Archive | August 12, 2015

No Rest for the Wicked

Aug12

Musings from a Tangled Mind

Whoever thought being a legend would be so exhausting…

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Dear Lisa Vogel

Aug12

Finnian Burnett

Dear Lisa Vogel,

I had two items on my bucket list this year for the final Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

  1. I wanted to meet Sara St. Martin Lynne.
  2. I wanted to meet you.

I met Sara. In fact, I ran into her several times. I kissed her, hugged her, drank champagne with her, told her how deeply I admire her work. I recorded my own story with her for her “voices from the land” project. She is even more gracious, beautiful, and insightful in person than she is in print.

Bur I didn’t meet you. I didn’t even see you. I looked, though. I wanted to see you just once. I think I wanted to tell you that I didn’t like who I was before I found fest. I wanted to somehow be able to make you understand that everything good in my life came from my fest experience. I…

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Today’s installment of “As the stomach churns” the TMI medical drama – Edited with update

Aug12

I spent yesterday at Huntington Hospital’s Imaging center to get a ct scan of my intestines. So not fun. When I got there the very nice person at the reception desk handed me 3 450ml bottles marked with times 20 minutes apart of a barium solution. This is not a cocktail I can recommend. It was warm and thick and with the slight fruit flavour of a market that has let the melons go bad, It tasted like warm snot, in other words, totally gross. I got into the ct scanner where they went to hook up an IV of iodine dye. The vein on the right arm collapsed after they started. What I heard was “Uh oh, it’s blue.” Note to all nurses: never say “uh oh” during a procedure, luckily I had an idea what had happened and just said, “did the vein collapse?” because your mind starts screaming when it hears, “uh oh”.

She called the tech in and he put it in and that worked. I always tell them I have rolling veins and to use the pediatric set up and they never listen.

Then I got to spend 15 minutes sliding in and out of the machine being told breathe/don’t breathe. I’m glad it was feet first and not head first because after having 10 MRIs those damn tubes make me claustrophobic. Tomorrow I have to go have a blood test to see if I can start the Metformin again. You can’t take it and the dye or your kidneys could fail.

My doctor called with the results last night. The good news is there is nothing they can see that is causing the problem. My intestines and my pancreas are in good shape for someone my age, but they did find some other stuff. I have two cysts in my kidneys that he said were no big deal but they found spots on my lower lungs and two spots near my bladder.

What does all that mean? I get to have a full lung ct scan, oh joy! more barium cocktails and I may have to have an MRI of my nether regions to find out what the spots near the bladder are, but on a funny note those may be the ovaries they lost during my hysterectomy since I never had endometriosis which he thought it could be. When they did my emergency hysterectomy, I had fibroids wrapped around my bladder on the edge of gangrene. They had to take my intestines out and clean off the fibroids, They had to take my cervix and a lot of other stuff and my fibroids had swallowed my ovaries. He thinks they may have gone on a voyage when everything was removed and are now near my bladder since they had to resituate that when they cleaned it off.

All that means I may have a date with my nemesis the MRI machine and another trip to the ct scanner and or ultrasound. He is having another radiologist read the lung part again. But I had Valley fever back at camp in the 70s and it may be from that

Oy!

The kitten greeted me on the top of the stairs when I got home and was looking at me questioningly. I told her I’d been at the vets and she cuddled my side and purred. I was sick all afternoon and she slept on my chests in between bathroom visits.

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Look a matching set of pretty colours

The visual portion of today’s soap opera

 

Update, My PCP just called and is ordering the CT scan of the chest and the MRI of my nether regions. After a year of having to wait for each test, all of a sudden things are moving awfully fast.

Áine Ní Laoghaire: Hysteria in Le Roy

Aug12

The Coven

October 2011: High-school cheerleader Katie Krautwurst wakes up, her face spasming uncontrollably, her teeth grinding. A week or two later her best friend, fellow cheerleader Thera Sanchez, begins to exhibit similar but intensified tics; face twitches, stammers, and physical jerks.

The girls and their continuing symptoms were discussed and dissected on Facebook and Twitter by their peers. Soon, other girls reported their own physical and vocal tics. Something strange seemed to spread among the teenage students of Le Roy, New York.  By mid January, the number of twitching teens was 12 and was continuing to grow.

It wasn’t long before the media caught wind of the story – teenage cheerleaders caught up in terrifying mystery illness – and descended on the sleepy town. Camera crews roamed Le Roy’s main street, searching for comment from any of the seven and a half thousand occupants. YouTube videos made by the various sufferers…

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