I wanna love You better whatever it takes . . .

So for those of you who have been waiting with baited breath, here are some highlights (and photos, of course!) of the sleep study . . .

now THAT’S attractive . . .

best moment: the technician telling me, “so if you need help relaxing, there’s a vibrator over there.” My immediate thought: “EIUEW!” and then, “BUT SHE JUST TOLD ME THERE’S A CAMERA IN THE CEILING!”

Seriously, it took me a minute to register the fact that she was pointing to a remote control and that what she meant is that the BED had a vibrating mechanism. wow.

she was sooooo nice . . . so if I get a survey in the mail, do I even mention the fact that she might want to consider a new choice of words? she was young . . . and married . . . so of course I’m sure it didn’t occur to her!

most annoying moment: mentioning to the afore-mentioned technician that I had overheard the anesthesiologist at my surgery say something about, “her sats kept dropping” (not my test scores, my oxygen saturation levels, for those of you who are possibly less cyberchondriacal than I am . . . ) and the tech immediately said, “So that was probably a big part of the reason why you were referred.” and all I could think was, “nice. too bad I referred my OWN self, and nobody there said anything to me.” AND I requested my records from the surgery, and nothing was said there either. (I think there was one sentence about them needing to switch from partial to full anesthesia, but nothing like, “hmm. she doesn’t breathe well when she’s asleep. perhaps we should suggest that she get a sleep study.”)

so you see, cyberchondria does have its benefits!

worst choice of media: there were “movies on demand”, so after watching Reality Bites on the cable channel (true story, that was seriously on!) I put on Hairspray, which probably wasn’t the most relaxing choice for me, between the toe-tapping songs and the themes of racial injustice. (I was so wired up and I wondered if my brain waves and heart started freaking out every time they said something that had to do with racism . . . it’s so weird knowing that you are being not only “watched” but monitored in terms of your heart rate and brain waves . . . kind of hard not to submit to the paranoia of “what if they can read your mind?”

biggest epiphany: the next morning, searching YouTube for sleep apnea videos, (the one they showed at the hospital was painfully corny and I was telling the tech that they could’ve made it way funnier) I came across this video (below the fold) of Rosie O’Donnell on The View talking about her own diagnosis and treatment. (If you can deal with Rosie talking about being in bed with her girlfriend) She talks about the shame surrounding her reluctance to be tested for sleep apnea . . . which hit home with me . . . as much as I try to preach size acceptance, there was obviously no denying that this is a disease that is common to (though not exclusive to) fat folks. But I also recognize what I keep hearing, which is that sleep apnea can actually CAUSE more weight gain, and that the resultant daytime sleepiness can make it harder to be able to exercise . . . so the whole “correlation does not prove causation” mantra that was such a part of my undergrad experience is something I need to keep in mind . . .

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So my stalking of my doctor’s office has paid off, and I got the news this morning that the CT scan of mi lumpito came back as “normal”. I was then told that, if I would like, I could see a “general surgeon” to talk about whether we should consider having it biopsied.

I should be jumping up and down, right? “Normal” is good, right? And yet, I just have this sense that things are somehow not quite right in Mudville, and as a result, I told my doctor’s office that yes, I DO want to talk to the surgeon. El Lumpito is not very large, but neither has it gotten any smaller, and although I am struggling to discern whether this is my hypochondriasis kicking in or if it’s an intuition that I should pay attention to . . .

 Reading stuff like this makes me hopeful that I’ve made the right choice. But for those of you who are Jesus followers, I would greatly appreciate your prayers for discernment on my part, and the ability to separate out what is an actual risk from what is just my neurosis, or even better, something big and lovely trying to get itself born . . .

So it wasn’t bad enough that my car broke down on Sunday, or that I found out on Monday that the repairs will cost something like $1500 (which I don’t have now, and am not likely to have anytime soon . . . or perhaps EVER.)

And it’s not enough that my call to my doctor’s office this afternoon to see if they’d received my CT scan results yet yielded a “no, we don’t have them yet”, despite the fact that the brand spankin’ new hospital where it was done claims on its website that its “new, state-of-the-art technology” enables them to share test results with lightning speed.

(or that I threw up from the contrast dye they had to inject–yes, that was ALSO on Sunday.)

But today, on top of all of this, THEY REPO’D MY TRASH CAN!

I’m out of checks (I stopped tithing in June, the first time my car broke down, and I hardly use checks otherwise) and this is one of those bills that just seems to fall by the wayside–it’s not easy to pay it online–so I just never got around to it. Not that I have the money at this point, anyway . . .

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott talks about how a lot of things going wrong at once is viewed by some as evidence that “something big and lovely is trying to get itself born“. But she doesn’t totally buy that, and neither do I. I think that part of the problem, though, is that I do foolish things like titling my blog, “I wanna love You better whatever it takes“, not realizing that God might take me up on my offer.

Right now I just need to crawl into bed and spend some time feeling sorry for myself.

Number of people I told about el lumpito in the first week: 6

Number of people I e-mailed to ask for prayer after el lumpito refused to shrink in the face of a week’s worth of killer antibiotics: 41

Number of people on my church’s prayer chain who received the request: 54 (a few of them may overlap with the list of folks I sent it to directly)

Number of atheist friends who received this “prayer request”: at least 2

Number of nervous, “I don’t know how to act around you” smiles I received: only 1 (!) I was sure there’d be more . . . but maybe that’ll come later

Percentage of my workday spent Googling possible causes: between 30% and 60%, depending on the day

Number of times my shrink has told me not to Google it: 30 or so

Number of magazine articles about cancer that I’ve “randomly” come across in the past ten days: 1

Number of times in the past ten days that I’ve turned on the radio and “randomly” heard people talking about their experiences with cancer: 4 (two times was the same person speaking on two consecutive days)

Number of times in the past ten days that I’ve heard a radio program about a hypochondriac who always thinks she has cancer, but doesn’t: 1

Number of answers to my Yahoo! Answers question asking, “is there any possibility that this could be something OTHER than cancer?”: 4, so far

Number of cutesy chick-lit books on living with cancer that I saw at Target but didn’t purchase: 1

I just uploaded seven pictures of mi lumpito to my flickr page.

now THAT is more than you ever wanted to know about me! ;-p