what the he!! is wrong with me??!?

i haven't been online during the weekends for a good while so some of y'all might not remember me but just go back through some of my previous posts and you can get caught up on the history or whatever.

so anywho, for those of you that already know what's going on and for the others who cared enough to research and get caught up ~ here's the latest.

somehow in the past couple of weeks i have managed to put on 12 pounds from my lowest of 108. as of this morning i weigh 120 and my abdomen is increasing in size and hardness every day. i had lots and lots of pain all day yesterday and last night and today which is unusual as i haven't had ANY pain with this up until now. i wasn't sure yesterday if the pain i was having was ulcer pain or something else but i kept taking my carafate and it never helped. nothing helped until i actually broke down and took some liquid lortab.

so what do you guys think? what could this possibly be? and can it wait until i have my exploratory laparoscopy on valentine's day or do i need to see someone about this right now? and if i need to see someone right now, who do i see? the er? my pcp? my rny surgeon? my obgyn? med-plus? idk...




just for comparison, this is what my abdomen looked like on december 8th. i'm laying on my back in this picture and it's upside down...

feling like a screw up and a failure. sorry but it's true...

i've been reading the boards this morning and i've noticed a lot of people talking about "goal" and "wow moments" and stuff like that and how happy they are to have the weight off, etc. for some reason though, this is triggering a feeling in me that is absolutely ludicrous!! i feel like a failure. i feel that i've screwed up my "tool" and i'm on the precipice of some horrible disaster that will cause me to regain every single solitary ounce that i've lost.

i think mostly the reason i'm feeling this way though is not actually because of the posts. i feel this way because of the weirdness going on in my abdomen. i know i shouldn't feel like this, especially since the weirdness in my abdomen isn't actual "fat" or anything but i look in the mirror and i see this huge, hard bulge in the lower half of my abdomen and it freaks me out and makes me want to just lay down in the floor and cry my head off.

i went to my pcp this past friday and when i asked her about this (again!!) she told me (again!!) that she thinks i'm just "full of crap". (<--- that's a direct quote!!!) she thinks that i need to take a laxative and then i'll lose about 10+ pounds and she came to this diagnosis without even touching or looking at my abdomen. since sunday i have taken 22 dulcolax tablets. (2 at a time and spaced out over the course of these many days.) and YES! i have had many many MANY bm's. yet my abdomen is still hard and still protrudes and still causes me to have to wear pants two sizes larger than without the "bulge".

i'm literally about to lose my mind over this. my eyes are welling up with tears as i type this and i just don't even know what to do anymore. i can feel a panic attack coming on yet i'm completely powerless to stop it.

i'm scheduled for an exploratory laparoscopy with my obgyn on valentine's day and hopefully he can fix whatever is wrong (endometriosis? fibroids? something else???) but what if that isn't the answer? what if??? he!!, what if whatever's wrong gets way worse between now and valentine's day and i don't even make it to HAVE the exploratory lap???

and add to that the fact that my b12 and vitamin d are both extremely low and i'm just one mell of a hess right now! i called my surgeon's office the other day to at least let them know that my vitamin d and b12 were extremely low and the nurse called me back and said that i'm taking the wrong vitamins. umm... you don't even know what vitamins i'm taking!! der!! how can they be "wrong" if you don't even know what i'm taking? her reply? "you should ALWAYS be taking the bariatric advantage vitamins NO MATTER WHAT!" ok fine but the bariatric advantage vitamins come back up whenever i take them so isn't it better to take a vitamin that will stay down rather than one that won't?? because at least then i'm getting SOMETHING, right??

but they aren't concerned about my vitamin d or my b12 OR the weirdness in my abdomen. my pcp says i'm full of crap and my surgeon says i'm taking the wrong vitamins and i'm eating too much. HELLO!!! how the crap is 500-600 calories a day TOO MUCH??? god i'm crying now! i gotta go...

anybody know what this means?

ok so here's a new twist in the ongoing saga of "what's wrong with monday"? so i went to my pcp this past friday and she mentioned having a tilt table test on down the road but that she wants to check my bloodwork first. she's convinced that my blacking out episodes are directly related to my blood work and that there's no "vasovagal dysfunction" going on. (whatever... )

anywho, she ordered a complete work-up (heck i don't think i had this much blood drawn ALL YEAR!!) they forgot to run a couple of the tests that she wanted (whatever one it is that shows your potassium and blood glucose levels) so i won't have those results until tomorrow but the ones that they DID run have come back and are as follows:

cbc - normal
thyroid - fine
vitamin d - REALLY low at 15
b12 - REALLY low at 158

so the plan right now is to go to their office as soon as they come back from lunch today and get my first b12 injection. i have to have one injection a week for four weeks and then one a month for who knows how long. (forever? WITH the sublingual b12? idk...)

and as far as the vitamin d goes? she (the nurse) at first was saying that my pcp wanted me to do over the counter stuff first but then she realized that i'm already getting d with my calcium but that i'm just not absorbing it so we'll probably have to go the prescription route on that one.

so... what does all of this mean? she said that normal vitamin d levels are 32-100 and normal b12 levels are 211-9something. so OBVIOUSLY i'm deficient. obviously. so how come when i had bloodwork done at med-plus a week and a half ago they said that everything came back normal? they said that they did a complete anemia profile and that everything was just hunky-dory. so... i became deficient in a weeks' time? really?? BS!!!

any thoughts on this?

blood pressure?

ok so you guys remember the abdominal issues i've been having lately right? and how i've been seeking answers and am having an exploratory laparoscopy on 2-14-08 to check for and fix any fibroids or endometriosis that may be present? well, here's another "problem" to muck things up a bit.

last night i had to go to med-plus for a shot because i had a migraine that wasn't responding to my migraine medicine (again!) when i got in there they said that my blood pressure was 82/60 and my pulse was 66 and they were very, very concerned about that. well, the nurses were but the doctor wasn't because he said that with a pulse of 66 then that means my body's tolerating the low blood pressure.

well, idk anything about anything like that but shouldn't SOMEBODY be concerned about that? shouldn't that be in the normal range before i have my surgery? because wouldn't a blood pressure that's too high or too low cause problems during a surgery like that?

idk... what do i do??? what does that mean?? how do you get your blood pressure back up and what SHOULD it be? anybody?

for those who have been following my abdominal issues

(and for those who thought i was full of chit)

so my surgeon is an a$$ and keeps telling me that my sudden weight gain that seems to be centered around my abdomen and appears gradually over the course of a week and then mysteriously disappears over the course of 2-3 days is "dietary" (meaning they think i'm pigging out on 5,000+ calories/day which is physically impossible... duh!) and then my pcp thinks (as i did and as most of you guys on here did as well) that i'm just "full of shit" ~ literally.

my surgeon told me to make an appointment to come talk to the nutritionist so i basically told him to go take a flying leap.

my pcp told me to try dulcolax. i did. i experienced "relief" but that's only because i have constipation problems ANYWAY.

so i wasn't very satisfied with either response and i called my ob-gyn since i needed to talk to him anyway. he scheduled me for a vaginal ultrasound today which was truly disgusting because i started my period this weekend (YUCK!!!) and then he called me back a few hours later to go over the findings.

apparently the abnormalities they found in my uterus last september really do need to be addressed pretty quickly. he feels really confident that they're either fibroids or endometriosis. he said if it's endometriosis then they can burn those out for the most part and i'll experience 70-80% relief in most cases but that if it's fibroids then that's a whole other ball of wax entirely and would have to be handled differently and i might not get any resolution on it.

but in addition to the "abnormalities" he said that there was also a LOT of "free fluid" in my abdomen that was NOT there in september. he believes that this is because my hormones are off which is a "true sign of endometriosis". (i'm quoting here...) so... random 6-10 pound weight gains within a week followed by random 14-18 pound weight losses in a 2-3 day period of time is most likely endometriosis. he's going to do an exploratory laparoscopy on 2-14-08 and hopefully will be able to "fix" everything. (i'm still wanting to have more kids so the ablation and hysterectomy are both out of the question.)

thanks for all the advice and support. you guys rock!!!