So. I had the procedure done, which was a little scary at first since I had been up all night stressing about it, but as soon as they administered the fentanyl and the versed I was out like a light, and I woke up in the recovery room not remembering a thing.

That’s exactly how I prefer it.

There is no ulcer, and there is most definitely no cancer. Well, so far. The biopsy they did still needs to be tested, but let’s just jump ahead and say that I don’t have fucking cancer, OK?

I have something called gastroparesis. This is apparently mostly seen in diabetics, which I am not, but the medications I take such as the narcotics for pain and the anti-depressants are sometimes associated with the condition.

It basically means that I’m not digesting food the way I’m supposed to, and that my stomach isn’t emptying itself, causing pain when I try to eat, and a whole lot of throwing up.

This also explains why most of the time, I don’t crap.

This also may explain Bulimia: The Later Years. I felt so uncomfortable with food in my stomach. SO uncomfortable. SO fucking full. Often times, I just did it to get rid of that awful feeling.

Now I know why I had that awful feeling. My food was sticking around for days on end, and every time I ate I was compounding the problem.

The new medication I’m starting (Reglan) is supposed to get my stomach and intestines moving in order to help move food on out the door.

I may become an efficient eater/pooper yet.

So, I’m glad it’s nothing deathly serious and something easily treatable. I’m slightly worried about the medication, which comes with a slew of warnings and side effects, but if will make this ache in the pit of my gut go away, it’ll be worth it.

So there it is, nice and tidy. I think the doctor wants to leave me on the med for a month, see if things get resolved, and hold off on any more tests for now, but if they don’t I will still be having a colonoscopy and all that jazz.

Hopefully things will be resolved by using the medication.

Thanks for all your good lucks and good wishes! Apparently they helped a great deal, and my guts thank you.

Happy Monday.

So tomorrow I’m having a scope of my stomach done, along with a biopsy of the lining.

The gastroenterologist was nice, very thorough, but he did manage to scare the living shit out of me with the C word.

Why would you even mention the C-word to me? I don’t know. I think it was terrifying and totally unnecessary. I think he said it solely based on the amount of weight I’ve lost lately, even though I told him I’ve been dieting and exercising.

Anyway, I didn’t appreciate it much, but I didn’t allow it to make me nervous, either. There’s just no fucking way.

So tomorrow, early in the morning, there’s that. I will then be home sleeping it off, and I’ll let you know what’s been found.

Happy Sunday.

So I’m moderately nervous about going to this gastroenterologist tomorrow.

I really don’t relish the though of having cameras poked into both ends, nor do I relish the thought of the master cleanse that is going to have to take place beforehand.

I’m “master-cleansing” it up enough on my own, if you get my drift.

I have never been this sick. It’s actually pretty exhausting. I’ve had pretty serious bouts of flu, but nothing that lasted this long or was this vicious. This is like stomach flu that wil not quit. The stabbing pain in my stomach is enough to make me want to crawl under the covers and cry, but the constant puking and the shits prevent me from doing so.

It’s pretty awful.

My appointment is at 7:15 tomorrow, and although I’m slightly terrified, in a way, it’s kind of a relief. The doctor has to find *something*. I’m hoping that it’s just some sort of rogue virus that has knocked me down and not really an ulcer or something more serious.

We shall see.

In other news, tomorrow my stepdad is having surgery for a hernia, after which he will be staying here to lick his wounds. We will all have to be very very quiet and on our absolute best behavior so that he can rest.

Saturday is the science fair, during which I will have to suck it up/wear Depends/try not to puke for four hours while I smile at all the happy little children who have had their parents work on all of their projects.

Obviously I can’t wait.

I will let you know what’s happened tomorrow afternoon. Cross your fingers and toes for me.

Happy Thursday.

I was hospitalized for a while for dehydration and bleeding, as well as the completion of some really embarrassing and painful tests.

Did you know that a doctor can pretty much stick his whole hand up your ass? He can. It’s called digging for poop. Apparently they don’t like to wait for a sample.

Also, did you know they can pump your stomach even though you haven’t overdosed? Yes, they can. They just jam a fucking tube up your nose, slam it down into your stomach, and pump away. This was probably one of the least fun experiences of my entire life.

I have to go back to a different hospital on Friday, because the ghetto hospital didn’t have the technology necessary to scope my stomach and find out where the bleeding is coming from, so I have to have that done, and probably a colonoscopy as well. Yay.

I’m feeling a little better, largely because I’m on anti-emetics and Immodium and have finally stopped running at both ends, but my stomach still hurts like an unholy bitch.

So, I’m mostly lying down and moaning and groaning, watching bad Lifetime movies and trying to eat a little, but I am somewhat triumphant over the fact that I did lose twenty-two pounds during the month of January, ulcer or no fucking ulcer.

I get my kicks wherever I can.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated on my gastrointestinal doings.

Now I have to go and help the J-Man work on his science project. Oh Joy, Oh Rapture.

Happy Sunday.

Going to the STUPID ER because I am throwing up STUPID blood.

My whole family has had the stomach flu, so I think it’s just that, but my mother thinks I have a bleeding ulcer.

FUCK.

See you on the flip side.

My iPod battery died, leaving me with about ten minutes of playing time before crapping out completely. I’ve had it for about five or six years, so I found this reasonable.

So, I went over to the Apple site to see about getting myself a replacement. They wanted me to send the Pod in and asked for sixty bucks.

Sixty bucks seemed like an awful lot, so I went to eBay.

EBay had batteries for eight bucks, and they came with the tools required for opening up the Pod. I immediately ordered one and told myseld that this would be as easy as pie.

Or else they wouldn’t sell them on eBay, right?

Right.

The battery arrived in about a week, along with a tiny plastic crowbar and no directions and the recommendation that you take your Pod to a technician.

Did I listen?

Of course not.

I looked up “how to change an iPod battery” on the internet and watched an instruction video about 12 times, and then I went to town.

It is not all super-extra easy to pry an iPod apart. At least it wasn’t for me. Maybe mine was extra-stubborn. All I know is that I bent my fucking screen.

Yes.

There was much swearing.

After the storm of swearing abated and the iPod was apart, I disconnected the old battery and connected the new one, and that was easy enough, but then the hard drive fell out. I picked it up, looked at it, and sort of stuffed it back in there.

You are probably laughing at me right now.

Then I smashed the Pod back together and stuffed it into the charger, praying to whatever technological god might take pity upon me.

Unfortunately the technological gods were not smiling down upon me, and it did not work. I was bereft. I had broken my baby. I was an idiot, an ass. I should never have monkeyed around with it. I should not have been a cheapass, and I should have sent it to Apple.

My dad came over last night. He knows nothing about iPods, but he is sort of an electronics genius, so he offered to take a look at it.

We opened it up.

“Well, JEN, you didn’t connect the hard drive.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
“Oh!!”
“And you didn’t connect this battery cable right.”
“Oh!!”
“And the screen is bent.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of that.”
“I can’t fix that.”
“I know.”
“You should have just given it to me to fix.”
“I know, Dad. I know.”

Let this be a lesson to those of you who are do-it-yourself-ers prone to cheapassery: DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.

I can still use my Pod on shuffle, but the screen is basically a blur of alien language.

Grrrr.

I think I may soon sell a bunch of crap on eBay (including two very pristine pairs of Doc Martens, including my BURGUNDY PATENT LEATHER Doc Martens, if you’re interested) and buy myself a 160G Classic.

So, remember how I lost twelve pounds last week and was all excited?

This week?

Not an ounce.

Not a single ounce.

I went up to a thousand calories a day, because my father and also a couple of readers and the internet in general suggested I wasn’t eating enough, and I think I am at a plateau.

I am furious, but I’m trying to deal, to keep going, and not to cheat because I’m pissed off.

Sigh.

Happy Thursday.

…And the angels said AAAAALLELUIA!

I lost twelve pounds last week.

I’m pretty damned excited.

It sounds pretty extreme, but hey, those bitches on The Biggest Loser drop like twenty-five pounds a week, so I figure my non-toiling ass can drop twelve.

I stayed on the liquid diet for three days and after that I kept my calories between eight hundred and a thousand, and I drank about two gallons of water a day to stave off the hunger.

I have to tell you, it’s working perfectly. I don’t feel hungry, and I am writing down everything I eat so as to keep track.

This week I am going to begin exercising. I’m going to start out small, with say, a half an hour on the treadmill every day, and then eventually increase it to an hour a day with some Pilates thrown in for good measure.

I feel pretty good.

This makes a total of 28 pounds lost for me, and I think I’m doing it in a healthy and very aware fashion, eating every few hours rather than binging and purging or just plain starving.

I’m eating a lot of cereals and yogurt and fruits and vegetables and soup, and I’m drinking a lot of tea.

I am drinking so much water that I have to pee every four and a half minutes, but my skin has never looked so great. Bonus.

So, I’m just going to keep on keepin’ on, and I’m going to talk to my doctor about it next time I see him to get a thumbs-up, which I’m sure I will, because the general consensus among my doctors has always been that Jen Is Too Fat To Live.

In other news, the J-Man had a weekend school project, in which he needed to create a musical instrument. We made a double-ended guitar, which I must admit was difficult but pretty damned wicked all the same.

In still other news, Alice the hamster very nearly met with an untimely death.

I was holding and petting her on the couch, because I must admit I have become somewhat attached to the little rodent, and suddenly she leaped off of my lap and onto the sofa, and dashed maniacally into the small space between the couch cushions that was created by my big ass.

Now.

We have one of those couches that pop out into recliners. Therefore space abounds underneath. However, could I pop the mechanism and rescue the hamster without squashing her in the process? More importantly, could I get to her before the cats, who were circling around like vultures?

My child moaned in the background. “YOU LOST HER.”

I held my breath, popped the mechanism, and that fucking hamster walked right up to me, the same time as the fat cat, who smacked her with a paw. Hard.

I grabbed her and stuffed her into her cage. Then I got her a baby carrot for good measure. “Good Alice. Good hamster.” “Goooood.”

It was a tense moment, especially since the J-Man’s friend recently told him a lovely story about finding HALF a hamster on the floor, mauled by the family cat.

I will be much more careful with the little bugger in the future.

I probably should also stop feeding her Chee-tos. She’s huge.

Happy Monday.

So.

New Year’s Eve was a good time. I went to a party here in the ‘hood, and noshed on food and swilled beers with a great many people I went to high school with. The only downside was that nearly everyone there was smoking pot.

I don’t get the pot thing, people. To me it smells and tastes like flaming cat poo. All it does is make one hungry and stupid, and as one who is already usually both hungry and stupid, why should I bother?

It’s a total waste of time and money.

Still, the party was fun, and my two friends and I spent the night so as not to be out driving on New Year’s Eve, a night which is a veritable free-for-all for the police.

Since New Year’s I have been on a liquid diet.

Before you scream at me and tell me that this is grossly unhealthy, let me stop you right there and tell you that it’s only for five days, and only to shrink down my hungry hungry little stomach so that I can diet in a healthy fashion without feeling as if I am starving all the time. My father does this frequently and it seems to work well for him.

So far I have lost four pounds, so, yay.

I am determined to eat healthy this year, and also exercise. I am going to buy the Wii Fit and use that in addition to the treadmill and my yoga and Pilates DVDs, and I hope to see some tangible results within a couple of months.

This is the Year of the Perfect Ass, I swear it.

In other news, our furnace is on the fritz, and believe me when I tell you that it is a bad, bad, BAD time for a Chicago furnace to be on the fritz. It is working, but sporadically, and at night it stops working entirely, so when we wake up in the morning the house is about fifty-eight fucking degrees.

Brrrr.

I’m relatively cool (ha) with this because I have an electric blanket and am used to the frigid basement, but my poor bony mother is losing her motherfucking mind.

With any luck we will be able to cajole my father into coming over today to fix it.

In still other news, I went to the neurologist today to report that I am having frequent and violent seizures due to a medication change and had one right there in the office. FINALLY I have proved to these fuckers that I am not imagining this shit. I barely escaped a hospital admission, but instead wound up with a lot more drugs.

Hopefully this will help, and I can stop dancing all over the floor with my head.

How was your New Years?

Happy Tuesday.

The damned hamster, Alice, stays up all damned night.

The J-Man came tearing into my room at two AM Christmas Eve, moaning, “I CAN’T SLEEEEEEP!”

The thing was gnawing on the bars. Gnawing toward freedom.

I should explain this hamster cage. The damned hamster cost ten bucks. The cage was fifty dollars. It boasts three levels, an attached travel cage (as if), and tunnels.

I didn’t think the fat little thing would even begin to fit in the tunnels, but it squashes itself into them.

I spent about two hours assembling the cage, and there was much swearing. I don’t mean to disparage direction makers, as I’m sure they hold the most boring jobs in the universe, but they all have the IQs of said hamster.

Patience? We are all out.

So, the J-Man slept on the couch for a couple nights to escape its buck-toothed machinations, but last night I figured I’d put the thing in my room.

Perhaps it would freeze to death.

Heh.

Really I just wanted my kid to sleep in his own bed.

I cleared off a spot on my dresser and gave the thing a few baby carrots, hoping that it would gnaw on them instead of the bars, put my iPod on, and turned off the lights.

*rumble rumble rumble*

I took my iPod out of my ears and went to have a look. It was tearing around its wheel like a miniature Flo-Jo, but it wasn’t anywhere as bad as the sound of tiny teeth on metal bars. I was able to sleep in my normal, comatose state.

This morning I transported Alice back to the J-Man’s room, where she immediately fell sound asleep.

Great. I have a hamster with its nights and days mixed up. I couldn’t even figure that one out when I had a baby.

I’m thinking of either covering the cage during the day so that it thinks it’s nighttime and stays up, or putting in light in front of the cage at night so it thinks it’s daytime and sleeps.

Any ideas would be heartily appreciated. Either I come up with something, or I am going to give it a sliver of Trazodone.

That ought to work.

Christmas was beautiful and joyous and awesome and all that crap. We had my stepdad, my dad, my sister and the kids, and of course, the kid from down the street.

Who sends their kid to someone’s house for nine hours on Christmas Day? The people down the street, that’s who. I never heard of such a thing.

I received a beautiful white coat from the J-Man, which I dearly love but which will probably be charcoal grey in no time.

The J-Man got a Wii from my father, bless his heart, and played Wii Sports so long yesterday that his arms ache today.

I was pretty into it myself. I suck at baseball and golf, but I did pretty well at bowling and tennis.

Don’t even get me started on Super Mario Brothers. I could play it all damned day.

Anyway, I hope all of you had happy holidays.

I am completely ignoring my birthday tomorrow and will instead hold at thirty-five for the rest of my life.

Ahem.

Happy Sunday.

No, we don’t have mice.

The J-Man wants a hamster for Christmas.

Yes.

Never mind the fact that we have three cats.

Because I am a pushover, I am going to purchase said hamster, but Dear God I am not not going to have anything else to do with it. I had this child sitting at the computer yesterday for an hour researching hamsters, their care and feeding, and most importantly their short life span, and he seems to be well-informed, at least.

My mother is less than thrilled about this addition to our household. She feels that a rodent is a rodent is a rodent, and that having one is both gross and completely insane.

I largely agree.

However, we shall give this a shot, and if he doesn’t take proper care of it it will go back to the pet store.

In other news, my family’s rather raucous Christmas party was this past Saturday night. A thousand pierogi were fried, a thousand beers were drunk, and it was a pretty happy time.

My father called me the other day and had this to say:

“Jen.”
“Yes?”
“I have a Christmas request.”
“Shoot.”
“I don’t want any presents in gift bags this year.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want everything wrapped. It is NO FUN opening presents in gift bags, you just take the thing out of the bag!”
“You like the ripping.”
“I like the ripping.”
“You are so freaking weird.”

I had already wrapped all of his gifts, but I’m thinking I will put them in gift bags anyway, just to be ornery.

I’m crazy busy what with making ornaments and jewelry for friends and family, so I probably won’t post again before Christmas, but I hereby order all of you to have a rocking good time.

We are staying at home, going to church (augh) and then having dinner on Christmas Day. No big whoop. It’ll be nice to relax.

Happy Monday, and a very merry Christmas to you.