A Game Of Crohn's

Never in a billion years did I think that I would be writing another Rockstar Piercing blog post. Which should have been my first indicator that my hubris would be punished. So now there could be endless Rockstar Piercing blog posts! Who knows?! If you’re new and need to catch up, I’ll help you out and link you: Part 1 , Part 2 , and Part 3 ...mostly because I am lazy and I do not want to explain what a Rockstar Piercing is again. Suckers! I put the picture in here anyway! If I have to live it, you can look at it. LOOK AT IT AND KNOW MY SHAME! So, if we’ve all been paying attention, since the stem-cell placement I have had an open tract that has stayed open despite attempts to treat it, mostly using silver nitrate (literally burning my ass with chemical matchsticks every other week). My Rochester surgery/gastroenterology team has watched it via MRI and nothing has changed. They’ve also checked me with another colonoscopy (yay!) and added another medication. ...

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…. I’ve been sitting on (hahahahaha butt jokes) a version of this post for some time. I’ve gone through a nice little run-through of all the emotions in the past four months, thus my blog silence. I’ve also been writing elsewhere, and no, you can’t read it (yet). A friend of mine nailed it on the head, first guess - I’m looking at you, Kelly - but I’m not going to talk about it and that delay - it’s totally not worth the blog space. Not even close. Instead, we’re going to go over the fact that January 24th marks my SIXTH colonoscopy. Stop and absorb that. 1 2 3 4 5 SIXTH. FRIGGING. COLONOSCOPY.  I’m 37, y’all. I do not want to hear ANYONE complaining about getting one. GET IT DONE. The reason for this one (other than the fact that crohn’s patients usually average a colonoscopy a year, and I didn’t get one done last year - score) is to check for active disease, because things have been...well, actin...

I don’t need to warn you that this post is about to be real, not with “Horrific” in the title, do I? We'll break out the caution tape, just in case I’m really thankful that I live in today’s medical environment, because as terrible as some things may be right now, they were downright horrific. And not all that long ago, really. Lobotomies may have fallen out of favor in the 1950s, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t 40,000 of those “procedures” performed, and from what I can collect without anaesthesia . Do you know how a lobotomy is executed? Essentially an ice pick is stuck through your eye socket, and your frontal cortex is “scrambled”. But I’ll do a whole different blog post about what they did to people with mental problems in the future. Before I begin, let’s just take a look at an old hypodermic needle. The syringe as we know it was essentially created by Dr. Alexander Wood in the 19th century. I’m not sure on the dates of when these were actually use...

I don’t mean to brag, y’all, but I am totally in love. With a mortician. That I see on YouTube. So it’s kind of a one-sided thing at this point. It'll remain one-sided. S'ok. *Swoon* Her name is Caitlin Doughty. She’s amazeballs. I’m in love with pretty much every aspect of her that I’ve seen. I agree with her stand on green burials. She’s educated me on so much, and changed my mind about a lot of things that have to do with the funeral industry (and it is - very much - an industry that is milking you for billions, with a B, each year). I mean, why wouldn’t I want to wash the body of my mother after (God forbid) she passes? How many times has she washed MY body? Why would I want to leave her in the hands of strangers? All fantastic questions that I had never thought of until I watched her channel. But I’m not here to debate any of that with anyone. It’s personal choice, but she makes brilliant points. (I’ll link to her YouTube channel at the bottom, as w...

I knew that she was a girl. I didn’t need a doctor to tell me, I could hear her voice. She already had a name, Lila Grace, named - in part - after her amazing cousin, Grace Ann. And I knew, the second I saw a pink spot of blood, that I had lost her. Just writing that sentence, even now, even six years later, brings me to tears. I don’t know what kind of mother I would have been to little Lila, being that I went through my own mini hell in the past six years. I don’t know why she was taken from me, but I’ve been through the whole list - her body was broken, her father and I aren’t together anymore and what kind of life would that have been for her?, something wasn’t right, *I* am not the best genetic contributor, etc, etc, ad nauseum . It’s pointless to wonder and to beat myself up, but guess what? I do it endlessly. It’s my fault and I killed my baby. With crohn’s. That was my daughter’s gift. Awareness. It's about to get real, y'all. I knew that whateve...