A Ceramic Fish Joint

Oh, Twitter…how I love you.

I particularly love the random @ replies from people searching for a particular keyword but neglecting to read my tweet.  My most recent example:

@onehotrobot (that’s me!):

Might attend a Jesus Lovin’ banquet tonight w/peeps who are building Mom’s ramp. Fellowship, love & blood of the lamb. Offensive, I has it.

@lamb_lover:

@onehotrobot It’s so easy using up roast lamb leftovers, wrapped in foil and kept in the fridge they’re good for two days

Oh my.  Oh, oh my.  This one is actually so wrong that it’s very, very right.

Did I mention anywhere that I’m offensive?

This video, this one taken at the second largest aquarium…It’s the most breathtaking thing I’ve viewed in a long time.

Let it load for a while before clicking play, make sure HD is on and go to full screen mode then just watch.  Kinda puts things into perspective a bit.

Also, I love the manta rays and watching them swim.  Especially the giant ones.  It looks like they are flying through the water.  Absolutely amazing.  Bajillion thumbs up.

First, I finally upgraded my version of Wordpress.  Twice, actually.  I was running 2.2.x and we’re now at 2.8.2 I think.  Yesterday it was 2.8.1.  Today I updated again.  In doing so, I deleted everything from my domain (this one, anyway) and used the handy-dandy easy installer thingy from DreamHost.  You can only do it with blank directories, see.  And I had run into problems previously because my WP install was buried deep in the domain and had a weird redirect running.  So it broke some things.  Well, a lot of things.  Most of which I could fix with some hand coding, some of which I couldn’t.  So, for the ease of the site, I moved everything to the root of this domain and splat.  I don’t even remember why I did it the other way.

But, looking at the admin page – it takes me back.  This is what WordPress looked like way back in Beta.  It has changed a lot since then; apparently choosing to go back to its roots.  I’m a little ‘meh’ about it.  I liked GreyMatter but I don’t think it’s being produced anymore.  And I’m just impatient enough to get annoyed when trying to use another CMS.  I’m bored, yet I wiggle my way out of anything that would lead to learning.  Smart move, Heidi.  Smart move.

Moving along.

So my body has declared all out war on me.  Fine, whatever.  There’s the pain.  Oh, the pain.  And the nothing to take for pain since my PAIN MANAGEMENT doctor feels I’m “too young” to be in pain.  Forgot that pain had an age limit.  He took me off of the meds that helped me function and now I’m just a shell.  An angry, hurty shell.  Then there’s the stomach.  Also painful, but nobody will treat it because nobody knows what is causing the pain.  It’s almost certainly my liver.  Considering I was never a heavy drinker and barely a social drinker…don’t think it’s alcohol related.  The thing highest on the list as a cause is autoimmune hepatitis.  Doesn’t go away.  Can be treated to some success, however by the time you’re having symptoms – especially frequent and bad (like me, for the most part) your liver is already kind of screwed.  So, yay!  Also, I don’t see the doctor about this for another two and a half months.  Yay again!

Finally.  My fucking period.  You know, I was bemused when you went away.  Figured it was from the surgery, the sick and the stress of losing my job then having to move.  You came around last October.  I stopped taking birth control in December.  A normal person would start bleeding pretty darn soon after cessation of hormonal birth control.  Not me.  No, it wasn’t until…May I think?  Yeah, May was when my good friend came back briefly.  Now, roughly 9 weeks later I’m having my fourth period.  Seriously?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Also, I would like to point out to my brain that…look – right there.  In front of you no more than six feet.  Is a box of fucking birth control pills.  Two full packs.  I could go back on them if I wanted.  Apparently reaching for and opening the box is too hard.  Who the fuck knows.

But, interestingly enough, there is a correlation to the blood and the pain.  No wait, trust me on this.  So the last time I went to the gyno they said they were almost positive that I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) – something that causes pain in the lower innards, irregular periods, and a strong hormonal imbalance leading to obesity and thyroid disease.  But.  I was taking the treatment for mild cases of PCOS already.  I could have a CT Scan to confirm if I wanted (but would have to pay a large copay) or just keep taking the pills.

Now, here’s where it’s interesting.  Autoimmune hepatitis normally affects females.  Young females.  Either immediately around puberty (first type) or in early adulthood (second type.)  Thinking back, when I was 12 I had this blasted pain and nobody knew what it was.  And have had problems with my stomach off and on ever since.  I’ve had a slew of diagnoses some right and others not so much(like diverticulitis – though more recent tests show no signs of it…and it doesn’t heal itself.)  Ok, so I got sick again yesterday morning I think.  And researched again the whole autoimmune hepatitis.  Turns out there is a link between it and PCOS.  Which I was told with a fair amount of certainty that I have.  Now, if the cysts are large enough they have to be surgically removed.  Also, it would explain a lot.  Like the whole irregular menses.

Anyway, there’s nothing truly definitive out there, but there seems to be a link between PCOS and autoimmune disorders.  Also, my thyroid function has been ever so slightly out of whack for years, but not enough for any doctor to care (just like my slightly elevated liver enzymes which apparently are a big deal now.)  So I’m being tested for thyroid functioning, too.  That is, if I ever take the labwork somewhere for my blood to be stolen.  Always fun.  They’re going to need about 10 vials with all the tests ordered.  And, uh, my veins – they hide.  And roll.  And are deep and small.  Getting blood from me is an ordeal.  Getting an IV in me is an ordeal.  Should prove interesting.

Did I mention I cracked another tooth?  On a fucking mint?  I’m falling apart here.  (Though, in my defense, the teeth thing is likely hereditary.  It still sucks.  Also, a mint?  Seriously?  That’s not even real food!  Weak ass teeth.)

Oh and aha!  I finally found the Twitter plugin I used previously.  Out with the old one(s) and in with the right one.  Who knew it was so hard?

Well, everything is all snug and secure and up to date. And I’m all “meh” about it.  Not digging this version of Wordpress much, but whatever.  The thing that bothers me the most is that, at least in the browses I use, the option to subscribe to the feed for the site is all the way up in the address bar.  That other RSS icon?  Is to subscribe to my Twitter feed.

I guess I should just be happy that this went over relatively unscathed.

It’s hard to write something when it seems suck and doom is all I ever see. Which is why I write infrequently. I made a promise to myself a few months ago to only write when there wasn’t a negative undertone to it. Which led to me not writing at all. Still, I attempt to keep the angry deep down inside with myself.

My mom is home from her second hospital stay (seems I didn’t even mention that) and is relatively okay. They sent her home with a number of ports and drains. Guess who gets to flush them. Oh, go on….guess. It’s me! Oh well, at least I don’t empty them.

My own health front is bleak at best. Doctors are turning me down all over the place. Nobody really knows what’s wrong and at the very earliest I’ll have test results in late September regarding the abdominal pain. That is, if the theories of the doctor at U of MD are correct. If not, then we start all over again. Personally, I’m done playing the doctor game. I’m forced to live in constant pain because my “pain management” doctor feels I’m too young to take the pills that worked for me. Didn’t realize pain had an age limit.

I don’t feel like doing anything or seeing anyone. My life, since I’ve moved to WV, has consisted of doctors, hospitals and family. There’s not a single social moment I’ve had since I’ve been here. My car is not my own. I actually have to ask permission to use it. Yet I pay for insurance and upkeep (and registration and all that jazz.) I can’t save money to get away because my dad keeps taking money from me. It’s all seemingly innocuous – he takes then puts money back. Except for the whole part where he doesn’t actually put it *all* back. In 2 months I’m about $600 in the hole. In 2 months he “borrowed” 2 grand and over time put some of it back.

I’m sick of this. I’m stuck. I have no way out. Even going to school is impossible until I get another car. Do you realize how hard it is when your money is continually being leeched away by your parent? Or that you can’t really work because of those pesky illnesses that nobody knows the cause.

I’m sick of this. It’s not the life I had planned. Nor the one I wished to live.

Guess I let a little of the negative slip through.

For most of my growing-up life, my dad had one of those real, legitimate businesses. Well, maybe not *most* of it. But a good portion of it. B.H. (Before Heidi, as he calls it) Dad was mostly a gambler. He had a racehorse in 1978 (Mr. G) and played cards most of his life.

A tangent. My dad and mom actually grew up about 3 miles from one another (until my mom’s parents divorced; she was 13.) However they went to different schools for some reason. I don’t know. Different times. Walking 12 miles uphill in the snow BOTH WAYS and all that. Okay. So there’s this local place…a hot dog shop. It’s totally famous to the area and apparently the owners (and finally the sons) rubbed elbows with important people because there are autographs of actors, athletes and even a president or two adorning the walls. Waaay back in the day, the town in which it is located (which is adjacent to my hometown) was the second largest city in Maryland – next to Baltimore. It’s the Queen City. Okay. So, this hotdog place. It’s located on a downtown mall. For a while there were actually TWO of them, on the same street, about a block apart (but with access to each restaurant in the back alley.) I don’t know how long there were duplicates. I believe maybe one was the original then one belonged to the son…or maybe original passed down to son then the next owned by grandson. I’m not great at remembering details. Anyway, the second one closed a few years ago. Not entirely important to the story, but relevant to the store, I guess. So when my parents were wee, they were both taken to this hotdog restaurant. (And it is just a hotdog restaurant; recently they’ve added hamburgers and a fish sammich…but people go for the hotdogs with special Coney Island sauce. Which, after researching, is totally different from other Coney Island sauces. Whatever. Oh, another tangent of a tangent…the last time I ate there my dad remarked how I order two hotdogs with sauce only and eat one hotdog – complete and one bite of the other…then remove the hotdog to eat it with just sauce. Cause I really don’t like hotdogs, just always ordered and ate it that way. BUT! At the register we asked, and learned that you can totally buy a “Sauce Bun”! I’m not the only one, apparently.) Okay, so this hotdog place. My father’s parents and family had more money than my mom’s family. Although my dad’s father could be considered a drunk, my mom’s father was a full-on alcoholic. There’s totally a difference. There’s a difference between chasing the tax collector off your property with a gun and beating your wife and children daily up to the point of holding your children at gunpoint asking which would like to go first. And children regularly sleeping in the woods because they were afraid of their father. Also, if it was bad enough for my grandma to divorce him in the very early 60s to raise 3 young girls alone…it was bad. But, it gives a background to their lives. Dad got to have chocolate milk every day at school and keep the change from it. Something like that rarely happened for my mom (and never keeping the change – 2 whole cents – to buy candy or somesuch.)

Okay, so in this tangent of my story, both parents were taken to this hotdog place as children. For my dad it was much more common than my mom. When my mom went, her mother told her to not look at the men in dark overcoats at the counter because they were bad men. When my dad went, he was taken to meet those bad men because they were bookies – taking bets for (horse) races later that day. It was assumed that dad would grow up to be meeting with those bookies (he did) and other unsavory characters about town. Dad was much better at handicapping horses than his father or uncles (and I am better than he is, it seems,) and the only one who was any good at poker. For much of his 20s he rented out an office in an unsavory part of town so that he could run a game.

Damn, how did I get here? Oh, right. So although Dad did all this gambling and such, he also worked with his father doing drywall. My grandfather picked it up after the war. Him and a few of my great uncles moved to the D.C. area to start doing it. Totally new trade – and although they claimed experience they learned on the fly. After I was born (A.H.) he did a lot more drywall and a lot less gambling. And endured countless amounts of ridicule from my mom’s sisters because he didn’t have a real job. Though, yeah. Throughout it all I think my parents survived a lot better without any help from inheritances or payouts because the “real job” caused real damage to the worker. After my grandfather died, my dad took over Sisk Drywall and turned it into a real company. It was before that…but not nearly as prosperous. People in the know knew them, but it was officially on the downlow. Dad got a contractor’s license and a business license and all that fun stuff. He had no official employees – just subcontractors working for him (who usually did not have a license) but who he vouched for and would fix any mistakes made by them. He had a good run until Jeremy kind of beat him down. Money was good for my family, and it all started to go to Jeremy. And still does. Another story though, another time.

So with a business comes…business cards! I distinctly remember being about 12 years old, waiting in my dad’s truck while he conducted some business with some builder. And I was bored. So I drew on the back of a couple of his business cards. With a purple pen. Fred Flintstone. Wilma, too. And Dino. There were probably duplicates, but I drew on about 5 cards. (A funny aside, this was in his “new” truck. He still has it – it is no longer new. But his previous truck, a Datsun – this one being a Nissan – had totally turned into a Flintstone truck towards the end. The damn floorboards kept rusting out. Meaning if you were a passenger riding along you could look down and see the damn road. No lie.) So this was a new pack of business cards and I picked a few at the end to draw my lovely pictures. Towards the end of his legitimate business days, and while he still had the business line (before actions Jeremy took caused it to go away) he got down to those last cards and found pictures from me. This was like 5 years later I guess. He gave away a couple cards before realizing I drew on them because he still has a Fred Flintstone somewhere in his truck. When the time came to give out a card, he just wouldn’t part with the drawings I made when I was 12.

Now dad occasionally does some drywall here and there and instead gambles for his living. He’s not necessarily on the level of those professional players you see on tv, but he’s also never had the bankroll to get him in a game with blinds that are 4 grand and 8 grand either. He doesn’t do so bad on his level, though. And, poker is another think he passed to his progeny – I don’t exactly suck at it, either, though I’m definitely still learning.

Uhm, this may or may not be inspired my my total need for business cards for a business I don’t have (you know, other than being me) and my previous browsing history on Moo.com to build business cards.

Nothing says America like some Muppets singing Stars & Stripes forever. No, really.

So I went to University of Maryland for a consult with some extra super specialist in gastroenterology. I’m not exactly sure how to take the consult. In one sense, he doesn’t feel that I have certain conditions (like Sphincter of Oddi dysfunction or enlarged ducts/trapped stones in the ducts around my liver, going to the pancreas and other complications from gallbladder stuffs.) So, that means no invasive tests. Right now at least.

He feels the problem is with my liver. He thinks the two most likely causes are either a fatty liver (cause, you know, I’m fat) or autoimmune hepatitis. According to the Googles, a fatty liver can only be diagnosed through biopsy, but he claims that a loss of 10% of my body weight could relieve symptoms and be an indication of the disease. Except I’ve actually lost more than 10% in the past year and have only gotten worse. Apparently that weight loss doesn’t count. (Also, I love how blase doctors are about losing weight. I can barely eat solid food as it is, I’ve completely changed my diet months ago so that I am eating healthier. And I used to exercise until I was taken off of pain medicine and walking across the room became difficult. So, you know…not so easy.) The only real treatment for fatty liver is losing weight. And some insulin producing meds – but since I’m not diabetic and tend towards the lower end of the glucose spectrum that’s not a good option for me. But, of course, I’ll try to lose more weight. If only because as long as I’m overweight all physical and mental ailments I have will be attributed to the fat on my ass. (Like when I recently saw the pain management dr? He referred me to a weight loss doctor. Despite the fact that the pain started one year ago, almost immediately after the whole “being t-boned by pizza boy” incident. Not only was I not having chronic back and hip pain before, but I was quite…uh…flexible and had particular stamina in certain situations…)

As for the autoimmune hepatitis, that one is tricky as well. They’re retesting for Hep B and C because of my mom’s history with it, too. But Dr. Google kind of shows that most of my symptoms match the autoimmune hepatitis. And, it is interesting… I’ve been wondering for a while now if I have an autoimmune disorder just because of some of the stuff I deal with. So, this also can’t be “cured” – just treated. And hopefully it goes into remission. The main treatment is steroids, which, of course, cause weight gain among other craptacularness. I’ve already got enough anger, don’t need roid-rage.

Finally, the doctor addressed my gastroparesis. It takes about 12 hours (from what I can tell…) for me to digest food now. The normal treatment causes major anxiety issues and can’t be used long term. I didn’t notice any additional anxiety while taking it, but when you’re on edge all the time it’s hard to tell. But I also didn’t notice any benefit to taking an extra 4 pills a day so I ended up stopping them. So anyway, he tells me there’s two ways to treat the issue. One is this drug that’s not FDA approved, but can be purchased from Canadian pharmacies. I’d actually heard of it before when researching gastroparesis but blew it off because I didn’t figure I’d ever get a valid prescription. Anyway, the big side effect of it? Lactation. As in, milk spewing forth from my boobs. So first I have to order this illegal stuff and get it through customs. (Which, hell…I’ve done countless times with stuff from India and the like…) and then I have to worry about boob leakage. It seems so wrong. If that doesn’t work, the other option is botox. In my tummy. Which either works or doesn’t and has to be repeated 2 – 3 times a year. Sigh.

Am I the only one who has these weird ass health issues to be treated with even weirder treatments? I don’t get it.