If I were to give the Universe’s writers’ room a note on this season of the show called My Life, it might say, simply: This feels like a bit much. Why force her to go through the emotional roller coaster of a miscarriage in order to discover the cyst? Seems overly cruel and unrealistic. Maybe save the miscarriage for another season. Don’t burn all your plot points at once. But the writers are the pros,…
I got a dead pixel recently. I was driving R and H somewhere and I saw it there, just north of my center of vision in my left eye. It was like a speck of dust, but hard around the edges. A pinprick in the sky. I looked left, it went left. Up, it went up. Down, down. Two years ago I learned that the squiggly little translucent worms that move across my vision at…
This morning we learned that Richard’s father is in the hospital and has been for several days. His stepmother went to the ER today, too, and is being admitted, as soon as a bed comes open. They both have the flu, and his father has pneumonia and sepsis and a UTI on top of that. He was in the ICU for a couple of days before being moved to a regular room yesterday. Richard and…
I need to say this right now: I am happy. I am grateful. I am in love and working hard and creating and thinking and striving and questioning and all the things that make me feel real and human and in progress. I don’t have doubts about the big questions in my life. Once upon a time I feared that I would never love or be loved. I am lucky that I have found someone…
I was sick the entire first half of 2017. It was a tour de force of ailments — sinus infections, ear infections, pink eye, strep throat — cycling through my body and returning at their leisure, like microbial timeshare owners trying to make their individual marriages work. I remember two low moments in particular in that span of months: 1. Sitting in the Walgreens well clinic exam room, my throat swollen painfully shut, unable to…
The CT scan showed that I’ve got chronic sinusitis plus a nasal septal spur on my right side, and that thing is keeping stuff trapped in my head that just keeps festering and perpetuating the gross cycle of crud in my skull. So I’ve got an appointment with an ENT to talk about my options. I’ve been doing nasal irrigation daily for a week or so and it seems to be working. In fact, I…
Well, that was interesting. This whole thing ended up with me getting a referral to a gynecologic oncologist, who examined me and recommended that I get surgery to remove the endometrioma, which had grown to 10 centimeters by the time I met with him. He did not feel strongly that the uterine fibroids had to go too, but he was fairly adamant that the cyst needed to go quickly, or else I’d risk it rupturing.…
I’ve not been well since July 2. I don’t know what specifically is ailing me but it’s a little like the mystery bug that got me in 2009 that no one ever could diagnose. (Sans hives. So far.) I’m on a second round of antibiotics and I’m still prone to coughing fits. And headaches. It took Holden down too, and his teacher and some classmates. Whatever it is is no joke and has been hanging…
Here we are at the halfway mark. In some ways I can’t believe it’s here already, but then I remember how slowly the time passed early on, when I had to keep this delicious secret to myself. And while I’m still worried about the ultrasound issue (we had a follow-up yesterday and the bowel is still bright — although to my lay eyes not nearly bright as bone, which would indicate a more severe problem,…
I lovehate the internet. On the one hand, in ye golden olden days, my midwife would have uttered the words “echogenic bowel” to me and I would have had to carve out some time between milking the cows and hanging the pig guts to walk uphill both ways toward a library, inside which I’d pore over medical books carefully in dusty, neglected library aisles, wondering what the densely packed terms actually meant. And worrying. On…
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