Yellow Girl

Apparently I'm not sleeping tonight. Or rather, this morning. I went to sleep around 12:30 AM and woke up around 4. I've been up since.

I just went to the bathroom and, somehow, in the last hour, I've gotten totally yellow and zombie-like. My first reaction was, “Whoa, look how scary and sick I look.” But then I changed it to, “Look how sexy and beautiful I am! I'm a yellow, sexy woman. Look at me, I'm yellow girl and I'm gorgeous!”

I did a little dance and laughed at myself in the mirror. I told myself that if anyone could make jaundice amazing, sexy and cute, it was me.

I don't know what will happen today. Maybe I'll be admitted to the hospital. Maybe my headache will get out of hand and I'll suffer and cry through the DEXA scan. Maybe my headache will completely go away and the scan results will be amazing. Maybe I'll never get another headache again and get to stay home with my wonderful animals and be in my sacred space instead of trying to do yoga and make juice in a hospital room. Who knows? It's up to my outlook and the Universe. I trust that everything will turn out as it should. If I can see the life, joy and love in every moment, even if it's while being hooked up to tubes and machines, then I will make it through.

After all, today I'm that amazing super hero, Yellow Girl!

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Stress Test

I've gotten a little better when it comes to the stuff that was going on last week. But I've certainly made up for it in other places.

One day I all of a sudden felt really, really horrible and shortly after had an "ammonia episode". Apparently the ammonia has been building up in my brain and I haven't been keeping on top of it as well as I should. I went a little crazy. I don't care to go into details.

Also started having a raw-feeling throat and before long a cough. Saw the doctor today and I've got swollen glands and red spots in my throat and all that lovely stuff so I got put on antibiotics.

Yesterday I got an echocardiogram and a stress test done. I'd never had a stress test done, bt UNMC wanted the info so they could make sure I was still ship-shape (relatively) for transplant.

First the nurses screwed up accessing my port so they had to call in an expert.

For the test I was given a medicine that sped up my heart rate. It didn't really work so they gave me some stronger stuff. A minute in to having this put in me I started screaming. I thought I was having a stroke or an aneurysm. The muscles and blood vessels in the back of my neck and head felt like someone was stretching them on a taffy puller. My heart was beating in my head as if I'd been standing on my head for hours. My jaws shut and my tongue swelled up. It was all I could do to tell the doctor what was happening. They stopped the medicine immediately. I had to squeeze the doctor's fingers and it felt like a Herculean effort. The only thing to do was wait while the medicine wore off. I probably lay there for five minutes (it felt like 10 years and I was sure I was going to die at any moment due to Exploding Head Decapitation or something similar) until the pain was low enough that I could start crying like a baby. Even then the pain was at about the level of a banging-my head-on-hard-objects-and-going-to-the ER migraine. After about 10 more minutes, an oxycontin and many cold compresses I was able to slowly roll over so that an full echo could be done since the doctors were obviously not going to be getting a stress test.

I was then wheeled out to where my mom was waiting to pick me up. She must have wondered why a nurse was wheeling me out of the hospital after an everyday medical test.

The fact that I had sinus congestion, had taken my blood-pressure lowering medication the night before, have asthma and two minor heart problems are probably some of the reasons the test went the way it did.

I came home, took an Imatrex and went to sleep. My head still hurts horribly today. I've had to take hydromorphone to make it bearable. Hopefully the horrible heartbeat-speeding drugs get out of my body soon and all is back to normal. Well, semi-normal.

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