If I’m lucky.
I am very afraid that my “condition” has gotten worse.
By “condition” , I of course mean whatever the fuck disease I have that has been making my muscles get progressively weaker over the last five years or so.
You know, that disease Doctor Chao forgot all about for six months. Six months in which I assumed he was hot on the trail of a diagnosis and maybe even treatment for me.
But no. Must have slipped his mind.
It’s not like I am kinda bitter about that, though.
It’s that I am INCREDIBLY bitter about it, and if things continue to get worse and I lose my ability to walk completely, I am going to both file a complaint with the College of Surgeons and Physicians about him AND sue the pants AND underwear off him.
He’ll be lucky if I don’t take the crotch lint too.
And that point might not be that far away, because for the last three or four days, walking has been both more painful and more tiring than ever before.
Or at least since I got out of the hospital last August.
This morning’s trip to Wound Care was a real trial. Wound Care is the hardest thing I do in a week because I have to walk from the parking lot to the elevator, then through the door into the Community Clinic, through the reception area, then down a long (for me) corridor to the waiting area, then into the room where they do my Wound Care where I wash my hands then go to whichever cubicle we’re using this time.
Then it’s back out to the corridor, through reception, down the elevator, and back to the parking lot where Julian is waiting with the car.
Back when my legs worked, that would have been no big deal, even for a fat fuck who is so out of shape he’s non-Euclidian, like me.
But now it’s a grueling death march, and every time my condition gets worse, it gets longer and harder for me.
And I am pretty sure this is my last stop on the locomotion locomotive. If my condition gets much worse, I will have to switch to using a wheelchair.
I know I have said that before, but this morning was so bad that I think this time it is really and truly for real, dawg.
However, I must point out that this could all be temporary. The cause could be something transitory like an infection or a subtle injury, and I might well wake up Monday and find that things are back to the previous level of misery.
And I might not.
And mine is a temperament that demands that I work out the worst case scenario in my head in order to be able to calm down about something that worries me.
It always makes me feel better to take a nebulous, unquantifiable, shadowy fear and transform it into something defined, limited, and known.
There’s a price, though, because once you do that,. it’s real. No backsies.
More after the break.
Timeline of an “attack”
An attack of what? Fucked if I know.
Around 8:30 pm, I got out of bed after a brief nap. And apparently, I got up too fast, because I immediately start feeling very ill.
I settle in to play some Baldur’s Gate 3 anyhow. I had been stuck on a very hard fight with a (non sentient) spider queen the size of a backhoe for a long time, and I wanted to get back to playing the rest of the now spider free game.
9 pm, I order myself some lovely food from Donair Dude. And once more I notice how reasonably priced the special is. $12 for lamb, my choices of sauces (creamy garlic and Halifax sweet donair), and four of those odd spherical boiled potatoes.
Throw in a 591 ml of beverage plus tax, fees, and tip, and it comes to $23, which is $4 less than my usual McD’s order runs me, and way healthier.
But my future enjoyment of it is in great peril because I am feeling worse and worse. And according to the app, the food is taking an oddly long time to be prepared.
I assume that’s just because a) it’s Friday night and b) the food is so damned good.
9:30 pm or so, and my symptoms have gotten so bad that I have to stop playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and lay down and do crosswords on my tablet instead. I am very nauseous, I’m sweating like an icecube in July, my head hurts, and my heart is pounding hard on my ribcage.
And that really hearts.
Plus I have that feeling like someone is very firmly holding my heart in their hand.
And it just keeps getting worse. And my food is going to arrive around 10 pm.
Just before 10 pm. The food arrives and I have to tell Julian to put it on my computer chair when he fetches it from the door for me because I have to go poop NOW.
About 10:15 pm, I have evacuated my bowels (please form an orderly line in front of the anus) and I feel a million times better.
So I guess the whole thing was an all too familiar kind of IBS augmented by sinus (and eustachian tubes) congestion attack after all.
The cardiac type symptoms were just a red herring, I guess.
But I do know one thing : that was not mere heartburn. I mean, I don’t think it was a heart attack or anything, but there was definitely more going on than acid reflux.
I can only assume that there was some kind of soft blockage in my lower intestine that caused a buildup of pressure behind it, and when I finally defecated, that let the blockage pass and suddenly the pressure was gone and I felt way, way better.
Gotta love those residual endorphins.
I’ve had dozens of attacks like that in the 30 years or so I have had IBS. I don’t have them very often, maybe two or three times a year, and often they are milder than the one I just had, which is why I did not recognize it as such right away.
So in the end, it was just another evening in the exciting, action packed life of a 50 year old fat dude who is slowly dying of something or other.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.