Gut feeling…

A few weeks ago, my track pad starting acting all funny and unresponsive, but I thought I’d just tough it out with a wireless mouse. However, after a while, it went completely kaput, and it now resides in the geeky hands of the Apple repair folks until further notice. I’m painstakingly tapping this out on our iPad, so pardon the lack of spell check.

I didn’t set out to have any resolutions this year, but I DID have some goals for myself, first and foremost being to Take Better Care of Myself. In all aspects of that concept, from making sure I slather my hands with lotion whenever I can, to cleaning house emotionally and mentally, to making sure I get all of the pesky annual or bi-annual doctors visits scheduled. Let me tackle the easy one first.

I have been feeling quasi-nauseous for the past few months (and no, I’m not preggers) and finally went to my doc a few weeks ago to get a prescription for a better acid reducer. I was certain the cause was gastritis, which I’d had a decade ago, and I was hoping to just cut to the chase, rather than have to go through the nerve-wracking experience of getting a scope shoved down my throat. My doc gave me some drug samples, but also wanted to rule out the possibility of an infection called H. Pylori so off I went to get a blood test. Simple enough, right?

The results come back a week later, and while the H. Pylori test was negative (yay!) my bilirubin level was elevated (anti-yay!) and they wanted to rule out any funny business with my gall bladder. So, I was ordered to get an abdominal ultrasound, much like the kind you get when you’re pregnant, but far less fun and exciting. Meanwhile, I’m thinking “can’t you just give me that purple light and the cushy shades my son had in the NICU and send me on my way?” Turns out,my gallbladder is fine, but there appears to be a cyst on one of my kidneys that my doctor wants to investigate further. Now I’ve got an abdominal cat scan scheduled for Tuesday morning. While I’ve read that these cysts are pretty common, that they’re usually found in an ultrasound when looking for something else and are relatively harmless, there is always that very small chance that it could be something more. Here’s the thing that scares the shit out of me in all of this: this? This is how people find out they have some funky tumor hanging out somewhere that gets messed around with to a point that it throws their while body out of whack and things turn south. I know, I know. I’m letting my mind and WebMD get the best of me. Tell me to shut up, would ya. So much for taking care of myself…

Speaking of my mind, I’ve made some pretty big leaps in terms of my own mental and emotional health. Huge, scary steps that seem small to everyone else, but feel GINORMOUS to me. In short, I’ve realized that I make assumptions that the people around me know how I’m feeling, both the good and the bad, and then I get frustrated if they aren’t on the same page. So I’ve been trying to be more open with the people I care about. Man, that is sooooo hard. My super ego predicts how things will go and tries to scare me out of being my authentic self, for expressing how I feel, or for asking for what I want or need. Sounds so simple, yet so difficult to execute. Time to put on my big girl pants….