and I feel SUPER, thanks for asking! seriously, it doesn’t hurt (so far?! it’s only been about four hours and the numbing junk seems to still be wearing off), although I took some medicinal precautions anyway . . .

and yeah, I know you’re dying to see some pictures . . . give me a day or two . . . you won’t be disappointed!

ps–what a FABULOUS excuse to eat mashed potatoes!

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 . . .

Sadly, however, neither was there a “next year” with anybody else. When it came close to being wintertime again this year, I was completely out of credit cards with which to perform my usual ”smoke and mirrors” maneuvers. A neighbor had approached my tenant a few times, and said that he would be willing to shovel our driveway all winter for less than what I had paid the (ultimately delinquent) plow guy.  We took him up on it . . . only to find that he, too, soon flaked out. In one sense, it was okay . . . he had done a really good job a few times, so I tried to tell myself that I’d gotten my money’s worth . . . but at the same time, I was frustrated. Did he assume that he could screw me over because he’d seen someone else do it?

Anyway . . . tonight I shoveled. The city plows had blocked in my driveway in such a way that it was impossible for me to even pull the car in . . . so I did my usual sidewalk path, and then attempted to tackle the driveway. I got about a third of the way through before giving up . . . but it only took me five minutes to pull out my phone and say to myself, “I need to take pictures so that I can blog about this.”

I was so inspired that I almost went inside to get my regular camera. but I didn’t. I didn’t do much of anything. now I am sore, and I still have a buttload of snow in my driveway . . .

um. I don’t think any of this actually has to do with Sisyphus . . . except you’re supposed to get the visual . . . as much as I am trying to push away the mounds of snow, they just keep returning . . .

it’s madness. but now I need to go to sleep and hope & pray that I can get out of bed in the morning . . . because of course now I’m sure that I’m going to die of a heart attack, or at least a backache . . .                                                                     

 or maybe it’s just germs. who knows.

anyway, I am just writing to say, ow, ow, ow, ow OW my ear is throbbing. and that the internet suggestions to put olive oil and/or peroxide into my ear are just strange enough that I will hold back for now, and go with the advil and melatonin, in hopes of a few more hours of sleep.

 It is at moments like this that I curse this strange belief of mine that cold medicine isn’t useful. Perhaps it WOULD have been useful if I had actually tried it.

anyway . . . in trying to distract myself from the pain in my ear, I was wandering the internet and stopped by the Care Pages website so that I could read updates about a girl from my church and about my bosses’ brother-in-law . . . and while I think that Care Pages offers a great service, I hope it is QUITE clear that, in the (hopefully highly unlikely) event of my contracting some illness, and in the even more unlikely event that I were incapacitated to the extent that I was not able to do my own PR for said illness, that the people around me would have the common sense to realize the huge, not-to-be-denied opportunity in front of them to PROMOTE THE BLOG! Care Pages is great for the non-bloggers among us, but would be a huge disservice to my beloved blog’s ongoing struggle to increase viewership, and as such, I would be hard-pressed to forgive the lack of foresight demonstrated by the use of Someone Else’s Site when a perfectly useful site was already available.

but since this earache is not likely terminal, I think I will cease my rambling now and try to get some sleep. The med center doesn’t open until 9am . . .

                               I am currently attached to this lovely creature. fun times!

So if this is truly a reprieve from death, then I must have a great deal of thinking/pondering to do . . . except that right now, all I am interested in doing is going back to my bed and sleeping some more . . .

I will say that I just have no idea how people deal with chronic illness. I suppose you find the strength, blah blah blah, but here I am with this “minor” outpatient procedure, minimal pain, and yet I am completely wiped out. am I just a wimp?

but you have to understand, I’ve been quite busy. It’s hard work being a hypochondriac, and I just have not had time to think up other brilliant things to blog about . . .

With that said, I feel that I must give a brief update on mi lumpito, for those of you who have been wondering . . .

I already posted about my “normal” CT scan and that I was told that I could talk to a general surgeon to see if a biospy is warranted. (Trust me, with this alien growing on my collarbone–heck, yeah, I want a biopsy!) So I went to see the surgeon, and I am scheduled to have outpatient surgery on December 7th.

Of course, in the two days since the surgery was scheduled, I have been convinced that el lumpito (why the hell is it a “male” lump, anyway? shouldn’t it be a lumpitA?) is actually growing. I may take pictures tomorrow and post them (because we know you love the TMI!)   

but the happy thing about this is that i have been Googling new possibilities (after being told by the surgeon that the lymph node wasn’t visible on the CT scan, which I took to be a good sign?! Yeah, and I trusted that report so much that I went home and ordered my very own copy of the CT scan results, which I will promptly attempt to Google key phrases from in an attempt to freak myself out even further) and if it’s NOT the lymph node, then I have the absolute THRILL of having something FUNKY AND RARE!!!

Especially because of the tooth connection, I am so excited about my potential contribution to medical science . . .  Seriously, I could not think of anything more enjoyable than the possibility of gaining another fifteen minutes of fame in some obscure medical journal . . . WAY more fun than anything with the word “metastasized” in it!  

today at work, my boss told me that someone had mentioned the possibility that this is my twin–which would SO make sense, because I always felt like I had a twin! now THAT would be cool. 

lucky for all of you, we have a month to figure this out. Unless it continues to grow substantially in the next week or so, in which case I will probably go screaming back to my doctor like a nine-months-and-a-day pregnant woman: “GET THIS THING OUT OF ME!”

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 . . .

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 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

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