Dr. Hanrahan said that the surgeon at St. Mike’s who’s going to drain the pseudocyst was going to contact us but that was almost 2 weeks ago and we haven’t heard anything from him. Dr. Hanrahan sent him my last CAT scan so he could see if he could even do the procedure with my guts all twisted up and out of place and I’m worried that the answer to that is going to be “no” and that’s what Hanrahan is going to tell us on Wednesday. The alternative to this guy draining the pseudocyst is to wait until my body naturally absorbs the fluid inside it, which can take up to a YEAR. A YEAR! And Dr. Hanrahan can’t do her surgery in the meantime, she has to wait until the pseudocyst is taken care of. If I have to wait a year for my big surgery I’ll probably lose my goddamn mind.

So that’s my current worry.

On Friday night, Blake got me a new binder which fits a LOT better than the one he originally got. This binder is actually a back brace that we’re putting on me backwards. I haven’t thrown up since we got it so maybe it’s working and maybe I’m getting better at stopping eating before I get full because when I’m full, I get sick. Anyway, here’s the binder…ignore the boobs, or not, they kinda got in the way of the binder when I was trying to take the picture. Also notice the sticky stuff under my boobs, I am COVERED in that shit. Oh and for those just tuning in, I needed the binder to squish my guts back in place so they’re aligned properly and so theoretically I should stop throwing up because my guts are in a straight line so my digestion should be better, faster. And as I said, so far I think it’s working. So here’s the pic:

In my lap in that picture is a roast beef sandwich which is the only food I’ve consistently been able to keep down. I have one for breakfast, I sometimes have one for lunch  and then I have a small dinner and to date I’ve only barfed up a roast beef sandwich once so that’s kind of a record. I’ve also been eating multigrain Wheat Thins which, if you don’t know, are better than regular Wheat Thins, and they’re working to help my poo issues from taking 4 iron pills a day. I was all excited for pumpkin seeds for that purpose but pumpkin seeds apparently make me barf so they’re out.

Siske thinks my wound isn’t draining as much as it was in the beginning when we switched from the vac to a regular dressing so at first I was getting daily dressing changes (which sucked because Blake couldn’t be here to run interference) and yesterday Siske said I can go back down to just Mon/Wed/Fri again, which is a very good thing. That means my nurse will almost always be Siske (yay!) who now comes in the afternoons because she does vacs in the morning and regular dressings in the afternoon which means I can sleep in (yay!) and Blake can be here to help out (yay!).  Oh and both Siske and Janice (my other nurse) agree that I don’t need the vac anymore so that’s what we’ll be telling Dr. Hanrahan on Wednesday: just plain dressings from now on, no being tethered to that wretched machine that tangles you up in its tubes while you sleep!

So that’s some good news at least.

The deadline for the OAC grant I apply for every year is slowly creeping up. The deadline is Dec. 1st for my category and have I mentioned how much I hate applying for this grant only to be turned down for it every year. Applying is a lot of work, especially when you don’t have a printer, so Blake will have to print everything out at work and I think you need 6 copies of each thing. Then I have to hunt through photos and come up with I believe 6 pieces that best represent my work and I have to size them and put them on a CD. This year, since I’m not working and can’t do much else than paint, I really really need the grant because we literally have no extra money for canvases and brushes. And I need a friggin’ printer. I want the freedom to paint anything I want back, like I had when I had a job, and that only comes with money.

It’s a good thing I got into Touched By Fire this year because I can put it on my resume, which will look better when I apply for the grant. My resume is pretty limited though, I’ve only got Touched By Fire twice, The Sketchbook Project twice, The Fiction Project and A Million Little Pictures. I worry that that’s too thin. Oh well.

Speaking of The Sketchbook Project, I’m going to go to my office and work on mine because I’m falling behind and I have more ideas than time. Gotta hustle!

“I love you in the morning and in the afternoon! I love you in the evening underneath the moon!”

This was shared by pretty much everyone on my Facebook friends list today and yesterday and when I finally got around to watching it, all I could think of was “Fuck yeah, Rick Mercer, fuck YEAH.”

Don’t wanna talk about it. Just am.

Today Siske said my wound is leaking too much so now I have to have a nurse come in and change it daily because going back to the vac isn’t an option considering they took it back on Monday. Apparently it costs $300/day to have them in the home so they don’t like to have them out if they’re not being used and apparently there’s also a waiting list for them. I’m back on the waiting list for it but I won’t know if we’re going back to the vac until I see Dr. Hanrahan on Wednesday. Siske only works every other day so tomorrow Janice is coming and Blake has to go to work so I have to deal with her all by myself, which has me really really nervous.

This is what my dressing looked like this morning, it was changed on Monday:

Gross, right? You should have smelled it.

This is what my cheese pizza wound looked like today.
To the right is my bellybutton.
The pink stuff at the edges is new skin. It’s very very smooth.

We still haven’t heard from the surgeon who will be doing the pseudocyst procedure. I’m really curious to know if they’re going to snip it and let the fluid just drain into my abdomen or if they’re going to insert a needle and suck the juice out of it. I thought we would have heard from him by now and the fact that we haven’t makes me nervous because that could mean that he maybe can’t do it because my guts are all twisted up. Dr. Hanrahan said that was a possibility.

I have to get a new binder because the one I have is too big/doesn’t hold my guts in tight enough and my dressing leaked all over the one I have, staining it, so I can’t take it back. There’s another $50 down the drain. Thanks to some generous friends I’m a little less stressed out about this expense than I was before but it still seems like such a waste.

Halloween. Madison is going out as Nyan Cat and Wes is going out as his own creation, “W Boy”. Over the summer when they were in Michigan, the kids went to camp and at Wes’ camp they made him this “W Boy” costume that’s just a white t-shirt that says “W Boy” on it that he coloured himself and a cape with a silver “W” on the back. The kid practically lives in it.

Over the weekend we did pumpkins and by “we”, I mean “Madison” because she did them all, I just roasted the seeds which are my favourite part of Halloween but apparently they make me throw up. :o(

She made Blake a Burning Man pumpkin:

She made Wes a Nyan Cat pumpkin (it has ears but you can’t see them in the dark):

She made me a Hello Kitty pumpkin:

And she made herself an Angry Birds pumpkin:

I thought it was weird that Wes is obsessed with Angry Birds but Madison made HER pumpkin Angry Birds and Madison’s being Nyan Cat for Halloween but she made Wes’ pumpkin Nyan Cat. What a weirdo.

And last but not least, I got into Touched By Fire this year.
They chose “Black & White” for the show.

Oh and in case I forgot to mention it, my Etsy shop is open again.

Now I’m going to bed.

Click here to check out the paintings I currently have for sale!

Thanks, Bel. <3

Just thought I’d share! Again.

Today has really really sucked. First of all, I woke up at 4am with diarrhea. Again. And I decided that since I was up, I might as well eat an apple stick. To the uninitiated, an apple stick is this awesome apple pastry, like strudel, that comes in the shape of a tube about an inch & a half in diameter by about 6 or 7 inches in length with chunky sugar sprinkled on top. They are DELICIOUS and only available at one chain of stores here, which happens to be the type of grocery store we have here in town. The ones Blake bought me yesterday were baked yesterday so they are EXTRA DELICIOUS. So yeah, that? Was the highlight of my day. It was pretty much all downhill from there. Sort of. Bittersweet may be the better term, but when you wake up with urgent shits and fail to make the bathroom, and that trend continues throughout the day, it’s a little hard to be Miss Mary Sunshine.

A couple of weeks ago Blake got me salmon steaks from the big, good grocery store in Barrie that I love so much because it’s humongous and it has an actual meat counter, not just a tank of lobsters, not just a deli, but an honest to god meat counter with kickass steaks and kickass salmon steaks.

Blake bought two of them, which the butcher wrapped in butcher’s paper and I told Blake to freeze them without knowing they were wrapped together in butcher’s paper. I am the only person in this house who will eat fish (the kids will eat shrimp, according to my step-mom, but I’ve never seen it) because the kids don’t like it and Blake has a possible allergy to it where he doesn’t like it and it’s been known to give him the shits/make him throw up so he’s more or less avoided it his whole life so I was kinda pissed when I saw that he froze BOTH of them in the butcher paper when I have a hard time eating ONE, you can’t refreeze them after they’re thawed and you should eat them within a day of thawing naturally, immediately if defrosting in the nukrowave. So once I realized they were frozen together and spazzed on Blake, we asked the kids if they’d be interested in trying it and they said they would be, so we decided that in order for them to try it, I would pretty much have to wait until a weekend to have mine, which was fine.

Well today was that day.

As it turned out the steaks were individually wrapped in plastic inside the butcher’s paper so I basically spazzed on Blake for nothing (how was I supposed to know?) and much to my surprise, considering his lifelong aversion to all things that swim, when I asked him to cook them for me, he agreed and since he’s a million times better at cooking EVERYTHING than I am, he cooked them perfectly (just fried in olive oil with salt & pepper) and I absolutely loved mine. The kids weren’t so much fans, but they both tried it. Wes thought it was disgusting while Madison was more thoughtful about it (“good, but the aftertaste ruined it”) and much to my surprise again, Blake said he was going to try it. He said it tasted really good but at the end of his trial his gag reflex got set off, so he only had that one bite. He didn’t feel sick afterward though and he doesn’t have the shits to my knowledge so maybe with some practice we can get him eating salmon steaks with me because they are delicious and very very good for you.

After lunch we internetted for a while when suddenly I got it in my head that I NEEDED fizzy Skittles. I love fizzy Skittles. Hell, I love non-fizzy Skittles too. So Blake went to the store to get me fizzy Skittles and berry Skittles and a slush. A cherry slush.

So Blake got those and came home and then I sent him out to get pumpkins so we can carve them tomorrow and I can bake the seeds. The seeds make me poo fantastically so I’m very much looking forward to eating them. Not too firm, not too runny, just perfect poos. I highly recommend pumpkin seeds if you have any type of poo problem. As Blake (and Madison) were getting pumpkins, Wes and I were eating Skittles and I was washing them down with my slush.

This was a mistake.

Blake and Madison come home. I’m internetting and eating Skittles. Washing them down with slush. Blake started playing Arkham City and I got tired of eating Skittles so I put them away and continued my internetting for about half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. Then I started screaming for Blake to find my bowl (it was in my office) because I was dangerously close, without warning, to puking all over myself, my computer and the bed. He ran and got my bowl, I grabbed it and filled that thing within centimetres of the top.

My vomit tasted like cherry and Skittles and had the texture of salmon steak. It was the sickest thing I’ve thrown up so far. And I don’t know why I barfed it all up, I followed all the rules:

1. Eat things that aren’t very greasy. Check.
2. Eat them slowly. Check.
3. Eat small snacks, spaced out throughout the day. Check.

I’m even wearing that godawful girdle binder Dr. Hanrahan wants me to wear to keep my guts squished in and aligned. Blake picked it up this morning and it’s horrible. My waist isn’t long enough for the stupid thing so it’s either digging into my hips when I sit or digging into my underboobage. And the fucking thing was $50! If anyone would like to help us out with the expense of that because we’re down to one income and ran out of donated money about a month ago, there’s a donation button on the bottom right-hand corner of my site. I hate to sound like I’m begging and I’m not really, this was just an expense we weren’t prepared for at a time when there’s no money for extra expenses. And not that one has anything to do with the other but I’m going to thank everyone who donated before, here, because I’m on a lot of drugs and can’t remember if I already thanked everyone in a previous post while I was still in the hospital. I honestly have no idea how we would have gotten through until now without those donations.

Blah. I’ll shut up about money now. This post isn’t about money.

Tomorrow Blake’s going to look at the binder and see if we can use Madison’s pinking shears to take an inch & a half or so off of it so it’ll fit properly.  My guts really hurt when it was first put on this morning but throughout the afternoon it started feeling…almost normal? I mean, it feels like I’m wearing a girdle but admittedly my guts hurt less with it on then without it. Without it I look about 6 months pregnant with a square baby because my guts have drifted out of place to either side of my abdomen, the binder brings them back to the middle and the goal is to keep wearing the binder until I have my wound/hernia surgery so it’s easier for Dr. Hanrahan to make me normal again.

Well, as normal as I get anyway. Physically normal.

No word from the pseudocyst surgeon yet. Waiting, waiting, waiting…I feel like that’s what my life has become. I am *SO* worried that if surgery and recovery (main surgery not the pseudocyst one) don’t happen soon enough I’ll lose my already slim shot at getting my job back. And I’m really really scared about what that means. I can’t just go out and get another job! And Blake’s been putting a lot of pressure on me to do everything in my power to get it back because we’re pretty much fucked if I don’t. And it would be really nice to not have that stress. I’ve never been able to contribute financially to the household by selling paintings because I don’t sell enough of them and I have no idea HOW to sell more of them. I feel like I’m doing everything I can already. It was nice having a job because that meant there was no pressure on me to paint what was profitable, I could paint what I wanted to, but now that’s gone.

Guh. This post is not about money. This post is not about money. This post is not about money.

Alex @replied me on Twitter tonight to tell me that it’s a really small friggin’ world. Siske, my nurse, has told me about her daughter many times before and as it turns out WE KNOW HER DAUGHTER. She’s really good friends with Ronny and Alex and we met her at their wedding! Weird, right? I can’t get over it! She never told me enough to put 2 + 2 together and chances are I wouldn’t have anyway because I’ve only met her daughter once, but it’s crazy to me all the same.

And speaking of Siske, she’s going to have my ass up early tomorrow morning to change my dressing so I should probably finish this post and go to bed. Before I do though, here are some pics from the bed, mostly of Pixel because I thought Phaedie would like them:

I took this pic because Madison claims these toys were sent by someone on the internet but neither of us can remember who or if that’s even true, so if you remember giving these to Madison, please let me know!

I have no idea what she’s doing in the above picture.

And in case you didn’t get enough Pixel today, here are a couple of videos. The first is Madison and Pixel being best friends and the second is Madison and Pixel playing with ribbon.

And last, but certainly not least, I leave you with Blake attempting to sing “Miss World” by Hole while playing guitar. Enjoy and goodnight!

In reaction to the bringing down of his government on March 25, 2011, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper seems to have borrowed talking points straight from the mouth of the most evil man in the galaxy: the Emperor himself… Darth Sidious.

My surgeon, every time I see her, keeps telling me how “impressive” I am for maintaining a positive attitude throughout this whole thing and for healing as fast as I have been and for getting out of the hospital much earlier than expected (keeping in mind, the projected date of release was “maybe” by Christmas). And I keep wondering, every time she says it, if she says that to all the ladies who come into her office, considering the fact that she’s primarily a breast reconstruction surgeon, she’s got the pink ribbon on her office sign and everything.

I don’t feel impressive. I mean, I can’t control my rate of healing. I’m only positive about this shit when I’m in her office. Realistically I sleep my days away and I cry a lot because I am so goddamn sick of this bullshit that I can barely stand it. But I have no choice but to “stand it”, so I sleep away my days and just try to keep on keepin’ on. What alternative do I have?

I hate the days Siske comes because it means I have to get up early. She usually comes between 9am-9:30am, every Mon/Wed/Fri. I like Siske, don’t get me wrong, I just hate having to get up for her and I hate that I’m too chickenshit to deal with her by myself so Blake has to work from home those days. He makes sure the vac’s turned off half an hour before she gets here and makes sure there’s a garbage bag beside my bed for all the medical waste. He also makes sure the stainless steel scissors we stole from the hospital (accidentally, I swear!) are boiled and sterile. Stuff that’s hard for me to do because I suck at waking up early and it’s hard to navigate all the places I have to navigate to do all that with the vac. Also, I’m in a lot of pain and the less I have to move around, the better off I am.

Anyway…

So we went to see the surgeon today, whose name is Renee Hanrahan in case you were wondering, and she’s awesome, and there was some good news and some not so good news. And some more good news and some more not so good news.

The CAT scan showed that I have a 12cm long pseudocyst  on my pancreas that requires surgery (or maybe more to the point, a “procedure”) to be drained before she can close up my cheese pizza wound/hernia. 12cms is pretty damn big, I had no idea the pancreas was even that big, but this pseudocyst is like a blister and we’re waiting to find out from the OTHER surgeon, down in Toronto at the hospital I was in before, if it’s operable. If it’s not then we have to wait until the body naturally absorbs it which can take a really really long time. Like, we’re talking 6 months to a year. If it IS operable then what he’ll do is stick a scope down my throat and into my belly and at the end of the scope will be an instrument that’ll pierce the cyst. I’m not sure if it’ll just pop it and let my body absorb what’s in it or if they’ll suck the stuff out of it, to be honest, I forgot to ask. She said it looks like there’s more than one pseudocyst on the pancreas but they’re not so much worried about the smaller ones, it’s this big one that’s wreaking havoc on my guts and probably the culprit behind all this puking business.

The CAT scan also showed that my spleen is enlarged and unhappy and she said it was likely due to this pseudocyst pushing on it, but Blake asked about the blood clot that I had in the splenic vein (splenic vein thrombosis) and she said she didn’t know, that once the pseudocyst is out of the way they’ll do another CAT scan and will hopefully get a better look at it.

So that’s where things stand right now, we’re waiting for the Toronto surgeon to make his determination as to whether or not the pseudocyst is operable and hopefully it is because I’ll lose my goddamn mind if I have to wait 6 months to a year for this nightmare to be over.

We asked Dr. Hanrahan to ballpark how soon I would have the surgery to close up the hernia and she was very reluctant to give a date so my mom said “January?” and Dr. Hanrahan said that seemed likely. I almost cried right there. I’m crying now just typing that. That is so far away! I was thinking like, November? I thought we’d go to this appointment, she’d say the CAT scan looked good and my blood work looked good and my pee test looked good and then she’d book me for late November to be closed up.

Well, my blood work looks good. My liver is a little unhappy about something apparently but she didn’t seem worried about it and she said that despite all this barfing, there were no signs of malnutrition. My hemoglobin is low, but it always is. My iron is high, but I take 4 iron pills a day, of course it’s high! She made no mention of my pee test so I’m assuming it was fine.

She wants me to lay off on the domperidone because the issue is this pseudocyst and the fact that my stomach’s all twisted up so the domperidone probably isn’t doing much good (although I think it *does* make a difference so I’m going to continue taking it for my bigger meals, like dinner). I asked her if she’d raise my hydromorph dosage because as nerve endings grow into my cheese pizza wound, it hurts more. Also my guts just plain hurt. Ever since my run in with the world’s worse case of diarrhea, my lower guts just ache. It’s actually a lot like period cramps times about 50. And coming from someone with stage IV endometriosis I think that’s saying a lot.

So really the visit was more bitter than sweet, but at least I’m not dying of malnutrition so it can’t all be bad. I was a little worried about that, to be honest. I see her again in two weeks.

OH YEAH!!! AND GUESS WHAT!!! She said I can take a break from the vac for a while to see how my wound does. I told her I was sick of being tethered to the damn thing and she said, “let’s leave it off for a while and see how you do”. SO FUCK YEAH THAT’S AWESOME. I’m just going to have a regular dressing from now on, which will be silver nitrate (it’s like fabric made out of silver!), then an “abdominal tampon” on top (LOL I love saying that) and then the sticky drape stuff that I’ve explained before as being like shelf paper on top to make it water-proof and hold the ABDOMINAL TAMPON in place.

ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. ABDOMINAL TAMPON. <— this will never get old.

So no more forgetting about the vac and walking away from the kitchen as it falls off the table. No more worrying about getting the vac machine wet when I shower. No more waking up 20 times a night to untangle myself from it. No more carrying the fucking things around. It really sucks to have to carry it in one hand and your dinner in another and then you don’t have a hand free to take your drink too! But whatever, I almost died. Worse things have happened…

But still, I’m very excited about being untethered for a while, even if it only does end up being “for a while”.

Oh, another crappy thing though is that she wants me to wear a “binder” which is just a fancy term for a girdle. My guts are drifting to the left and right so my stomach region actually looks kinda oval-ish/square-ish. My guts are on either side of my stomach so by wearing the girdle binder it’ll bring them more toward the middle where they should be and not only should this improve my digestion but it’ll make it easier for Dr. Hanrahan to put my guts back where they should be and close me up. When we went to Shopper’s Drug Mart after my appointment they didn’t have one but they were getting a shipment in tomorrow so when it got there, they’d call Blake to pick it up. Can’t wait. I wonder if I’m supposed to wear it while I sleep? I sure hope not. :o/

After my appointment we went to Curry’s where I picked up some odourless mineral spirits and some paper stomps which are basically pencils made with paper and no lead. Just a sharpened stick made of paper. Odourless mineral spirits are normally used to clean oil paint off of brushes, but my friend Ditsy mentioned using “Gamsol” to do this neat shading effect with pencil crayons, which is just a brand name for what I bought today (I got the store brand). What you do is colour the edges of your picture with a good pencil crayon, like Prismacolour, and then you dip the paper stomp into the mineral spirits and colour from the edge inward. Basically the mineral spirits dissolve the wax of the pencil crayon causing concentrated colour around the edges with it fading into the middle. It actually makes the pencil crayons behave a lot like Copic markers, but without the enormous expense of Copic markers.

This lady’s kind of obnoxious at the end of the tutorial, but here’s how to do the technique: episode 1/episode 2

I’ve got to admit, I’m pretty geeked to try it and I meant to try it tonight but I got distracted by this post and now it’s too late because I’m about to take my PM drugs and since Siske’s coming tomorrow, I can’t sleep in.

After Curry’s we went to Starbucks where I got a chocolate coffee and then to EB Games to get Sims 3 Pets but they were sold out so we went to Wal*Mart instead. I’ve installed the game but haven’t played it yet because after my mom left we had to have dinner and then after dinner I had e-mail to deal with, then I started writing this post and before I knew it, it was 10pm (the time it is now) and I was late for taking my drugs. Oh yeah, and I still have the shits so there was some bathroom time in there too.

I really have no doubt that I won’t be impressed by Sims 3 Pets. The only reason I really got it is because I’m completest. The pets expansions for previous incarnations of the Sims were my least favourite of all the expansions (okay, Open For Business for Sims 2 was probably the worst and Ambitions for Sims 3 was pretty bad too) so I’m really doubting I’ll actually play with the pets, I’m more interested in the extra stuff like, are there new aspirations? Lifetime rewards? Jobs? Stuff to grow in your garden (like catnip maybe? that would be cool and maybe even worth owning a cat)? New furnishings etc etc etc? Stuff like that is why I keep buying all these expansions even though the core games themselves may suck.

Truthfully, I’m more excited to play with odourless mineral spirits than Pets. Which I think I’m gonna go do right now because today was a bummer and I would like a little joy before I go to bed.

Oh yeah, and I barfed up my chocolate coffee seconds after getting home. I was feeling really sick all the way home and Blake stopped off at the pharmacy before we came home and I was praying that I wouldn’t have to barf on the sidewalk, which I didn’t, but I don’t think the car was fully stopped in the driveway before I jumped out and ran as fast as I could to get to my barf bowl. (I can’t barf in a toilet like a normal person because it’s too hard for me to get back up. My legs are still too weak to get up easily from the floor, so I barf in a bowl instead and Blake, my beloved, dutifully takes the bowl (after putting my hair up and putting my computer aside as not to get barf on either), flushes the contents, washes the bowl and hands it back to me. That is LOVE.

Okay, gonna go play with mineral spirits now. Goodnight!