembling, too exhausted to even move, eyes closed, unable to even look at me. She was sad. She had big plans for me, too. We were going to work together, and here we were, forcibly separated, and she was too weak to even stand up. She needed me and now I’m destined for a place in the sewer, where microbes and vile things will dine upon my parts. This is not my destiny, yet here I am.

She finally was able to gather her strength to get up, clean herself off, and wash my remnants away. I assume she stumbled back to bed and got up in the morning to try some other food, for she surely needed some energy, but I can tell you it did not go well either. I was joined by her breakfast not too many hours later, and an equally distraught plate of eggs and English muffin were washed away, their destiny robbed from them too, all because of that stupid quinine-type medication that refuses to allow Happy Villain to digest food.

How exactly is this supposed to cure malaria if it runs the risk of starving the person to death?

I’m a piece of pizza. I’m full of nutrients from grains to calcium to essential fats and antioxidants. I’m supposed to give a human power. It’s a great purpose, I have. And thanks to some stupid medication, I dwell in the bowels of the septic system, munched on by unspeakable creatures, my glorious fate stolen from me unjustly.

Drugs suck.

I've Officially Lost It -- Whatever "It" is

One of the few gifts of being sick is that I cannot smell the great, unwashed public. A sinus infection took root in my head on Friday and kicked my ass all weekend. My sense of smell disappeared, only to be replaced with a dull but unpleasant scent of mucus that is all my olfactory senses can detect. *Sniff, sniff.* Nope. All I have is mucus going on here. Thus, I cooked the stinkiest foods I could think to make all weekend. Everything contained caramelized red onions and garlic, and there was a heap of salmon and steak to be eaten. If I don’t care about the odor, I’m making the stinky foods! Which includes the spinach and artichoke dip, that isn’t stinky per se, but the effects are. “I have no idea what you’re complaining about. I can’t smell a thing!”

Another of the gifts of being sick is that I cannot hear the obnoxious and irritating public. The sinus infection raged so hard that it broke through and gave me a double ear infection. Now I cannot sleep on my sides because the pain in my ears is too much to support the weight of my head on two soft pillows. And everyone sounds like they’re adults in a “Peanuts” cartoon. This is just as well. Not often does anyone say anything worth listening to. “I have no idea what you’re saying. Maybe you should tell it to someone else.”

Ahhh, steroids. Only taking prednisone for a little over a month and suddenly the infections are running rampant through my system.

I’m sure that refusing to take the chemo medication didn’t ingratiate me with my new rheumatologist, so I feel obligated to take the anti-malarial she gave me instead. At least this drug doesn’t stop my body from making bone marrow and cause lymphomas. (How is that drug on the market, I ask.) Anyway, after some time, I guess I can start traveling to malaria-ravaged areas of the globe again. Which is fortunate, because I’m sure they missed me in Africa and Panama. I’m quite popular there, I understand. At least with the mosquitoes.

Then again, do I really want to get on a plane being all immune-suppressed? Probably not. But maybe I could share some of my many infections with others. Perhaps I could get on a plane and pee all over the toilet seat, hand people things after putting them in my mouth first, and rub my nose before reaching out to shake someone’s hand. And this is on top of my anosmia and deafness. Oh yeah! I’m the perfect tourist! I’m the very definition of Americana!

Ahh, finally, a patriotic moment in my life! Being sick is a beautiful thing.

(It could very well be that the infections have breached the blood/brain barrier because I think I’m starting to hallucinate.)

It's All In the Family

My brother would make a fabulous reference librarian. The boy can research the hell out of stuff that others don’t dare to tackle, and he finds answers where I cannot find any. Every conversation I have with him is enlightening in some way.

For instance, last week he taught me about dark matter. Maybe at some point in my education eons ago, dark matter came up for one paragraph in a chapter that was briefly discussed on a day when I was out sick, and if it was on the test later on, I got the answer wrong and didn’t care one iota. But I don’t remember learning a damn thing about it up until last week. My bro is completely beside himself with anticipation over the results of the Large Hadron Collider from CERN, that will make history on Wednesday and either answer some huge questions about particles in the universe and its creation, or it will yield nothing at all, and all these geniuses will have to start over with their mind-blowing theories about how it all began. When he tried to explain what this means to science, he had to explain to me the universe’s ingredients: matter, dark matter, and dark energy. Then he started talking about extra dimensions and black holes and I think my brain officially blew up.

As he was describing dark matter to me, I was thinking that this is the scientific equivalent of a god: invisible, powerful, keeping the universe together. When he was done explaining things, he said, “Doesn’t that sound like the Holy Trinity, in a way?” He thinks like me, only so much more so. This precipitated a conversation about how religion just missed the boat when science started answering some of the questions religion always had, and if religion had evolved with mankind, it might not be this splintering, archaic, inhumane concept that is fragmenting the human race instead of bringing it peace and comfort. My bro is an atheist like me, and he is a huge follower of Richard Dawkins, so we have conversations like this often. But how interesting the concept of religion might have been if it could stop trying to shove the old man with the white beard down everyone’s throats, and embrace this dark matter force that is the very definition of what a deity could be if a deity could be.

This was a casual conversation we had on the way to the DMV.

Oh, what a difference it is to have a conversation with my brother, and then walk into the DMV and have a conversation with one of them! I’ll not digress into that nightmare of an experience, but suffice it to say that we walked out empty-handed, cursing the government for being able to make shit up as they go, and leaving the citizens no recourse. Outside the door was a bicycle chained up to pole in the parking lot. The pole was straight up and down, about three feet tall. All any potential thief had to do was lift the bike and the chain up over the top of the pole and take off with it. Seriously, I regretted not having a camera, because that was a Fail Blog shot if ever there was one. I looked at the bike, looked at my brother, and suggested it was an employee’s mode of transport. He agreed. Then we drove home and talked about supernatural forces on earth and the debates over the existence of paranormal phenomena.

Seriously, this is the shit we talk about.

So, when I went to my brother over the weekend about something that I can’t get to the bottom of, I didn’t expect him to come back with help an hour later.

Here’s my dilemma.

I have sarcoidosis, which is a rare immune disorder. I live with my disabled mother, who has fibromyalgia and Sjogren’s Syndrome so severe that it legally blinded her in one eye, and both of these are rare immune disorders. Directly across the street from me, I have a good friend and neighbor who was recently diagnosed with a form of vasculitis that is very rare and not responsive to immune-inhibiting drugs. Two other neighbors are suffering from rare, chronic, debilitating immune disorders, including one who just was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. There are only 9 houses on our cul-de-sac, and five women have rare, chronic immune disorders. They are also the only five women who have lived in these houses for 15 years or more. The remaining neighbors have only lived in their homes for a couple years, and they are all healthy. To me, this is beyond a coincidence, but I have no idea how to get to the bottom of it. Together with my neighbor who has vasculitis, I’ve been trying to figure out how to poll other neighbors without causing a panic or getting doors slammed in my proverbial face, so we can figure out if there are more cases in the surrounding cul-de-sacs and the rest of the subdivision. My intention is to gather more information, but I am unsure how to do so.

My brother was so intrigued by this bizarre cluster of rare and troubling diseases, so he started emailing medical experts and medical attorneys, asking for research facilities that might have the interest and funding to look into this on our behalf.

I never would’ve thought of that!

Sure enough, he came up with a couple of places doing research on the topic of cluster outbreaks of rare diseases. Amazing.

Today I sent emails to two recommendations he gave me, one of which was a very prominent doctor who responded to me directly about an hour later, advising me of the various local agencies to contact as a first line offensive, since he was on the other side of the country, and there are far too many of these clusters of diseases for him and his team to research them all. He was so kind and helpful, and he also suggested I not hesitate to email him with more questions anytime. Doctors who care: how nice to meet this rare beast!

And, promptly I emailed the state agencies, which will likely yield a form letter response in a week or a month, telling me to call their office and leave a message with the cousin of a friend of the mother-in-law of the receptionist of someone who might be capable of helping me. The DMV does not set a good example of how government agencies work for the people.

But still, it’s a starting point.

And it was my brother who got us here.

Dude should be a librarian, I swear.

Cymbalic

What would you do if you had flippers coming out the front of your chest, about the size and shape of the head of a tennis racquet? How might you use these flippers if you could?

These are some of the thoughts I had as my boobs were squished beneath a piece of plexiglass, flattened and stretched beyond recognition, making them appear alien and surreal. Unfortunately, they haven’t any muscles or bones with which to move them around, otherwise, I might have had two interesting rudders coming out of my chest.

Boobs kind of feel like water balloons to me, and water balloons are a bit fragile, so for the last two weeks I’ve been having nightmares that the mammogram would rupture my girlies. I envisioned my nipple and areola ripping off and shooting across the room, essentially springing a leak, and booby water pouring out until it was completely drained and flaccid. It’s rather weird that somewhat the opposite happened. Instead, they seemed to inflate. I had no idea that when you press them that thin, they’d keep expanding like dough and turn into something from a sci-fi movie.

I asked Boyfriend Extraordinaire which direction he would prefer my squished boobs to be: horizontal or vertical. He voted for vertical. I thought that was interesting, but then I realized it was more practical. With two fleshy cymbals coming out of my chest, I could clap or press them together. If they were horizontal, they’d just flap up and down independently. From a man’s perspective, I can see his point.





(Boyfriend Extraordinaire suggests that these doodles should be submitted to Boob Overload, which was a joke and a parody of Cute Overload so I didn't think it existed, but evidently it does.)

The good news is that the mammogram revealed that the nodule had nothing concerning in it, so they did an ultrasound, which revealed that the nodule had some kind of membrane, but was composed of the same tissue that the rest of the area is made from. What does this mean? Well, after an hour of people squeezing, stretching, flopping, and rubbing lubricant on my boob and armpit, they decided that whatever it is, it’s not a tumor and I should go home and be grateful. Given the amount of pain that this little nodule causes, I was not pleased with this outcome. Pain is an indicator of something being wrong. Now I have to figure out where to go with this lack of information.

I’m wondering something, too. Why is it when something goes wrong with our health, the tests and treatments are always painful and humiliating? Why is it no one gets sick and the cure is to eat lots of dessert while getting a foot massage, your hair washed, and your ears Q-tipped? No, that’s never going to cure anything. You’re going to have to strip naked and wear a wrap dress made of cheap napkins. Then you have to flash private parts at people who will treat your exposed areas as if they are some kind of scientific experiment. (Why can’t someone just say, “Hey, nice rack!” and make me feel a little better?) Then you have to take medications that will give you symptoms of other problems. All the while it will cost you a fortune in medical bills for office visits, tests and medications. You don’t want me to remind you of all that I had to go through with my hemorrhagic periods, poly-cystic ovaries, and the ovarian tumor, because that set of humiliations was simply horrific. Nothing involving illness ever ends up making you feel good about yourself or your situation. Medicine sucks.

Speaking of which, my wonderful, brilliant rheumatologist wants to do what the very bad rheumatologist I used to have wanted to do, which is start me on a chemotherapy medication to shut off my immune system. Long-term use of this medication can actually cause cancer, specifically lymphomas, in addition to making the user dangerously susceptible to all infections around due to the lack of immune defense. I have the prescription in my purse, but I can’t bring myself to fill it. Tomorrow I’ll give her a call and see if she will change my therapy. I just can’t do this to myself, particularly with some kind of growth in my breast that no one can identify. Cells mutate, fact of life, I know. I don’t want to be the perfect environment for them to grow into big, healthy tumors, like some kind of human Petri dish to incubate monsters. Why I feel guilty about this, I don’t know. It’s as if I feel compelled to obey my doctor, to be a compliant patient who does what she’s told and doesn’t question those who are more knowledgeable. But I’m not going to take that medication, and I don’t care if that makes me a bad patient.

Particularly because I have something in my booby! When you have something in your booby, it changes things.

Maybe it’s a creature.

Maybe it’s some kind of alien tracking device.

Maybe I’m growing a third boob. Maybe I’ll grow boobs all around my ribcage! I’ll have a veritable hoop of boobage going all the way around me! Excellent! Then I can get mammograms on all of them so that they get squeezed into vertical cymbals and I’ll clap them all together and sound like an applauding audience all by myself.

DUDE! Imagine the possibilities if I did porn! I could make a bloody fortune! With six or eight boobs, I’d be like the female version of Ron Jeremy.

Someone get me an agent! Someone get me a manager!

Someone get me a seamstress.

Symantics

Lump. It’s sounds like a silly word, doesn’t it? You could say the word “lump” in front of a 4-year-old, who would waste no time repeating it, to test the effect of uttering the weird, new word, and only about three utterances would lead to it sounding completely nonsensical in your own ears. It just doesn’t add up to its meaning.

Now nodule sounds so much more compelling. It’s almost science-fiction-esque and requires much more effort to enunciate correctly, with your lips moving all over when you say it. It has a certain panache about it, above a layman’s term, but not so highbrow that you don’t use it when necessary. It befits its meaning.

Which is to say that having a nodule in my left breast is a little science-fiction-esque and requires effort to say aloud, but I can say it because it carries the appropriate weight.

We (my doctor and I) have comfortably accepted that it is likely a swollen lymph node or a cyst, but the diagnostic mammogram in two weeks will tell us more. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family and I’m much younger than any doctor would even start to test. This is compiled on top of the fact that it’s actually located about six inches down from the center of my armpit, technically on the side of my breast, and not only is it extremely painful to the touch, but it’s shaped like a soft grape. Each menstrual cycle sees a small increase in size and discomfort, which means it’s being effected by hormone levels. Yeah, well, what isn’t?

I’m not afraid of the nodule, but I am afraid of what they’re going to do with it.

First they’re going to stretch my tit across a plexiglass surface, compress it in a vice grip, and take fucked-up black and white pictures of it. If that doesn’t sound like some warped fetish shit, I don’t know what does. I have D-cups, and during certain days of the month, my D-cups runneth over. I have a feeling that this exercise in body contortion is not going to be pretty for me. My girls are not accustomed to this kind of abuse, and I fear for their recoverability.

According to the radiology center’s website, depending on what they see at the time of the mammogram, they could actually do a biopsy or aspiration right there, at the same time, if they felt it was prudent.

Lovely.

Grab a big, fat needle, shove it into this extremely tender growth in my boob, and suck stuff out. I’m thinking I’m going to take some of my Vicodin-ES pills leftover from my dental work while I’m in the waiting room.

Then what? What’s really scaring me here?

What I can’t seem to stop thinking about is if this has to be surgically removed, then I’ll have this painful stitching at the backside of my boob, where the side of my bra wraps around my ribs. What if they tell me I can’t wear a bra for a while? What if I am not allowed to use deodorant until it heals completely? What if I have to stop shaving my pits temporarily?

DEAR FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER, I will be just like one of my stinky, braless, hairy patrons!

*runs screaming around in circles*

At least I’ll fit in then.

Nodules: the great equilizers.

The Steroid Diet

Someone needs to break into my house and make sure there are no crumbs of junk food, no cookies, no cake mixes, no brownie mixes, no pie crusts, and no chocolate at all. I feel tremendously guilty for the amount of food I'm eating, but as long as it's fruit, veggies, and healthier choices, I feel a little less guilty. Here's a sneak peak at today.

Breakfast
1 banana
2 toasted whole grain English muffins with light jelly
½ can of Coke

Snack
1 banana

Snack
1 orange

Lunch
1 thin cut, grilled pork chop
1 cup of applesauce
1 bowl of peas
1 huge tumbler of ice water

Snack
1 banana

Dinner
1 bison hot dog on a whole wheat bun, with chopped red onions, pickles and mustard
1 ear of corn
1 can of Coke

Snack
1 banana

Snack
5 teaspoons of peanut butter
1 large glass of milk

Midnight Snack
1 handful of walnuts
1 bowl of pineapples


HELP! Who eats 4 bananas a day? I'm not even hungry and my brain is telling me I am. When I question my stomach, it simply says, "Dude, I'm worn out. If you send any more food down here, I'm going to return it to sender."

And then I reach for another snack anyway.

I think about poor Bernie Mac, who had sarcoidosis like me, and how he died of pneumonia, even though he was in remission. This disease does a real job on your lungs, let me tell you, so even if he was in remission, I would be guessing it still played a big role. I think about that and take my next dose of steroids, to stave off my current spell of the disease, and hope I don't run into anyone with a contagious respiratory condition. Or with a chocolate cupcake. Because I'll walk away with both, no doubt.

We better hope I run out of friut and other food, or there could be a case of spontaneous human explosion here, and all they'll find is post-digested banana sticking to the walls. Or maybe I'm better off with the bananas, oranges and pineapples, because it could be chocolate bars and French fries instead. And that would smell bad if I exploded.

Please, someone sneak into my kitchen and make sure there is only good food around. And take the bananas away. Five bowel movements in one day is a bit excessive.

And this doesn't even touch on the mood swings and insomnia. Crying fits and being awake 21 hours a day just seem to make me more hungry. Why is that?

The good news is that the swelling in my feet is almost gone, the pain is but a memory, and now all I have to deal with is bruised muscles, my swollen ankles stubbornly hanging onto the fluid, and the hideous scarring all up and down my legs and feet, making me look like my legs got run over by a truck. It will probably take about six months to a year for the tissue scarring to go away completly, but at least I can walk again. Which makes walking to the kitchen easier.

Dammit, now I want another banana!

Take Cover!

Let the ‘roid rage begin! Again!

The day after I called an ambulance to the house because my mom was dying of an overdose, I woke up with some big, red spots on my legs. I figured they were bug bites, even though they didn’t itch. That was the end of June. They never went away, but grew in size and became more and more painful.

Something else terribly personal and tragic happened in the beginning of July, and as it was happening, as I was sitting there, awash in emotions I couldn’t even begin to deal with, I noticed more red spots erupting on the tops of my feet. I remember thinking, “Fucking spiders,.” even though I never saw one. However, these bumps never itched either, but became quite painful the next day, and they also have not gone away.

I remember sitting at work and researching spider bites between helping patrons, and for some reason, I was still convinced it could be a brown recluse trying to kill me with multiple bites. I was in denial.

In the end of July, another insane crisis blindsided me, and the following day, I woke up with more red bumps on the soles of my feet, right in the arches, and my feet and ankles became so swollen that I had to forego socks and most of my shoes. I’m down to having only three pairs of shoes I can stretch over my feet. That was when I realized this was no spiteful, venomous spider.

The sarcoidosis has flared up something awful, giving me hideous erythema nodosum all over my legs, and it’s starting on my arms now. Today, I found myself in my doctor’s office, crying my eyes out and begging for help because I can’t sleep from the pain, and I can hardly bend my feet at the ankles anymore. Help, for me, comes in the form of 40 mg of prednisone daily, which means I’m about to embark on some fun times of mood swings, food binges, and insomnia, the likes of which could lead to me disowning my friends and family (which I have done before), redecorating my room at 3 a.m., or spending all my spare change on chocolate bars, only to eat them all in one gluttonous sitting. We shall see how this episode unfolds.

Meet my left foot.



You know it’s serious when your favorite doctor, who has been treating you for 12 years and is the only one you trust to help you in this time of need, brings in his partners to gawk at girl with this rare and severe case of E. nodosum. And what did they all say?

“Oh, I’m so sorry for your condition. Is your hair BLUE? WOW!”

So, even though I have what looks like elephantiasis of the lower legs, my blue hair is still what people see. I guess that’s good. Let’s just hope that’s not how I’m identified in security footage at a local convenience store after throwing a steroid-induced tantrum over a lack of Nestle Crunches one night.

Pass the Pizza, Please

Lately, I’ve been trying to eat healthy and live a better life.

I’m very good about vegetables and fruit. They are a part of every meal and if I go without, I start craving things so intensely I’ve been known to run to Wendy’s in the middle of the night to get a salad and baked potato. But some of my other choices are not so good, and with summer here, I’m grilling burgers and hot dogs more often than I should. So, I’ve been making some changes.

First I started trying to eat fish, despite my fears of mercury and pollutants, and what I’m finding is that I just cannot consume food that smells like a yeast infection. Call me crazy. Every time hold my nose and scoop a bit of something fishy into my mouth, my gag reflex kicks in and I feel the need to wash my mouth out with Monistat. I think I’m done with fish.

Then I committed myself to whole grains, incorporating delectable grass seeds into usually bland and unfulfilling foods like spaghetti and meatballs and banana bread. Who knew all this time that couscous was the tasty flavor of mud that’s long been missing from my meatloaf recipe? Have you ever had quinoa? If you haven’t, you really should. It’s somewhere between hay and unsweetened, dry cereal, which is exactly what I want to replace 50% of the meat in my meatballs with. Add a little Parmesan, roll in flour, cook in a skillet and add to your spaghetti and suddenly you’ll find that one of your favorite dishes is now improved to taste like bird food. I wonder if you can grow grass in your tummy with the right conditions. Oh, and who likes sweet banana bread? That’s right: NO ONE! Put some whole grain flour in that recipe instead and you’ll find that the essence of banana added to a gritty yet moist cracker is just what you’re looking for. Trust me, whole grains are great! And if that wasn’t enough of a sermon to run out and fill your foods with barley and brown rice, consider how happy you’ll be when you have to poop 15 minutes after every meal thanks to all that fiber. Oh, your butt will thank you! Your butt will thank you to the tune of constant tenderness. You’ll love it! Trust me.

So, tomorrow is my last day of work until the 19th, and Boyfriend Extraordinaire is flying in tomorrow night so we can be on vacation together. For this week, we’re likely going to eat out most days, and I’m stepping back from grass seeds and vaginal-discharge-flavored meats. When he’s gone and I’m back at work, I’ll probably give it another try, but I get this week to eat pizza and fajitas again.

Oh, and I’ll enjoy the luxury of maybe cutting back to one bowel movement a day. And when you consider how much toilet paper and toilet flushes this will save, I think the earth will thank me.