{"id":354,"date":"2003-04-07T08:26:48","date_gmt":"2003-04-07T13:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/04\/07\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-20T21:32:23","modified_gmt":"2005-10-21T01:32:23","slug":"whats-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2003\/04\/07\/whats-up\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s up?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I guess I should update this thing with what’s been going on.<\/p>\n

Friday the 28th, Okina and I closed on the condo. Hurrah! Then he and J and I went on a nice little shopping spree in the area. The location of choice was Best Buy, and we managed to pick up a washer, dryer, microwave and a new television for the basement. Then we stopped in at the mall to examine the food court, after which we raced home so I could run a class on game.<\/p>\n

Class ended around 10:30, and after that I was fine until about midnight, when I started to get the same middle back pain that I’ve been getting on and off for well over a year now. I took some Ibuprofin and went to bed, and managed to fall asleep for a couple of hours. But when I woke up again, it wasn’t gone, it was worse, so I hauled out the heating pad. I dozed for a little while, but it just didn’t seem to improve, so at about 4:30 I went downstairs to look up the symptoms of appendicitis. I didn’t -seem- to have them, but they said you definitely shouldn’t use a heating pad, so I turned that off.<\/p>\n

About an hour later, I decided to make Okina take me to the emergency room. Here I must pause to thank the MIT-Wellesley exchange bus, because otherwise I would not have known where a hospital was, and would have had to look up directions. (Directing Okina to a strange location while one is lying flat in the seat of the car and neither of us has had much sleep is a dicey proposition.) So we get to Newton-Wellesley hospital, and first I have to convince the nurse that I am in PAIN and dammit I NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR. But before that, I must, of course, provide a urine sample and fill out about 800 forms with yet another nurse. We manage that, and I go back to the waiting room, where I attempt to find a method of sitting that actually relieves the pain rather than making it worse.<\/p>\n

(No luck.) A little while later, they finally send me off to a little cubicle, where I wait for a doctor. And wait and wait and wait. And finally he comes in. We talk for about 2 minutes and he determines that no, it’s not my appendix, but it probably is my gall bladder. I am, at this point, vastly relieved. They know what it is, which means they can bloody well do something about it. Which they do, though slowly. We arrived at about 5:40, and after several abortive attempts at painkillers that just didn’t work, they gave me Demerol at around 7:45ish, and that 1) made me sick, 2) made me high and 3) made the back pain tolerable.<\/p>\n

After an ultrasound and some morphine (also made me sick… whee.) they confirmed the diagnosis.<\/p>\n

A minor digression here. Why on earth don’t we hear more about people with gall bladder problems or with thyroid problems? Those are two diseases I never have heard much of anything about — everyone knows about appendixes, for instance — yet they are apparently remarkably common. The only time I’d ever really heard a gall bladder mentioned was in relation to my great-grandmother when I was very young, and so naturally my thought processes went like this: gall bladder = really old people. But…!<\/p>\n

Anyhow. Moved to a room. Managed to get hold of mom. They refused to let me have anything to eat or drink, because they *might* do surgery that day, but they weren’t sure. Finally it got to be like 6pm and my mom went and bothered the nurse to make them give me some food. After a fairly uncomfortable night, they took me down pretty much first thing in the morning. Was back up in the room by about eleven, and after Okina had a short nap, he headed home to pick up J and the two of us spent part of the day playing Lord of the Rings Risk. (The forces of Evil swept over Middle Earth. Ha.)<\/p>\n

Interestingly, almost immediately after the surgery was over, they decided to give me lots of food, then promptly forgot about me again until they delivered a dinner I didn’t really care for. Monday morning, I didn’t get any breakfast, and then at noon, as I prepared to depart the hospital, someone finally showed up to take my order for lunch.<\/p>\n

It was an odd weekend. When I got home on Monday I felt displaced from time; Saturday and Sunday were just so outside the realm of my experience that I wasn’t sure how to include them in my count of days. I spent the week at home doing precisely nothing, for which I will pay dearly this week. But I can’t help but feel that the lethargy, which followed the two days of actually feeling very ill, was justified.<\/p>\n

Am at work now, not pleased to be here, and feeling rather out of it.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess I should update this thing with what’s been going on. Friday the 28th, Okina and I closed on the condo. Hurrah! Then he and J and I went on a nice little shopping spree in the area. The location of choice was Best Buy, and we managed to pick up a washer, dryer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}