yeah... i suck. just so's you know...

just thought i'd log in and give everyone a quick update. please forgive the ramblings found in this post because i've just chewed up two lortab 5's and imma bit looooooo-peeeee

so anywho, i guess i'd better backtrack a little bit here... friday when i left yoos guys i had a pretty nasty migraine that i'd been dealing with since i woke up that morning. i had called my new pharmacy and asked them to fill my prescription for zomig so i could get some relief as soon as i left work. well, when i got there to pick it up they told me that i would have to go to their other location because they didn't have any there. so... i went to the other location and they told me that they couldn't fill it because the insurance company was telling them that it was too soon. (i haven't had this prescription filled since august 8, 2007 so there's NO WAY that it was too soon!!)

so i called milner rushing (my OLD pharmacy ~ DO NOT USE MILNER RUSHING FOR ANYTHING!!!!) and they were extremely nasty towards me, cussing and laughing at me and hanging up on me while i was crying and wailing with a killer migraine exploding in my head. finally the NEW pharmacy called them to find out wtf was going on since i couldn't get any information out of them and turns out, those idiots filed my prescription as a 15 MONTH supply instead of a 15 DAY supply and that's why it wouldn't go through. (MORONS!!!! they also messed up my carafate back in october and told the insurance that they gave me a month's supply when they really only gave me an 11 day supply and then messed up my lortab elixer just last week and wouldn't fill it because they said the insurance said it was too soon even though i was in PAIN and was going to CASH pay it!)

so... i no longer use milner rushing and i highly suggest that if anybody lives in my area and uses milner rushing that they switch to a different pharmacy ASAP because these people are going to seriously hurt somebody with their negligence one of these days!!!

i finally got my prescriptions filled and went home. my head was still pounding and i was afraid that i had waited too long to get medication and that i would need to go to the er for a shot. my girlfriend came home about 30 minutes after i laid down in the bed (her grandfather died thursday and i had to drive her to hunboldt, tennessee thursday evening to be with her family but she had to work saturday so her uncle brought her home) and i just laid there crying and crying because it hurt so bad. but it came in waves so a few minutes later i was okay enough to get up and fix her something to eat (she hadn't eaten since lunch the day before so i MADE her eat even though she said she wasn't hungry) and then i ended up having to take ANOTHER dose of my zomig AND half a vial of phenergan gel AND a dose of some other pain medication that i have but i can't remember the name of it right now and i finally went to sleep.

when i woke up saturday morning i still had a lingering headache but not the migraine that i'd had the day before. i didn't have any more of my lortab elixer since milner rushing wouldn't fill it so i had to take my girlfriends lortab 5's for the abdominal pain that i was having all day saturday. and it got REALLY BAD saturday too!!! my girlfriend got off of work at 6-ish saturday night and we went to wal-mart looking for a vcr/dvd combo and the hook-ups for it so we could watch movies at our new house and i was hunched over the buggy the entire time just praying for us to leave soon! so when we wrapped up our wal-mart trip she just went ahead and took me to the er where they gave me a shot of dilaudid/phenergan and sent me on my way. they said that if the pain was still that debilitating the next day or if the dilaudid/phenergan combo didn't work then i needed to come back to the er ASAP for further testing.

so we went home saturday night and the dilaudid/phenergan did the trick and i got some good rest until i woke up sunday morning. katie had already left by then (the viewing was yesterday afternoon and the funeral is today) so i couldn't go back to the er even though the pain was as bad yesterday as it was saturday. so i just kept on chewing up lortab 5's and hoping that the pain would just go away. i'm not sure how many lortab 5's i took yesterday though which is REALLY scary. especially since i was still in so much PAIN! but there were 15 in the bottle saturday morning and only 4 in the bottle this morning. so somehow between saturday and sunday i chewed up 11 lortab 5's and was still functioning and still in extremely intense pain.

and here it is, monday morning, and i have to go to the hospital for my pre-op testing in about 45 minutes. i'm still in pain but guess what? when i got on the scale this morning it said 114! weird... that's 10 pounds below what i weighed the last two weeks at the doctor's offices (and their scales are the same as mine) but still 6 pounds above my lowest. so now i'm wondering, is this going to be like taking a car to the mechanic? it knocks and knocks and knocks the whole way up there but as soon as the mechanic gets in it purrs like the first day you got it? so... i'm hurting and hurting and swelling and gaining weight but as soon as my gyno opens me up **poof!** i'm magically going to be healed and he won't find anything??? so now what?

shouldn't this be getting better by now?

as most of you know (and if you don't just read back through some of my old threads) my b12 is EXTREMELY low right now and i've had to start getting b12 injections once a week for 4 weeks and then once a month thereafter.

so i've gotten 3 shots so far and i'm a little bit confused about this. the nurse that i spoke with at my pcp's office said that i probably was having difficulty thinking and remembering things and expressing myself due to having such a low b12 level. and YES, this is ABSOLUTELY TRUE!!! but she said that i'd start feeling much better and more like myself after just the first shot.

well like i said before i've had 3 shots so far and it seems like my mental capacity is diminishing with each shot instead of improving. (and no, this isn't just a hypochondriac moment either. my girlfriend even made the comment yesterday that she's noticed my speech and memory getting MUCH worse here lately.)

i wonder why that is. does anybody here have any insight into this? i'm going to ask the nurse when i go in for my 4th shot next week but i wondered if anyone had any suggestions about possibilities that i could be researching in the meantime.

thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions that anybody may have

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!!!