The Diaries of a Fat Chick

In a moment of madness, I decided enough was enough with the long, heavy, un-stylable hair and after work this evening, I scampered off to the hairdresser.

I like the new sleeker, shorter version of Kelly’s hair.

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Today is my birthday.  I am 33 years old.

It was a good birthday.  Full of:

Birthday Cards:

Birthday Presents:

Birthday coffee (thanks Nghi!):

Birthday lunch (thanks Clark!)

Birthday cake (thanks Jenny!)

Brightly painted toenails in wedge heels (not recommended to drive in):

An expired drivers license (damn the closed ICBC on Easter Monday!)

(No picture available)

An adorable husband who cleaned the kitchen and did my chores while I was at work:

Birthday smiles:

A delicious birthday dinner (thanks Ben!)

Birthday ice cream (thanks Ben!):

And Birthday Curling Viewing (um thanks Ben?)

Birthday Dancing with the Stars viewing (much better!)

Today is my birthday.  I am 33 years old. 

It was a good day; full of laughter and love and friends but there is also grief.  Today is Mollie’s birthday too; and for the first time in 20 years I celebrate my birthday alone.  It is not the same.

Happy 20th Birthday Mollie.  I miss you.

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Me:  C’mon honey, get up, we have stuff to do.

Ben:  Hmm.

Me:  Seriously dude, it’s late, get up.

Ben:  Yup.

Me: *hollering from the bathroom*  Are you up yet?

Ebony the cat:  *leaps from the window*

Ben:  Gah!

Me:  Honey?

Me:  *walking into the bedroom* Honey!  Get up!

Ben: *curled into the fetal position*

Me:  For the love of pete man!  Get out of bed!

Ben:  As soon as I recover from the herd of cats that just tap danced across my balls, I’ll get out of bed.

Ebony:  Purr

Me:  *laughs hysterically*

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100 words

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So way back in October, Ben expressed interest in an itty bitty snake at one of our local, family-owned pet stores.  I used to work part time at this pet store and so we know the owner quite well.  Ben has wanted a king snake for years and years and immediately fell in love with the gray banded king snake at Pet City.  He was just a little fellow, quite mellow and very beautiful.  And, apparently, quite rare.  He hemmed and hawwed about getting him, I kept encouraging him to go for it but in the end, his (sometimes too much) common sense and fiscal responsibility won and he didn’t buy him (despite having an extra aquarium and all the required equipment to house him in).  A week later, I stopped by the pet store and secretly purchased him, with the owner agreeing to hold on to the little guy until Christmas Eve day when I would bring Ben in and show him his Xmas surprise.

The following week we went back to the store where a small, neatly-lettered sign indicated the king snake had been sold.  Ben’s face dropped and later that day I had to listen to him moan and groan about how he should have bought the snake.  I nodded sympathetically (oh who am I kidding - I was all over the “I told you that you should have bought him” line along with random bursts of cruel laughter) .

A day or so later the subject was dropped.  (I’ll say one thing for Ben, the man is not a whiner.  How on earth he ever fell for someone like me I’ll never know).   But every now and then when we were at the pet store he’d take a look at that snake still curled up in his enclosure and sigh.  The sold sign mocked him cruelly.

About mid November we were at the pet store, once again looking at the reptiles when Ben casually mentioned to the owner that the snake had been there a long time even though it was sold.  Luckily I was standing behind him because my eyes bugged out of my head and I turned a vibrant shade of green.  The owner, however, cool as a cucumber just nodded disinterestedly and then changed the subject to the new veiled chameleon he had just brought in.   They began to chat about the chameleon and I gave my best “Whew, crisis averted!” look to the owner and headed to the fish room to recover.

Later that week Ben and I were in the kitchen when he said:

Ben:  So, did you see that Pet City has a sale on corn snakes?

Me:  I did see that.

Ben:  I know how much you want a corn snake.

Me:  That’s true.

Ben:  It’s a really good price.

Me:  *picking invisible lint off my sweater*  Uh-huh

Ben:  We have that extra aquarium you know, we could set that up and you could finally have your corn snake.

Me:  But we were going to use that aquarium for when you got a king snake.

Ben:  I’ve decided I don’t want a king snake.

Me:  *outside voice* Really? 

Me:  *inside voice*  Too fucking bad mister, you got yourself a mother-fucking king snake!

Ben:  Yup.  I think we should get you a corn snake.

Me:  Maybe I’ve decided I don’t want a corn snake.

Ben:  Yeah right.  Listen, all I’m saying is it’s a really good price and it’s a nice corn snake.

Me:  I’m too busy right now, I don’t have time.

Ben:  Fair enough.  But I really think you should think about this.

Me:  *outside voice*  Will do honey.

Me:  *inside voice*  Will do Jackass!

On Christmas Eve morning dad, Ben and I went to the airport and picked up the mumsi entity.  On the way back into town I mentioned that I needed to stop at the pet store and pick up some pet supplies, Ben nodded agreeably and after a quick bite to eat we all filed into the store.  I nodded and winked at the owner and made my way to the back of the store where the reptile enclosures were.  I called Ben over and taking his hand, pointed to the sold sign and said “Merry Christmas Honey.”  He gave me a blank look and I again pointed at the sign and repeated my Merry Christmas.  At that point, he finally got it (he’s a smart one!) and the look of surprise and shock on his face was well worth the two months of trying to keep the secret.  My lovely, sweet Ben was completely and utterly surprised by his Christmas present. 

We took Cedric home that day and got him set up in his new enclosure.  He’s a really great little snake, very mellow and easy to catch.  He’s just a baby right now but eventually he’ll grow to be between 4 to 6 feet in length. 

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Last Friday morning I woke up with one hell of a back ache.  Not an unusual occurence, I often wake up with back pain.  But that morning?  It was not just painful, it was ferociously painful.  I hobbled my way to the bathroom, took a prescription painkiller described by my doctor for just such incidents as this one, and hobbled back to bed.  After about 20 minutes, the drugs kicked in and I eased my way into the shower and got ready for work.

Thirty or so minutes later Ben and I were driving to work and I was just thinking about how odd it was that my stomach was hurting so badly when my collarbone started to ache.  For those of you who are new to the blog, in November of 2006 I had my gallbladder removed.  I had lost nearly 90 lbs by that point and my gallbladder decided to exact it’s revenge by turning on me.  It staged a full blown mutiny for months and, in fact, had almost convinced my damn pancreas to turn on me as well, before a surgeon finally went in with a scope, cut the organ free from it’s bile duct attachment thingy, scrambled it up like a bunch of egg whites and sucked it from my body. 

Since that point, life has been grand.  I may have mentioned this before but gallbladder pain?  Is the worse fucking pain of your life.  My mom would probably dispute this, seeing as I was a rather whiny kid, but I have a high tolerance for pain (the whininess as a kid was mostly to try and get away with not going to school).   For the roughly six months I suffered from gallbladder pain I was able to walk off maybe two attacks thus avoiding a trip to the emergency room, the rest of them rose up and smote me with the wrath of an angry god.  Near the end, right before the surgery, my stomach hurt constantly.  The stomach pain I could deal with (see:  high tolerance to pain), I was grumpy but I dealt.  But it didn’t take me long to discover a pattern.  The only true way I had of knowing if I was about to have an actual attack was if my collarbone started to ache.  And I’m not ashamed to admit that near the end, the moment my collarbone started aching, I started to cry.   I knew what was coming you see.  And what was about to happen was not exactly rainbows and puppies.  

The only good thing about having gallbladder attacks is that since then, I’ve compared every pain to gallbladder pain.  Nearly sliced my thumb off with a paring knife?  Eh, not as bad as a gallbladder attack, slap a bandaid on it and I’ll be fine.  Fell down and slammed my knee into concrete?  Whatever, I’ll walk it off.  Debilitating back pain?  Oh well, at least it’s not my gallbladder.  You get the picture.

So, Friday morning there I am, sitting in the passenger seat of the car with a bad stomach ache and my collarbone starts to ache.  I hold off on the crying because I know it can’t possibly be a gallbladder attack.  I might not be the brightest bulb in the pantry but even I know that one cannot have a gallbladder attack if one does not have a gallbladder.

But as we pull up in front of my office and the stomach pain increases and the collarbone aching continues I do mention to Ben that it feels like I’m having a gallbladder attack.  If I had been really smart I would have had him drive me to the hospital right then but I think we’ve already established my level of intelligence.  Instead I went to work, taking shallow breaths, muttering under my breath and continuing on in my little bubble of denial. 

Twenty minutes later I popped the denial bubble and sobbing like a little girl, asked a co-worker to drive me to the hospital.  I phoned Ben and told him what I was doing and we drove the 5 minutes to the hospital, me crying and cursing the entire way there.  There was no denying it any longer, I was having a full blown gallbladder attack.  Without a gallbladder.

As it often did, the attack stopped while I was still in the waiting room but I stayed, patiently waiting as they did a cardiogram and took blood.  I mentioned the pain relief medication I had took and they led me into a room in the emergency room.  A very friendly nurse took all my information and then mentioned that perhaps it was the pain relief that was causing the pain.  Having done the exact same thing I did this morning dozens of times over the last year and a half, I just gave a little smile and a shrug.

Ben, bless him, found someone to cover his first class and arrived at the hospital, allowing my very over-worked but much loved coworker to get back to her job.   After only a 20 minute wait we met with a doctor who explained very patiently the theory that some medical professionals had.

Basically, in some women (and only women) the little piece of duct that’s left over after the gallbladder removal can be irritated by narcotics, which then mimics a gallbladder attack.  It doesn’t always happen but can and does happen.  It may never happen again, I may get another attack the minute I take another narcotic, they don’t really know.

Armed with this knowledge, I went back to work and spent the next 45 minutes explaining in intricate detail the habits of the inner workings of my body to my interested coworkers.  I prepared myself fully to never again take any sort of narcotic, afterall, I’ve had gallbladder attacks, I can handle any pain after that.

Yeah, unfortunately, this “theory” is not believed by all medical professions.  In fact, a surgeon that my mumsi works with told her in no uncertain terms that this theory was utter bullshit (my words not his) and that in reality, what can sometimes happen is that some people who have had their gallbladders out will get random phantom gallbladder attacks.  They don’t know why, they can’t explain it, it just sometimes happens.

Awesome.

In short, I am left with two theories and still no clear idea on why I had a gallbladder attack on that dark Friday morning.  For now, until I see my family doctor and get yet another opinion on why it might happen, I am avoiding all narcotics with the dedication of a Navy SEAL defending his country, and living in fear that at any moment I may have another phantom gallbladder attack.

Good times people.  Good times.

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