Sorry for the lack of blogging – it wasn’t due to lack of inspiration or laziness or anything of the sort. It was due to several rather unfortunate surprises right in a row. This will have to be short because I need to get to sleep, but I at least wanted to post a little something and fill you all in on what’s been happening.

    First off, I’ve been sick. Well, sicker. I’ve been really swollen all over again, but in a different way, and my abdomen has been hurting like hell on and off. I went to an Urgent Care place and the doc poked and prodded me, and guess what? It hurt especially bad right over my kidneys. I got all freaked out, thinking maybe my disease had finally progressed to the final stage – the bit that makes Dercum’s Disease fatal – and that the diseased cells were finally accumulating on one of my internal organs (like my kidney, for instance), which would mean the organ would either become engulfed in diseased fat cells and shut down, or develop a large tumor on the organ and shut it down. Either way, that’s just not good. So needless to say, I was extremely, extremely scared. Lots of tears, but not a lot of talking this time. I just couldn’t bring myself to blog about it.

    Anyway, I had a CT scan of my abdomen over a week ago, which also sucked (I loathe barium, just so you know.) I only just now got the preliminary report – apparently there aren’t any tumors on my kidneys, but there is a “cyst” on my uterus. I don’t really know what that means or how bad it is, because they haven’t told me much else. Needless to say, I’m still freaked out. (This isn’t something I would normally talk about on the blog, but since I know a lot of you have been concerned, that’s why I’m talking about it.) While potentially losing my uterus isn’t a life-threatening issue like the kidney is, it’s still upsetting and just lends more credence to this feeling that I’ve had ever since I was a kid that I would never be able to have children of my own. I never knew why, it was just always in the back of my head. Kind of like how a thought was always in the back of my head that I shouldn’t be weirded out by my Uncle Bud’s partially amputated left hand, because I might end up in a similar situation some day. That one turned out to be true, which is why I never just tossed aside the thought about the kids.

    As if the sparse news about the random cyst isn’t bad enough, the CT still doesn’t rule out other kidney problems, because hey, the swelling is still there and I’m still having a great deal of pain in the vicinity of my kidneys. They could be infected, they could be bruised, heck, I might even have stones in there and not know it because of all the pain meds I’m on. Who knows what the hell is happening inside my body and right now I’m more scared than I’ve been in a really long time. I didn’t need this right now. Well, no one ever does, but come on. Life was already bad enough, I don’t know how much more I can take. Everyone has their breaking point, and I know I’m inching dangerously close to mine, and I’m afraid of what might happen if I’m pushed closer and closer to the edge. I really don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to snap, but I’m so close that I’m feeling the strain every minute of the day and I’m desperately struggling just to keep myself together.

    Alright, wonderful experiece number two – we had a small house fire. Everyone’s fine, there wasn’t any damage from the fire itself, but there was quite a bit of smoke damage. And as it turns out, I don’t react well to smoke, its leftover residue, or even the special cleaning fluid used to clean up after the damage. I don’t usually have bad allergies, but after only being exposed to the house for a few hours after the fire, my eyes were burning, my throat hurt like hades, and I developed a rash that took days to go away.

    So the fire happened around 6:30pm on Monday, January 8th. My brother was cooking a microwaveable frozen lasagna in the microwave. He got distracted, so it stayed in the microwave just a little bit longer than it should have. He smelled smoke, ran downstairs, and found the lasagna on fire and black smoke billowing out of the microwave on all sides. He said it was so smoky that he couldn’t see from one end of the kitchen to the other. Now, he should have just called the fire department straight away, but in the heat of the moment, he just put out the fire himself, took the microwave out to the back porch, and then opened up all the windows to try and vent out the smoke. Keep in mind, this was at 6:30.

    While all this was happening, my Mom and I were out to dinner with her chapter of the Red Hat Society. We got home at about 9:45 – it was still hazy in the house, but not too bad. The fire department was nice enough to come over and try to pump what was left of the smoke out of the house because we were all having bad reactions to it. Despite their best efforts, we still could hardly breathe, so at midnight, we quickly gathered some things and ran off to a hotel. (Did you know the Marriott has a “we had a house fire and had to evacuate” discount? They do! It’s $50 off. Learn something new every day…) We were there for five days. During that time, the insurance company got a specialized cleaning service to come in and clean up from the smoke damage, but apparently I’m allergic to that too, so I couldn’t go back home. (And by the way, all this time later, the cleaning crew is STILL there – last I heard, they were taking all our clothes and bed linens to be professionally cleaned.)

    By the time Saturday rolled around, we realized we were stuck with a rather serious problem. My Mom had to leave for Ohio the next day to take care of Samantha, my brother Tim’s daughter, because TIm’s wife had to go out of town urgently. I had been wanting to go with my Mom anyway, since I definitely needed something happy at this point, but we weren’t sure if I could go because of the aforementioned kidney and swelling problems. Here’s what our problem was, though – I couldn’t fly with my Mom to Ohio because of the health problems, but I couldn’t go back home because of the fumes, and I couldn’t stay alone at the hotel because I can’t drive due to the meds I’m on. I would have been stranded.

    So my Mom and I decided to go on a little road trip. She was able to rearrange her airline ticket for another date, so we hopped in the car and took off for Ohio. We meandered our way there, taking our time so as not to stress ourselves (and so we could shop at outlet malls along the way), so we made it to Ohio by Sunday afternoon. Despite the odd experience we had at our hotel in Morgantown, West Virginia, the road trip was uneventful and fairly easy. We could have done it in one day, but splitting the time over two days really saved me – I was able to get out of the car and walk around when the pain got to be too much after sitting for so long, and better yet, I was able to stop at the Hagerstown Outlet Mall, which is oodles of fun and provided some much needed therapy.

    Now here I am, in Ohio, with only a few clothes, my laptop, and a couple random toiletries that my brother Steve was nice enough to gather up for me from the house. I’ve been spending time with my niece and my brother, generally having a great time, but still trying to get through it all with a smile despite the pain, fear, and overall anxiety about what I’m going to have to face when I get home. More tests, more diagnostic crap, and of course, surgery on the 26th. That is, unless my kidneys decide to fail before then or I end up having to get my uterus taken out or something. Who knows. And that’s exactly what I’m so afraid of – who does know? Because I certainly don’t, and I HATE not knowing. And even worse, the fact that my birthday is in the midst of all this impending doom, it’s heartbreaking. I’ve been trying so hard to think of ways to try and make it a happy occasion, but I can’t think of anything. It’s just too dismal, having two birthdays in a row surrounded by such painful circumstances. I hate it, and I hate that I don’t know what to do to fix it.

    But more than that, I really, really, really HATE that it’s only 17 days into 2007 and so far so many things have gone wrong that it’s frankly unbelievable. And I haven’t even told you everything! There have been a few other family crises and medical problems that I just don’t even want to go into right now because it’s too complicated, too scary, and this blog is already about ten times longer than I originally intended it to be. I was only going to write a short, bulleted list of blurbs about what happened. Now here we are with another mammoth blog full of bad news. I’m sure you’re tired of blogs like this by now, and frankly, so am I. I really wish my life were fake like the Truman Show, because then that would mean I could just find the hidden doorway and walk out of the studio, walk into the bright sunlight of the real world, and leave all the make-believe problems behind. I would give anything if that were possible. But it’s not, because life sucks, and frankly, I’m starting to believe that it will always suck. There just doesn’t seem to be any way around it, because just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does. I think that is destined to be the story of my life. Crap, and now I’m crying. I’m just going to go to bed now… I should have done that hours ago, instead of writing all of this… stupid blog. But oh well, at least now you know.