Went to the ER at 9 am (ish) this morning.

And wow, what a difference from the previous ER trip. I am so glad I decided to wait a day and go on a Monday morning and not a Sunday afternoon.

Because the ER was so much more peaceful and calm and nice than when I went a week ago last Friday.

This time there were a total of three, count’em, THREE whole people in the waiting room besides me.

Ergo, it did not take long for me to get registered^[1], go through triage, and end up in a bed in the ER itself. I was in the waiting room for an hour, tops.

Once I am in a bed, surrounded by privacy curtains, and relaxed, I am way way more patient a patient. And I had my tablet with me, so keeping myself amused was easy.

Hell, I could have taken a nap if I felt like it. In fact, I was halfways asleep when the doctor came to see me.

Turned out to be the same handsome young doctor I had seen before. Dunno his name but he is pretty awesome.

He asked me pertinent questions. Together we figured out that it was mostly likely just a side effect of the antibiotics and not something more serious or dire.

Which is what I figured would happen. I would not have even been there had I not been told specifically to return to the ER if I had bowel control problems.

I also let the doctor check me for “tone”. I had told him about my feeling of extreme rectal dilation during the incidents, and so he wanted to make sure nothing was going wrong back there.

This involved him sticking a finger up my butt and telling me to clench hard on it.

Not nearly as sexy as it sounds. In fact, it hurt, which surprised me because I stick my fingers up there all the time.

For um, relief.

There should be a bottom fag’s equivalent to “blue balls”. Blue butt?

Anyhow, my “tone”: was fine. So he sent me home. Not empty-handed though… with a (erf) stool sample kit.

A sample I collected just now. I won’t go into details, but while it was pretty horrible, it was a lot easier than the previous time I collected a stool sample way back in the mid 90s during my IBS diagnosis phase.

So that’s done. But one last hurdle : the instructions that came with the kit said, at the very end, that this kit could not be used for the diagnosis of c. difficile

. Well that’s the very thing the doctor wanted to have my sample tested for!

That and a few other discrepancies caused me to look on the instruction sheet for how old the damned thing was.

Turns out it’s from freaking 2008! 15 years ago!

Yeah, I think a few things have changed since then.

More after the break.

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Talking about things

Oh right. This is where I would normally engage in self-therapy by diving deep into the dark and dirty depths of my depraved mind.

The problem is that I don’t feel like being introspective. I’m feeling lazy and self-indulgent and for some reason low key pissed off at the world.

So I’m not going to plumb my depths tonight. Instead, I will do more diary style reportage about things in my life.

The problem with THAT is that you lovely readers are pretty much up to date on my actual life. Taking that stool sample was the last noteworthy thing I did.

Turns out the specimen container had a tiny little spoon attached to the lid, which proved to be quite handy.

Other than that, all I have done is sleep and play Baldur’s Gate 3.

So let’s talk about that.

Now, while I was asleep…. just kidding.

In BG3, I have completed a major chapter of the game,. become part mind flayer in order to gain vast psychic powers, leveled up, and made my way through two “you’re not QUITE in the titular Baldur’s Gate yet” areas, thwarted a plot to kill refugee children with exploding teddy bears(!!!), and made it into the city proper at long last.

Right now, I am facing a goddamned horde of Githyanki warriors I stumbled on when trying to retrieve some artifacts for The Emperor, a good guy (so far) mind flayer who lives in a magic box which is apparently one of the most powerful artifacts ever.

But of course, not in ways that help me in combat.

Right before quitting the game to come eat n’ blog, I lost to those warriors. I took out a lot of their high value targets like commanders and paladins, but they overwhelmed me with sheer numbers of low level combatants.

Clearly, in this case, “starting with the head” was the wrong stratagem. I need to depopulate the lesser targets before I turn my sights on the big guns.

Luckily, my main character is a powerful wizard with many powerful area of effect spells that can lay waste to many minor enemies at the same time if I can only keep her alive long enough to cast them

So… that’s the plan, I guess. Protect my MC while she casts her devastating magic spells to take out the minor enemies before turning to the majors.

I’ll tell you how it goes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.