Bloated but Alive

A bpnwc 😻 health update

Hello and welcome back to all of you fine readers and subscribers! It's good to be back here with you again! I hope you're all finding ways to thrive and resist in your own ways in these troubling times. If you can do so, please consider a paid subscription. They are now 50% off yearly subs, making a full year of this delightful bpnwc madness a very reasonable $15. No worries though if you can't afford it. Iwill always be free to read. 😻

Some of you fine people may have noticed that I have pretty much just fallen off the map lately. That's because I've been busily slogging through a medical crisis that reared it's ugly head last week, taking me by surprise just like they always seem to do. You see, my multiple autoimmune conditions mean that I'm always one small health mishap away from a cascading medical nightmare situation. My bodily systems are like a house of cards and when one thing finds its tipping point, everything else quickly follows suit.

So it was, when I developed an intestinal condition on the 12th. I'm not at all sure exactly what the cause of my ailment was. It did happen the day after I had to take Alex to the emergency room where we ended up sitting in a packed emergency waiting room for 7 hours. Could have been a virus, maybe food poisoning, perhaps even some new pandemic threat of which we are still unaware. 2025! What a time to be alive! I digress.

Regardless of the cause, this illness came with the worst diarrhea and nausea I've experienced in years, and I soon found myself at the point where I didn't have anything left in my stomach to expel. But my traitorous body continued to attempt to do just that no matter how much I tried to convince it otherwise. I dry heaved until I had even thrown up all of the acid in my stomach, and once that was accomplished I was in agonizing pain.

Now, I'm a little paranoid about stomach pain. If you've read any of my memoirs you might know that's because I had a three year period of time in my life during which I underwent seven surgical procedures on my bowel and abdomen, ultimately leaving me with a midsection that looks vaguely as though it's been fed through a cardboard bailer and also leaving me three and a half feet short of a full lower descending colon. I wore a colostomy bag on my stomach for a little over two years during that whole fiasco. I am also one of the only people I have ever known who can say that they have vomited poop out of their mouths. A dubious distinction at best. It was…a lot. And it all happened when Rick was just a tiny little toddler and also in a period of time in my life during which I discovered my spouse had engaged in literally hundreds of instances of infidelity in our four year long relationship, so that added another dimension of hell to the whole experience. My point is, I've got a lot of trauma behind abdominal pain. So when my belly continued to feel as though I was bleeding internally, I hightailed it to the emergency room with a great haste. What they found was alarming.

They told me that my dry heaving combined with my diarrhea and severe dehydration had caused intestinal inflammation called enteritis and also had left me with a blockage in my small bowel that they thought might possibly require surgical intervention. Nightmare scenario, my friends. Medical PTSD fully fucking activated. I sat numbly as they completed the preparation for my admission into the hospital, running the worst case doomsday scenarios through my head over and over. What can I say? A girl knows how to have a good time.

At least I got some morphine out of the whole deal.

First thing up: I had to get a cat scan. Internally, I heaved a great sigh of relief. Phew, at least it wasn't my mortal enemy, the MRI. I am very claustrophobic. I am also very fat. And the circumference of that enclosure is shockingly tight. That tiny, loud, clunking metal tube of death is something out of my worst anxiety laden nightmares. And I have in the past, had a few very memorable full tilt panic attacks behind an order for MRI imaging. Cat scans are bad enough for me, but at least you're not fully enclosed like you're in some kind of steel coffin.

I made it through the cat scan with breathing exercises combined with my master level disassociation skills, and was soon thereafter installed in my hospital room and made as comfortable as possible by the extremely wonderful nursing staff.

The next few days were a blur of blood draws and morphine infusions every four hours and vital checks every two to three hours. Time became fluid, as it always does in situations like this. Routine and pain shrinking everything down into regimented bits and bites softened around the edges by a gauzy opiate amnesiac ambience. My arms became war zones. My veins are hard to find and difficult to hit, so blood draws are always fraught. I was on water only for the first two days followed by clear liquids and Jell-O for another day, then moved onto normal foods and I tolerated it well. I seemed to be progressing well. But you know how I said earlier that my bodily systems are like a house of cards and they all cascade when one is traumatized? Well, that happened this time right on schedule. Those every four hour blood draws started showing an alarming rise in my liver enzymes, prompting real concern amongst my doctors that I might be suffering from a liver bleed or inflammation. The prescribed method of ascertaining this? Yep. MRI. PTSD fully fucking engaged times infinity.

I immediately had a small panic attack as I hurriedly explained to my wonderful and understanding nurse about how I had full Chernobyl level meltdown panic attacks in the past, and then informed her that back then, not only had I been smaller than I am now, but that I didn't have the condition I have now that causes me to feel like I'm dying from a lack of air if I lay flat on my back. I told her in no uncertain terms that there was no way I was getting in that tube and not having a terrible reaction to the whole thing.

The doctor kept coming back with the same response: at least try to do it. Doctors never seem to really take things like panic attacks seriously. They always seem to think they are something that can just be willpowered through. That may simply be because they've never seen a grand mal panic attack like I'm prone to having when provoked. They agreed to give me Xanax, but even all zooted up on Xannies, I took one look at that giant metal boa constrictor and almost crawled up the back of the wheelchair trying to escape. Eventually, the nurse helpfully suggested that I might not even fit in it in the first place, and offered to measure my hips to find out before they tried to force me to my certain doom inside that looming magnetic behemoth. It became a moot point when the measuring tape revealed the truth: my hips, like Shakira's, do not lie, and there was no realistic way I could even get inside the cold metal machine of dread even if I had a strange lemming-like urge to sacrifice myself to its freezing metallic embrace. Saved by my own fat ass. How about that?!

In the end, my liver enzymes began to fall on their own, and I didn't end up needing to be medically transported to Eugene where they have an MRI designed for larger folks. Which is good, probably, because I would have hated to disappoint everyone once again on an even grander scale.

The rest of my stay was largely just marked with sleepless coloring and crossword puzzle solving. The lack of sleep when I'm hospitalized is problematic. Because of my chronic pain, I have developed an incredibly complex system of sleeping comprised of an excruciatingly specific layout of blankets and pillows arranged around me and under me and between my knees and under my arms. I'm packed like I'm a box of fragile glass getting shipped across country. The less I am able to move, the less I thrash around the bed restlessly and disrupt my bipap mask. It's all highly specialized and customized just for my own needs. And it works like a charm. But when I'm away from home without those things, I am like a lost little lamb. A sleepless lost little lamb, who can't find any rest no matter how many sheep she counts in her attempts to do so.

So I predominantly cycled between the hospital bed and the rolling armchair, watching lots of bad basic cable movies. I mostly left my tablet untouched because I didn't feel like I had it in me to even glance at the headlines in my weakened state. Eventually the extreme amounts of hydration via infusion combined with my lack of being able to lay flat for long periods of time to sleep caused edema swelling in my extremities. Still, my lab work improved to the point that they finally released me from my sterile medical prison yesterday, much to the relief of my kitty, Onyx, who was so happy to see me that he was nearly sideways with joy. It took a little bit of the sting out of the typical teenage shrugs I was greeted with from the other co-residents of my domicile. Honestly, I don't really blame them. I am incredibly needy when I come home from the hospital. I even annoy myself, truth be told.

Now, I'm in that final and in some ways, most difficult part of the journey: recovering from being hospitalized. It's great to be home with my own bed and my specialized pillow setup, but there are some drawbacks. The lack of pain relief after having been on an every four hour schedule for the past five days is a real bitch. Five days of that is definitely long enough to get a little monkey on your back, and it's probably a good thing that they don't discharge with pain meds. I stay away from them for the most part anyhow. But the pain rebound effect from having them and then not having them is real and it is heinous. I'm relieving that by staying absolutely bombed on THC gummies. Thank jebus for THC gummies, my friends. Without them, this would be a real slog. Now that I can finally lay flat for long periods of time, I'm working on getting this painful water in my legs to drain out by keeping them elevated. It is a slow, excruciating and frustrating process, but at least it's the last step in the healing, and that gives me some hope of a return to normality fairly soon. I'll probably be at reduced capacity for some time and most likely won't be very prolific at the writing for a while. But I'll be around. I've been through worse and been in way worse shape before so my situation is disappointing but far from hopeless. I'll be around only as much as I feel I can actually handle without being deleterious to my health. To everyone who has already been aware of my situation and who has already reached out to me with kind words and gestures of encouragement and love, thank you so much. I love each and every one of you. To my lovely and essential paid subscribers, thank you for your indulgence in my time of need. Soon, hopefully, I will be back up to speed and back to a more regular publishing schedule. You're all amazing and I don't anticipate that a single one of you will hold it against me. Wish me luck my friends, I'm in a very fragile state right now, and I know from hard earned experience that this period of time right after being discharged from the hospital can easily lead me into another cascading medical crisis.

Here's the part where I shamelessly drop my little money beg: if you can possibly afford to help me out a little bit right now, I could use a little extra $$$ to put towards THC gummies and also food delivery because I am not fit to cook right now and yet my children, for some strange reason, have the absolute audacity to continue to want to eat. I can expect them to cover some of their meals, and I do, but then the problem becomes overwhelming filth in the form of piles of dirty dishes and overflowing trash cans. The house simply just functions at half speed when I'm down for the count like this. We've been through this enough for me to know this to be the truth. So anyone who wants to help me defray my costs during this time can do so at either:

Cash App: $atxsupermom

OR

PayPal: atxsupermom@gmail.com

I hate to ask and please know that I hold no ill will towards anyone who can't. Times are tough everywhere and we're all going through it right now. I guess this kinda wraps it up for now, my friends. Thank you for reading and I would love to read your comments while I'm laying around recovering, so feel free to fire away with those if you're so inclined! Love and light to one and all. Hold each other tight in this storm. I believe we will come out of this one day and see a better world. I have to believe that because my children deserve that future.

😻 bpnwc