October 17, 2003

 

I have been terribly sick for the past week or so, but also terribly busy.  A little over a week ago, I decided to pull my old '65 Chevy pickup out of storage and begin restoring it.  It was my grandfather's when I was little and he left it to me when he died about ten years ago.  Now that I'm a broke college student with no viable income, I've decided that since I don't have anything else to do, I may as well get around to restoring that.  Now if you know anything about mechanics or body work, you know that this is not an inexpensive endeavor.  All I know is that I need to stop wasting money and start pooring every dime into that truck.  Well, after about three or four days of sandblasting the rust off the ancient frame, I came down with the cold from hell.  Everybody in the family got it, but of course I got hit with it ten times worse than the rest.  I could barely talk or move for four days when I finally went to the doctor.  It started out as a slight sore throat (which I attempted to treat with brandy, and ended up very drunk), then escalated to an onslaught of epic proportions.  My whole body was aching, my head was pounding, the coughing was non-stop, and the throat hurt worse than ever.  Finally I took a visit to my doctor.  She didn't seem all too concerned with my cold other than my ear was terribly red and swollen inside.  She gave me some pills, but also wanted to know how my post-op life was going.  I told her that it was pretty good and about how I had lost 96 pounds in about four and a half months.  She seemed impressed at first.  Then she asked if I was sticking to the diet.  I told her that the portion sizes weren't really an issue because I never want to eat a lot, and I couldn't if I did want to.  Then I told her how I had gotten sick that day because I had a chocolate bar and some juice.  (By the way, that was the first time I ever threw up from eating sugar.  I always feel sick, but I threw up really badly for the first time where it wasn't a problem with chewing.)  She just looked at me and said "You're going to get diabetes."  She didn't say it as a warning, she said it as if it were an undeniable fact that deeply disappointed her.  I was so shocked by her reaction that I sort of fumbled my words in response.  She then checked my blood pressure.  After my follow-up at the hospital a couple of weeks ago, they told me to continue on my blood pressure medicine until I talked it over with my doctor because I always read high at the hospital.  Well, I believe part of the problem to be that, first of all, they're machine doesn't fit fat people (Why?  The whole department's devoted to gastric bypass patients!) and it usually takes about five tries to get a reading.  Second of all, every single time they measure my blood pressure down there, they do it immediately after I get off the scales.  This may not make a difference to most people, but it is a big physical struggle for me to stand for about thirty seconds to get an accurate reading on the scale.  Of course my blood pressure will be high if I was just doing severe exercise, even if it was a short amount of time.  On the other hand, blood pressure medicine can be extremely dangerous and life-threatening even if you need it, and downright deadly if you don't.  Well, of course my blood pressure wasn't high at all when I went to my doctor's office.  She told me not to take anymore of that medication and I would be fine.  Well, I'm still here, so I guess it wasn't all that detrimental.