Whimsically Crazy

So I survived the looming, and following that, the moving.

Then the pain that followed the moving (never again!), the unpacking (well we’re not living out of boxes, that counts as unpacked), and convincing the cats that this new apartment thing isn’t too bad after all (porch!)

Then I survived the colonoscopy prep, followed by the colonoscopy.

I’m a survivor.

Questionable on the crazy at the moment. My doctor asked me today if it was possible to lower stress and anxiety in my life.

Short answer, not gonna happen right now.

The Looming – sounds like it could be a book, or a horror movie, something slow and suspenseful. Tomorrow is the final event looming ahead of me, and I’ve found it all too appropriate that it falls on the 13th. Tomorrow morning I will turn right instead of left at the four-way stop, turn right again to get on I-5 South, and face my fears (or something).

If you don’t pity me for the drive than pity me for my 8-hour FDA training. In Tacoma. With no Internet.

In the meantime, the loom that has passed:

Sunday, Andrew’s graduation. A really big deal of course, but I was nervous about spending the day alone with Andrew’s family (it was fine) and nervous about drugging my UC into submission for the day. That was also fine, and it’s a good thing because this was the bathroom situation for the day:

Before the ceremony – about an hour of waiting outside before the doors were opened for guest. I had to go early with Andrew to hold things while he was gowned.

Inside before the ceremony – long lines reported by Andrew’s mother.

During the ceremony – sure, if you want to be that person.

Later in the ceremony when other people have left therefore declaring it socially acceptable – All those people had the same idea, plus see above.

After the ceremony – lines worse than before, I’m sure. Everyone who didn’t go beforehand is going to afterwards.

In the parking lot – it took us at least 30 minutes to get out, wow.

Also, I’m not sure which was more embarrassing – when Andrew’s mother told him our apartment smelled bad, or that I couldn’t smell it myself!

Friday, my new gastroenterologist appointment. Even though I was looking forward to it, it was still looming for a good long while. Plus that last week was more infuriating knowing that I had to postpone the appointment pointlessly.

However I definitely like my new doctor. She went over my entire history, actually read the medical information forms they make you fill out beforehand (referred me to dermatology for a rash on my foot that I’ve Internet-diagnosed as eczema.) She agrees that I don’t need to be on the Entocort and I’m tapering off of it now. We went over my remaining drugs and she explained how Remicade and pregnancy works. Since I’m not pregnant yet, she wants to make sure I’m healthy beforehand, however I didn’t say that I’m not putting it off any longer than we’re already planned, green light or not.

Also I get to have another colonoscopy. I’m hoping if I say it like that, it’ll make me think it’s something I want to do – yay a colonoscopy! Actually I’ve gone through this so many times I feel pretty blase about the whole thing. (In other words, it’s not looming.) And her point makes sense – we need to find out if I still have active inflammation that needs to be treated, or if I’m having IBS symptoms as well.

The actual exciting thing is I’m now in a research study. I feel like it was something I was expected to take more time on deciding but I’m all for someone getting a benefit out of me having this disease if I’m already stuck with it. It just means that they take extra blood when they’re already taking blood, and extra tissue samples when they’re already doing biopsies (colonoscopy).

After the appointment I met with the research coordinator who then followed me to the lab and had me fill out paperwork that looked like the paperwork I’ve already filled out. I hoped she wasn’t thinking she had to keep me company while waiting because I would have been more comfortable just pulling out my Kindle after the questions were answered, but she came with me when my name was called and added ten vials for blood on top of what the doctor ordered.

Finally she apologized for having to leave – where I was thinking, “Yes, PLEASE, finally!” – while the lab person was explaining to me the process for preparing a stool sample. I know she must hear this stuff all the time if she’s doing IBD research, but it’s still awkward on the patient end with someone listening in!

Actually looking back, I’m surprised she didn’t ask for extra for herself.

Finally, due to a crazy series of events I’m going to be doing that colonoscopy prep in July in the same bathroom I did my first one. We’re moving back to Capitol Hill, back to my old apartment, at the end of the month.

I’ve decided I cannot rightfully keep claiming “still not crazy” until next Wednesday has passed.

The holiday weekend felt ill-timed to me. I want all of the Bad Stuff to be over first so that I can actually relax and appreciate it.

Next in line for “Bad Stuff” is the second of two “luncheon” meetings with Customs at work tomorrow. Besides always managing to fall right when work gets busy so that I can’t appreciate the time away from the office, what I hate most about these things is that by being a lunch meeting it overwrites my actual lunch. Just because they feed you, it doesn’t count as a break!

Anything that forces me to both interact with groups of people and doesn’t let me get out of the office on my own for a bit, I consider introvert hell. Worse yet, I get back to my desk before I would actually be leaving for lunch on a typical day so a draining experience is followed by an even longer afternoon.

One more day to go and then I can check this one off my list. Next comes an all-day FDA class in Tacoma in June.

Tacoma.

Someone missed the memo that I don’t do freeway driving. After a week or so of feeling panicky every time I thought about it, I’m resigned to the idea, at least until it gets closer in a couple week.

Exactly two weeks I see, looking at my calendar.

I can maybe relax in two weeks.

Are we there yet?

I am often guilty on my blogs of backposting to when I meant to write something rather than when I actually did the writing. I’m even more guilty of building up posts in my head and never actually getting the writing done because it gets harder and harder to recall exactly what was in my head. So the lesser of two evils, a giant sum-up of the last week in one night.

First I’m going to jump to the end and say I’m not pregnant. I don’t want to build up any unnecessary suspense accidentally, but there’s still a story.

Last Thursday (marked the date) I saw bright red when I woke up. A trickle of blood in the toilet and I confirmed with a piece of toilet paper. Breakthrough bleeding/spotting isn’t terribly uncommon on my pill – it probably happens once or twice a cycle, but it always throws me off. What threw me off more was the crampy and generally ‘off’ feeling I had throughout the morning.

On a hunch I did some research and found out there’s such thing as ‘implantation bleeding’. I’m not going to rehash my calendar math because it was probably flawed, but it seemed plausible at the time. I started thinking a little more seriously about grabbing that dollar store test.

Then over the weekend I went looking further and saw I had a handful of symptoms from Early Pregnancy Symptoms – The earliest pregnancy signs before you miss a period! I know some of these are so generic anyone would probably have a few but…

1 – Cramping
Many women think that cramping is a sign that Aunt Flo (your menstrual period) is surely on her way but it’s actually one early sign of pregnancy[…]

That crampy feeling mentioned above.

3 – Fatigue
Fatigue is one of the first pregnancy symptoms. Increased progesterone levels can make you feel exhausted.[…]

Suddenly I’ve turned into someone who goes to bed by midnight, and found myself sleeping through my Saturday even though I don’t have bad drugs to blame that on anymore.

4 – Nausea
Nausea can be an early pregnancy symptom. Some women will start feeling queasy days before they even have a missed period. Blame the nausea on hormones again! For most women morning sickness doesn’t set in until around six weeks of pregnancy but some women will start feeling queasy really early on.

Started up with the cramping and keeps hitting randomly after I eat. Not causing any food aversions (#18) but it is an annoyance regardless.

6 – Constipation or diarrhea
[…]While most women will have issues with constipation during early pregnancy, some will have diarrhea instead.

Hardly worth noting when I have a disease that accounts for any and all stomach trouble, but I feel like I’ve been wobbling around either side of normal lately as my body tries to settle back to whatever ‘normal’ is.

7 – Headaches
Not every woman has problems with headaches during pregnancy, but for some this is the very first tell-tale sign of pregnancy.[…]

Even more statistically irrelevant, but I’m not normally a headachey person and remember popping the Tylenol a few days last week.

9 – Spotting
While some women think that implantation spotting is a common early pregnancy symptom, it doesn’t occur in most pregnancies.[…]

Started this whole obsession!

14 – Frequent trips to the bathroom
Frequent urination is a big complaint amongst pregnant women. Some women don’t have problems with this until later in pregnancy, but for many, frequent urination becomes a problem right away.[…]

This might actually be a negative point because I’ve been getting up in the night every night for at least a month straight, until a week or so ago.

15 – Heightened sense of smell

Skipping the description, that day I had written:

Speaking of pregnancy symptoms, I wonder if phantom smelling is one. In the early morning when it’s now light out these days but still too absurdly early to be awake, I thought I could smell cat pee. Well actually pee in general, since cat urine has a strong, specific smell when you’re close enough, but the conclusion I came to is that Merlin defiled my laundry baskets again. I mentally groaned and decided I would be doing loads of laundry tonight, and went back to sleep. (It’s something I can only get mad at him to a point – when I don’t put my clothes away for extended periods of time I figure I’m asking for it.)

In the morning, the smell was gone. I picked through handfuls of clothes and they were clean (still).

(Now I’m pretty sure I’m tempting fate for tonight.)

Thanks to this list I was fully committed to buying a pregnancy test for real. I wanted to sneak out and grab one while Andrew was at band practice so I didn’t have to admit to this whole silly thing but I was slow leaving the apartment and he wanted to walk to the store with me. When the drug store ended up being closed, I told my story and we went to Target because I wanted it in hand for Sunday morning.

Luckily we’re at a point where admitting (frivolous or not) that I might be pregnant doesn’t meet with a response of panic or horror.

The first thing I’ve learned about pregnancy tests is, technically they can be used at any time of day now but first thing is the morning is still going to be the most accurate.

The second thing I’ve learned is, while it’s often referred to as ‘peeing on a stick’, that’s actually harder than it sounds. Actually I’m too afraid to try and miss and waste a test, so I’m going with the collection method (using one of my littlest disposable plastic containers) and even then it’s difficult. I think as preparation for the actual baby, taking a pregnancy test is just going to involve peeing on your hands somehow. Or maybe I just fail at this part?

After a minute a strong pink control line appeared. With reasons for wanting and not wanting both results I think my mind defaulted to wanting to see something happen. A second line appear.

Nothing happened.

So nothing happened. We didn’t plan for anything to happen in the first place. So why do I find myself disappointed? Besides having a bunch of stupid symptoms with no real reason behind them… And looking forward to going into work on Monday with a secret. And not worrying anymore about whether I can actually get pregnant in the first place because there it would have happened.

There is still the chance that I am and it’s just too soon to tell – the test came in a three pack and I planned to try again in a week or so – but even as the last week’s passed that feeling that I just might be pregnant has faded.

This wasn’t the kind of crazy I expected.

Oops, I totally distracted myself reading my own blog history until it’s at the point that going to bed is more important than writing. I guess I’m not as boring as I thought. Or just easily distractable.

A spammer tried to tell me a random post needs more relevant content. Well a story is coming.

Still not exceptionally crazy.

Today is Mother’s Day in Mexico, since they go by the date (May 10) not the day (Sunday) like we do here. I bet that leads to a lot less “is it this weekend or next??” panics too.

At work I got documents emailed to me from Mexico like I do every Thursday, but this email said, good morning to me by name followed by, “Happy mothers day, congratulations.”

Congratulations?? Do they know something I don’t, I wondered?

Last week I noticed for a few days I was experiencing what could be symptoms of pregnancy… or diabetes… (specifically being hungry all the time, tired all the time, and having to pee a lot.) I just had my blood sugar checked at my annual exam so I’m good there, but I’m still on the pill so that one is pretty unlikely as well. I considered getting a pregnancy test to be sure, but I’d just be disappointed at the negative result.

After today however I almost feel like the universe is telling me to grab a dollar store test.

More proof to the universe that I am ready – I found there is a visual guide to baby poop. Yes really – it has pictures from various phases (newborn, starting solids, etc) so you know what normal looks like.

I had no problem looking at it, while eating dinner even.

But I thought the ‘healthy breastfed poop’ picture looked like curry.

Also, still not crazy yet. Excepting previous line about curry anyway.

I wanted to bang my head on the wall in frustration yesterday morning, but I couldn’t reach it from the toilet. I just can’t wrap my mind around a disease where eating healthy makes you sick. I blame the whole thing on the nice, healthy bowl of broccoli I had with dinner the night before… Everything you read everywhere on diet says to eat your veggies and more veggies.

Then to add to the frustration I consulted with the Unhelpful Internet for ideas on what to eat when you still want to eat healthy and lose weight but your body doesn’t agree. (Yes I know everyone is different, but some guidelines please!) Getting past all the unhelpful stuff, what I did find out was, soup! Pureed vegetables are easier to tolerate, and while I normally like my soup “chunky” to be satisfying, I just need to rethink soup into a side dish and drink my veggies with dinner.

I got my appointment with a Virginia Mason gastro, June 1st since specialists are always booked out a month. I delayed on filling out the time off request since I wasn’t sure how when I don’t know how long to expect the appointment to be, unlike the old days when I could just say, “Hey I’m going to be in late tomorrow.” So when I did my office manager asked if I could reschedule because another coworker already had the day off for medical reasons!

Ugh, frustration! We’re not supposed to have more than one out at a time, but other coworker was allowed to run off to a spontaneous appointment in the past leaving me functionally alone, while my medical issue feels like an inconvenience!

Luckily I was able to reschedule to only a week later… if I was pushed out to July… just more ugh.

Warning: Cat story ahead

Last week Morgan got her wish and ran outside when I got home unnoticed. However I don’t think ‘unnoticed’ is actually part of her wish because normally she waits halfway down the hallway for me to accompany her exploring, giving me a ‘hurry up’ meow. Andrew noticed her missing 15-20 minutes later when she didn’t come for dinner, and found her crouched in the corner of the doorway of the apartment below us. At least one person had come through the outside door which always scares her back home, but Morgan doesn’t have a good concept of how stairs and apartments work so she always runs for the door above or below ours.

Back home she was still scared and wouldn’t eat. Since we were going out to dinner ourselves, we put her food up for later since Merlin was already finished and walking over with his ‘are you going to eat that?’ look.

I know it’s silly to compare your pets to kids, but since we don’t have the real thing yet…

First, I was thinking there was some hope for being able to go out without thinking about the “kids” nonstop since I was worried about Morgan when we left, and worried about her on the way back home, but had a normal dinner with friends in between.

Then after dinner, Andrew was sitting with her while she ate, making sure Merlin didn’t push her out.

Watching him with the cats, especially moments like that, I can really see him being an amazing future dad as well.

I feel like I should post every couple days and just say, “Still not crazy yet.”

It was a little dicey on Thursday when I had a parking ticket at lunch because someone had taken my parking spot, but the company ended paying for it.

Otherwise, still not crazy yet.

I had a dream – nightmare – that Andrew had died. The dream gave me the feeling of being in a cop show drama, involving a hotel room and putting shoes in plastic bags, but plot is irrelevant when I’m playing the role of the inconsolable widow.

Later in the morning, Andrew kicked Merlin out of the bedroom for being obnoxious, and sprayed some cat calming spray on the door to keep him from scratching. A minute later the smell wafted over and I thought, “yes that is calming…”