Friday, November 20, 2009

Bite me like you mean it

Call me a geek but I'm excited about seeing New Moon tonight, I'm taking my 16 yr old son, his girlfriend and a friend of theirs. Which that alone is fabulous, getting your 16 yr old and their friends to spend a Friday night with their parents is fabulous in its self and seeing New Moon is an added bonus. I was a late bloomer in terms of joining the Twilight bandwagon. When It first came out and I was told the basis of the story, it didn't sound like anything I would be interested in. I wasn't really into the whole werewolves, shape shifters or vampire thing. But it was everywhere. T-Shirts, dolls, hype, media, news and I had no idea what they were talking about. I figured it was some teen culture type movie that surely wouldn't be appealing to an adult. However, when my 16 year old son began reading a book just shy of 500 pages with the sequels each having between 550-640 pages I decided I wanted to know what he was reading. I began reading Twilight and found I couldn't put it down. It wasn't at all what I had expected.  I was expecting dark and twisted grizzly blood scenes, when in fact I found a love story. I mean sure there's some blood, they are vampires after all, but not the gruesome story I would have expected.  Hoards of teenage girls drooling over Jacob and Edward trying to decide which one they would choose, well I for one, as a woman, tend to be drawn to all things shiny and sparkly, so when a man's skin can shine like a diamond in the sunlight, I'm going to take notice.  sparkling-edward-cullen-wallpaper-small Not to mention, the shiny cars they drive and the super power ability to save your life. Maybe it's shallow, maybe it's a bit silly, but I have been bitten by the bug that is all things Twilight. At first I thought it was a bit creepy for a woman my age to have a twinge of lust over Edward's 18 year old character, but he is a vampire, and he has been 18 years old for a very, very long time and he is shiny so I guess that makes it justifiable to my warped mind.
P.S. I am off all of the antibiotics, mostly recovered from  my stint of a mysterious illness that landed me in the hospital and finally able to see through the haze and plan on attempting to write something more coherent next week so please check back.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Press the Pause Button

Honey I'm Home!

I promise to attempt to write something very soon. I have been sick, in the hospital and now am finally home. YAY! However, I'm in a bit of a haze of medications and so I'm not really able to write anything coherent, err, well, actually, I haven't even had a very coherent thought, much less attemt to make any sense on a blank page. As soon as I can see through the cobwebs in my head again, I'll get back to it.
If your just plain curious,and really bored,  feel free to read on. Warning: Boring Medical Shit Coming...
I get a treatment every 4 weeks or so through an IV which is administered through a port in my chest. The procedure is called IVIG. It is to treat a condition Called Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy . In english, it is an autoimmune disease. Last week when my nurse attempted to do my routine treatment, something went wrong with my port and I felt something "pop" in my neck. After evaluation, we went ahead with my treatment using a vein rather than my port and the treatment went as usual. The day following, I started feeling bad, hurting all over, I spent the night in the ER, had the swine flu test done, along with several other tests and concluded I was hurting for no apparent reason. Home I went. The next day I had a fever of near 103 and still hurt all over, head, fingers, legs, hips, just all over pain. Of course, I assumed I must have the H1N1 and had a false negative test due to having my treatment. Convinced my treatment was hiding the flu symptoms, I headed back to the ER with severe body aches and chills, to the point I chipped a freaking tooth from my teeth chattering. Only me. Anyway, after a very convincing plea to the doctor that surely it would be better to give me Tamiflu and send me home, he insisted on admitting me. I thought surely I would go home in the morning. Apparently my bloodwork showed my white blood cells to be near depleation and ended me up in what they call "reverse isolation". It meant I was not at risk of being contagious but that anyone who entered my room could get me sick. They started talking about oncologists and hematologists and bone marrow transplants, like my head wasn't already spinning. I was put on every antibiotic they make, continued taking the Tamiflu (just in case) and made into a  human voodoo doll I'm sure. Finally, it was determined that my port had indeed broken. Remember the "pop" noise. The port snapped, became severly infected and had mutiple clots, which explained why I was having a hard time breathing, felt like shit, and stayed in a drug induced haze. Finally, a week later, I had surgery to remove the port, and got to come home. And here I am. I have to do a bit of follow up on the whole white blood cells thing but that's about it. I'm a little sore from the surgery but not to bad and alot groggy and foggy from all the drugs but should be back to my old self soon. I hear I slept through a baby hurricane. It seems I do remember hearing an acorn hitting the hospital window at some point and I'm scratching my head wondering why they give you sleeping pills and then wake you up all night.