Medical Journal (this one is dedicated to Raven.)

One word.... Hypochondriac. Anyone who can count themselves in the ranks of individuals who can claim that word as an appropriate descriptive term for themselves understands the weight of the insanity it can generate. Allow me to elaborate. I am a hypochondriac. Tried and true... since I was 9 years old and saw a made for TV movie that featured a young boy dying of leukemia. After watching the movie and before going to bed that night I wrote in my diary something to this effect... "Goodbye cruel world! This is probably the last time you will ever hear from me. I die. I dieeeeeeeeee." Except that the next day (in spite of a lot of begging and pleading with my Mom that I was too sick) I did get up and go to school and somehow all these years later I am STILL ALIVE! It's a miracle really. A medical mystery. There have been many a medical mystery over the years since. Most all of them created and solved by me, myself and I. There have been a few that were legit... like the time I ended up in the ER after getting both a flu and a pneumonia shot. I was allergic to one or the other but they don't know which because a brilliant nurse had administered both shots into my right arm. That was an "I wish I was dead... please just let me die" sort of experience. My right arm literally became the essence of pain.... the ground zero of agony. And the 103 degree fever was the icing on the cake. There was also the 99.9% incident. I really don't do well with prescription meds and seem to have a really high sensitivity to them.... in this particular case I had to fast for three days and then go in for some x-rays where they run some sort of dye through your guts so they can see what is going on in there. Because I have a lot of allergies and drug sensitivities they used a special dye on me that they assured me 99.9% of people are fine with. Yeah. As I laid on the x-ray table under a heavy blanket I started to get itchy. I told the attending nurse... "I feel really itchy!" and she said "Yes, those blankets are kind of rough." and I said "No! I feel like I am going to freak out! I am REALLY ITCHY!" and I guess it was the tone in my voice that made her stop what she was doing and walk over to me. She flipped the blanket back and I was covered over my entire body with enormous hives. They proceeded to give me the equivalent of three Benadryl (on my three days fast empty stomach) and hand me back to my Mother. I was like a monkey with brain damage for the next two days. Anyway.... you see where I am going with this? I am not a good patient. I get weird things wrong with me. A lot of times no one can solve the problem. A lot of times what the doctors do to me just makes me feel worse. Also... I obsess. Like these past few days....

I have had a weird, tight, hot sore throat for about a week now. Yesterday it took an odd turn and manifested as a rock hard lump way down in my throat that felt like it was crushing my wind pipe. Also the glands under my tongue were sore. Weird. And gross. And a mystery to be solved. This my friends is where Google and Web MD come in. If you want to live dangerously Google your symptoms. See if you are man enough to take the results. I DARE you to look at the Google images files on say... swollen salivary glands and not break out in to a cold sweat. So this is what I do. I spend hours online researching my symptoms and the end result is me flung out across the bed crying because I am sure I am going to die any minute. (Imagine Billy through all of this.) For REAL though, yo.... at three in the morning when you are laying there with a big painful lump in your throat, can't sleep and have a pounding headache (from all the crying) it's hard not to sort of loose your shit and just become a big, hot mess.

I set my alarm for 7:30 a.m. so I could get up and call first thing to the clinic up in Fort Bragg and get an appointment for today.... which I did. Then I went back to bed and slept until almost 11 (the appointment is not until late afternoon.) And guess what? When I woke up at 11 the lump in my throat was gone. Of course. So now what? Do I go to the clinic? I can tell you right now that if I cancel the appointment then at exactly 5 pm this afternoon the lump will return with a steely vengeance. The lump BTW according to Web MD is the beginning of my grapefruit sized goiter. Billy's theory is that we are breathing poison Hemlock pollen (because the plant is growing prolifically all around our camp area) and we are being slowly poisoned to death by it. All these years with me has inflicted Billy with a touch of the drama as well apparently.

Anyway... I do have (clinically diagnosed, not made up my me) hypothyroidism and it IS possible that all this crap is stemming from that. So as archaic as it may sound a goiter is really not out of the question for me. See if you can find one other person in your life that says THAT to you today.

We are supposed to be hitting the road tomorrow. This is not news that I have shared here yet. I am not going to go into full details right now but we are leaving Mendocino earlier than we had planned. We may not make it out tomorrow, it may be Wednesday instead seeing as how it's 1 p.m. and we are both laying around in here like slugs doing nothing. Hitching up to tow the trailer after you have been stationary for awhile can sometimes seem overwhelmingly daunting. Sometimes it is great fun and you can't wait to go... for a variety of reasons this is not one of those times. Mostly it is that I want to feel better before heading out and because we can't yet figure out the puzzle of how the Hell all our stuff ever fit in the back of the truck in the first place. I may end up holding our Coleman gas grill in my lap when we leave.

I'll try to keep you updated on what develops. It's going to be a nutty week.