First I saw this article from Penny Arcade.
Then my friend Skeet said, “oh no honey, it gets worse” and I came very close to urinating all over myself.
Then I read this and almost shat myself.
Then Larissa posted this and now I’m done:

Edit: Dammit, the Reddit post is now gone but the comments aren’t. Someone posted this.

Edit #2: PA updated with this.

Edit #3: MOAR.

Edit #4: Oh snap.

Edit #5: Parody video.

I made macaroni salad for lunch. There are a million different ways to make macaroni salad of course, but the way I make mine is pretty simple and you have to love Miracle Whip or you just won’t like it because all it is is Miracle Whip, lots of it, tuna and whatever vegetables, frozen or fresh, that you can find in the fridge. In my case, all we had was onions, celery and french cut green beans (which is kinda like shredded, I hate them and they wouldn’t work for this anyway) so I used onions and celery, which, as it turns out, have next to no nutritional content. :o/ I also used penne noodles instead of macaroni because I like them better. They’re easier to skewer with a fork when you’re busy writing a blog post.

I can’t shave my head. It’s not that I’m chickening out or anything like that because it’s not like I haven’t shaved my head before, it’s because when I was in the ICU, I developed a bedsore on the back of my head because of where it rubbed on the pillow. I mean, I was laying on my back for 2 months more or less and I scar really easily so when the wound healed, I was left with two scars and hair doesn’t grow on scar tissue, at least, not fresh scar tissue. Behold:

If I shaved my head, with that bald spot, I’ll look like I was a victim of a lice infestation or something and people will want to stay away from me. As you can see, there’s the two little scars, but all around them hair isn’t really growing for some reason. I don’t know why, maybe it’s for the same reason that my hair is falling out.

Blake also said something like, would I rather be frustrated with regrowth with hair or without it? And he also said, would I just be moping around the house wearing hats with a shaved head? And if so, what’s the difference between wearing a hat all the time with hair and without it? That’s a very valid point, so I’ve decided not to shave my head and to just wear hats instead. So I bought this one and this one and this one, courtesy of my very special friend Charlie who is amazeballs. I also bought Madison this one and Wes this one (he’s obsessed with wolves at the moment) for Xmas.

I’ve been really depressed lately, moreso than I was before, because we’ve had a pretty big setback as far as my wound is concerned. The nurses wanted to switch my dressing changes to every other day, which proved to be a bad idea because the wound had too much discharge and because it was moist all the time, some of the new tissue around the edges began to break down.

In the pic you can see where it’s broken down around the edges, the parts that look like zombie flesh are the parts that broke down. On the right (well, my left) you can see my poor bellybutton.

I’m just disappointed because Dr. Hanrahan said maybe she’d be closing me up by Xmas but I don’t think she will be with the wound looking like this and we still haven’t heard from the stupid surgeon in Toronto about draining my pseudocysts. I am just so sick of being sick. :o( At least I’ve stopped throwing up though. I just decided that I wasn’t going to throw up anymore and I’m really very stubborn so thus far it’s been working. That’s not to say that I haven’t been feeling extremely nauseous and I always have my puke bowl within arm’s reach because I’ve had some pretty close calls, but I haven’t thrown up in about a week and a half. Maybe even longer.

Oh but back to my wound: we’re back to doing daily dressing changes, with Blake doing them on every other day and weekends and Siske doing them M/W/F. I guess the big deal is that they’re supposed to teach the families how to do them but in my case, I was having a nurse come every single day, which costs the company and the province money and I guess at the last meeting, the nurses kinda got bitched out about that.

Speaking of nurses, I’m fairly confident that I’ve scared Ben off completely. I know he’s gotten my Facebook message because he changed his profile pic recently so he would have gotten it when he logged in, but he hasn’t replied. He’s been doing orientation at the mental health hospital in Penetanguishene this week, according to Janice, so the rumour is that he’s going to leave Bayshore (the company that overseas the nurses) completely. He says he’s still going to work for them though, and I think the rumour is just a rumour. He mostly works weekends and since Blake is doing my dressings on weekends now, we probably won’t see him very often, if at all, so at least things won’t be awkward as a result of my Facebook message. I hope, anyway. I did send him a short message after the initial one saying that if he had like, a policy against fraternizing with patients on Facebook that was totally cool and understandable so again, I don’t think things will be awkward if he replies. If he doesn’t reply, then things will probably be awkward if he comes here because I’ll know he’s read it and like…do I say “hey did you get my FB message?” or just pretend I never sent it? I dunno! The protocol for this kind of thing doesn’t exactly exist or anything.

Whatever, I’ll cross that bridge when I need to.

A while back, you may recall that Madison’s teacher made Madison bring home the book White Oleander by Janet Fitch because Madison was reading it in class and the teacher deemed it “inappropriate” because she’s a fucking moron who has no idea what she’s talking about.

We’ve been recommending books for Madison to read over the past little while and she’s been enjoying (for the most part) the things we’ve been telling her to read. The only book that really gave her trouble was The Life of Pi, which was just over her head and probably a bad choice on Blake’s part. I recommended she read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides because he’s my favourite author, that book is fucking phenomenal and I think, being a teenage girl herself, Madison will be able to relate to it.

Since her teacher is a bloody idiot who will, no doubt, object to the book based on the title alone and Madison does a lot of her reading at school, she asked me to make a book jacket for it so her teacher won’t realize what she’s reading. So that’s what I did this morning. I told my friend Ashley that I’d take pics of the process but I forgot. I did take pics after the fact though and the process was pretty simple because all I did was glue the paper to the book using gel medium. I meant to leave the back part of the book cover loose so the synopsis was accessible should Madison’s teacher *gasp* wanted to educate herself on the book before deeming it inappropriate, but I fucked up and the first thing I did was smear gel medium all over the back cover and since I couldn’t exactly wash it off of a paperback, I just went with it and glued the paper to the whole thing. The back cover only had like, a 3 sentence synopsis anyway and the rest was praise so I don’t think it would make a difference anyway.

Here it is:

Front cover.

Inside front cover.
I folded the paper over a bit so it would adhere better.

Back cover.

Gel medium, so you know what to get if you wanted to do this for some reason as well.

And now I’m going to play Warcraft for a little while and eat ketchup chips.
Then I have to go work on my sketchbook because time’s a tickin’!

I have an ingrown toenail that is so pusy and nasty and painful that I just want to chop my toe off and be done with it. It’s my own fault, when I cut my toenails about a week ago I cut too deep by accident and knew it was going to turn ingrown. It fucking hurts.

I also didn’t have dinner last night because I knew if I did, I’d throw up. My “mind over matter” dealie isn’t working so well these days. I *am* almost 6 days barf-free but over the past 2 days I came pretty close and I don’t know if I can keep this up. I guess my mental powers just ain’t what they used to be. Then again, if I don’t believe in those powers, they won’t work, so I should probably be a little more positive about it.

So none of you probably noticed because you all saw the post earlier in the day, but I’ve removed yesterday’s post entitled “Sweet Child o’ Mine” because Madison got mad at me for posting her note. She wasn’t mad that I showed the whole world, she was mad that it was an image that people could save and potentially print out and bring to school to tease her with. Her friends don’t really come here but she was afraid of that scenario. She said that if I could figure out a way to leave the post up but make it so people couldn’t save the pics, I could leave it up, but as you all know, that’s not possible, which is a shame because I think that was a good post. I saved it as a PDF so I could print it out once we have black ink again, though, so it’s not exactly lost forever, it’s just not public anymore.

Anyway, total lapse in parenting judgement. I’ve apologized and promised that I wouldn’t post publicly about her sexuality again, especially in a savable format. We’re good.

I wish I could post publicly about how everything went down with her last night because I think it was very interesting but since I’m banned from speaking of her sexuality I can’t really go into details. I understand her reasons for being upset, and again, it had very little to do with you guys and more to do with people from her school, and I respect them. If she were an adult, I probably wouldn’t because don’t tell me shit if you don’t want it on the internet (unless you specifically say “don’t post this”, which I do respect, or unless it’s really obvious that it shouldn’t be public) but she’s a kid and has the right to grow up with a little privacy. Note that I said “a little”. She is unfortunately my daughter and I put everything on the internet that happens in my life from the mundane to extraordinary and sshe’s a part of my life so there’s going to be some cross-over. I’m not just going to write around her.

I explained this to her and she seemed fine with it. It was mostly the sexuality thing and who she likes (which I know I didn’t mention but I do have a video teasing her about someone we thought she was crushing on last spring that she hated but I didn’t know until last night because she didn’t tell me) because those things can come back to her at school if it falls into the wrong hands. And like I said yesterday, she’s already being teased at school, to a much higher degree than she let on before, and it breaks my heart so I won’t do anything to knowingly contribute to it.

So that’s what happened to the post, more or less.

Before I apologized, she was really mean to me and made me cry, which was a bad move on my part. Now that she knows she has that power, she’s going to use it as she gets deeper into the teen years and the shitty part is, I can’t control myself. I can’t not cry when someone’s being mean to me. I’m an extremely sensitive person and I cry a lot. I cry if the store’s out of ketchup chips. I cry if someone shows me a video on how Chicken McNuggets are made. I cry when celebrities die. I cry when Blake yells. I cry when Wes tells me about when he saw me at St. Mike’s and I was “sleeping”. I cry when “Creep” by Radiohead comes on my iTunes.  I cry for really stupid reasons, especially when I think people are mad at me or they’re being mean to me. Blake’s like, “it’s only going to get worse as she gets older” and I just cried some more because Madison’s never been mean to me before. She’s never gotten mad at me before. She fights with Blake all the time and gets made at him and that’s just their dynamic, they butt heads and scream at each other for a while, then Madison goes to her room and Blake goes to his desk and a couple of hours later Madison comes out and pretty much acts like nothing even happened, which Blake doesn’t let her get away with, they discuss whatever it was calmly at that point, but it always turns out okay.

Yesterday Madison made me cry, twice, and didn’t even apologize for it after everything was fine and we were back to joking around and being normal.  She was indignant, she was like “good” while I was crying, even though she didn’t say that. That really bothers me.

It getting worse will absolutely destroy me and I’ve been crying all morning just thinking about it. :o( Okay I’ve only been up for an hour, but I hit the ground weeping. I don’t know how I’m going to make it through her teens if this is how it’s going to be. She’s just literally, in the 13 years she’s been alive, has never gotten made at me before, she’s never lashed out at me, she’s never said anything mean. That’s not how we are. Or that’s not how we were.

Don’t get me wrong, even after she saw I’d posted the note and before I apologized, she was still telling me all about school and the kids in school and who she liked and was acting totally normal. She took the opportunity to be mad at me and ran with it to see what it tasted like and I think it tasted good. She’s been testing the waters with me a little bit the last few weeks, like saying “no” if I ask her to bring me a bottle of water from the kitchen or to recycle my old ones or to grab me an apple while she’s in there or whatever. She plays it off like she’s joking but she’s kinda started taking it too far and I can’t really explain in text how she’s testing the waters, it just feels like she is. Blake thinks the same thing.

Other than that, we’re totally fine. Blake tweeted this weekend, “I think that Madison and @SunnyCrittenden sitting around shooting the shit is just about the cutest thing ever.” and he mentioned somewhere else that it was “heartwarming”. I don’t/didn’t really understand what he meant because Madison and I were just being normal, this is how we are after school every single day, but I guess he doesn’t see that because he’s at work. Madison and I have talked after school about everything under the sun since she started school, pretty much, so it’s totally normal for us, but again, he just doesn’t see it. I don’t know what was different this weekend, but something was and he noticed and he mentioned it. He also said that it “warmed his heart” that we went into my office and watched The Muppet Movie together while I made art because, to him, Madison and I don’t do that together. But the thing is, after school we do, we’ve watched many an Oprah episode after school together and now on Thursdays we watch Extreme Couponing together. (That show is AWESOME.) Since I got sick, I don’t go in my office that often so we don’t watch as much TV as we used to, but obviously we still do it because we did it on Sunday and last Thursday with Extreme Couponing. In fact she stayed home from school that day to help me deal with a new nurse because I just couldn’t deal with her by myself (and rightly so, she was pretty gross and I hated her touching me :o(). Today after school, Madison is going to the pharmacy to pick up the drugs for me that Blake forgot to get on Sunday because he worked all weekend. She’s a GOOD KID, she just has this streak of malice now that I don’t know how to deal with.

And it bugs the hell out of me that she doesn’t believe me that she’s a good kid when I tell her she is. Maybe I should write her a note. I mean, she helps out around the house a LOT and for no allowance because we can’t afford allowance anymore, she runs errands, she’s constantly asking me if I need anything and both kids understand that walking is difficult for me, so they both grab me water from the fridge and stuff like that and they seem happy to do it. Sometimes (not often) I say in the living room where everyone is, as a joke, “the next person who gets me an apple gets a kiss!” and all three of them will literally fight over who’s going to do it, like they all run to the kitchen to get the apple. The ONLY thing I know for certain in this life is that my family REALLY loves me. Like, to an abnormal degree I think.

So then how could she be so mean to me? I don’t understand. Blake tried explaining it to me as there being reactions that come from the (logical) brain and reactions that comes from the (illogical) heart but I still don’t get it. I could never be that mean to her. I’m the one always sticking up for her, I’m the one always in her corner.

I guess all there is to do is to try and grow a thicker skin. Blake says I need to try as hard as I can next time not to react when she tries to hurt me and he guarantees that there will be a “next time”. I’m not so sure about that, but he’s probably right about the thicker skin thing, just in case. I just don’t think I’m capable of it.

Enough about that.

Last night I watched a movie called “The Switch”, which starred Jennifer Anniston, who I think is SO pretty and Jason Bateman who I think is a dork. Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum were also in it and Juliette was really great. Jeff, not so much. Anyway, it’s about an artificial insemination gone awry and it’s a romantic comedy, which I’m a sucker for, and I expected it to be really awful as most rom-coms are but it was actually pretty decent and do you wanna know why? It’s because it was based on the short story “Baster” by JEFFREY EUGENIDES (!!!!!!) who is probably my favourite author in the whole wide world. He wrote Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides and a new book that I forget the name of but Blake’s getting it for me for Xmas. Something about a marriage or a divorce or something, I honestly didn’t read the jacket, I just saw the name and basically screamed in the middle of Chapters because I love him so much.

Right now I’m half-assedly reading Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs which is kinda cool because of its gimmick (the story is written around strange photos that were supposedly “found”, but I’m not so sure – the photos are interspersed throughout the book) but the writing is kinda “meh”. The story is kinda “meh” too. And actually now that I think about it, the writing sounds like I’m reading a blog, which I don’t really mind but I read a lot of blogs and I want more from a book. Apparently they’re making this book into a movie and I have no idea how that’s going to work.

Speaking of movies, The Help comes out next week on DVD and I have to have it. If anyone was going to get me anything for Xmas, that’s the thing. It’s on my wishlist. Just sayin’…(I hate that term and I can’t believe I just used it, but it fit…)

Here are scenes from my bed from yesterday:

Wes gave me a bat ring for Halloween. It’s one of my prized possessions. :o)

My empty Tylenol #3 bottle.
I always keep them so I know when I can refill the prescription because I only get 100 pills every 30 days so I don’t become an addict (probably too late).

Wes’ picture from the dentist last year.
His hair IS tinged pink in this pic, it’s not  a trick of the light.
I just realized that it’s weird that its for the DENTIST and he’s not showing his teeth.
They probably wanted him to, but he probably politely declined.
That’s just how he is.

This is my extra special snowflake mug.
Blake got me a set of 4 from Caribou Coffee when he was working there like, 10- years ago.
This is the only survivor. :o/
It’s getting old and I need a new one but I haven’t been able to find a suitable replacement.
It’s stained on the inside and the inside also has a whole bunch of fine cracks.

I’ll be very upset if anyone breaks it.

Yesterday Blake called me from Shopper’s Drug Mart and told me that Isopure Plus (my protein drink that I need so I don’t die of malnutrition) was on sale for $3.50 off, which is a very big deal because the stuff’s $15 + tax for 6 bottles which is very expensive for us and he wanted to know if I thought he should get 2. I said yes. I wish we had more money so we could get more than 2 because that’s a really good deal and we should probably stock up. :o/ It’s NOT a good deal if we have to put it on Visa and pay interest on it, so that’s why we only got 2.

Today is a grey, rainy, depressing day. I really really hate fall, especially right now when we’re in the tail end of it; when the leaves are all off the trees and soggy brown muck on the ground and it’s cold enough to see your breath but there’s no snow. I love rain when everything’s green, but when everything’s brown, it just depresses me. Also, I just don’t get outside enough. I want to be outside, I just don’t know what to do out there.

Did you know that a serving of cashews (1/4 cup, which isn’t a lot) has 9g of protein? Learn something new every day. The chicken bowl steamery microwave thing I’m going to have for lunch is like, 18g of protein. My mom found an online protein calculator and she says I need 44g of protein per day. I’ve been doing some research of my own and I read that if a person is recovering from a surgery or an accident, they should actually DOUBLE their protein intake because their bodies are working extra hard to heal themselves.

My wound is almost healed and while my guts are swollen and unhappy, I can’t exactly heal them, so I say I should split the difference and that I should aim for 66g. There’s no way I can eat that much in a day without gaining a ton of weight and there’s also the puking thing to consider, but I can come close with the Isopure Plus (18g of protein) every day. I got Blake and Madison to try a little bit of the Alpine Punch flavour last week and Madison said it tasted like medicine and Blake just said he thought it was pretty good. I agree. The texture is a little weird and takes some getting used to (it’s more dense than water or juice) but after that it’s actually pretty good. Blake got me grape this time and everything I’ve read says that that one’s the best flavour so I guess I’ll see later tonight.

Even though Isopure Plus is designed to be easy on tummies, I find that if I drink it too quickly, I feel really really sick, so I have to drink it in little sips across a span of an hour or more. If it gets warm, I have to put it in the freezer to cool it back down, because it’s pretty gross when it’s room temperature.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the stuff.  I just wish it wasn’t so goddamn expensive.

Okay I think it’s time to go into my office where I can’t see the grey day, watch some bad movies OnDemand, eat my chicken bowl steamer thing and then work on this sketchbook. I got the sketchbook for the Limited Edition Sketchbook Project last week so the pressure’s on! My theme is “the last word ever spoken”. Hmmmm.

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!

So we didn’t go to Mother Mother. Saturday afternoon I threw up and I just didn’t feel up to going so we didn’t. I didn’t feel up to doing anything else, so we didn’t do that either. Then Sunday was completely uneventful. I basically sat in bed and read the entirety of Hyperbole & a Half. I’d read some of her blog posts before because people would link to them on Facebook and various other places but I’d never really checked out her site. This had me laughing so hard my guts hurt because y’know, they’re all out of place and stuff (click to enlarge):

Anyway, it wasn’t entirely a horrible way to spend a weekend. Arguably, Mother Mother would have been a good thing to do Saturday night but my logic was that A) I didn’t want to puke in public, B) I don’t particularly like the new album which I assumed they’d primarily be performing from, C) I didn’t want to take my 9pm meds in a dark club with a $5 glass of Coke (it would take me two, minimum, to get them all down) and D) I just flat out didn’t want to go.

Anyway, enough about that, it’s in the past. Let’s look at the present!

I took some more stupid “Scenes From the Bed” pictures today, some of which are pretty graphic and one of which Blake actually took because I don’t possess an ethereal body with which to take a picture above myself. Was that a tip off? That’s right kids! Today was Siske day and we took lots of new cheese pizza pics!

But first, here’s Blake being retarded with an extra medallion. These are the tubes that connect to my vac dressing and then connects to the vac machine.

Cute Lucky is cute.

This is my set up.
I think it’s all pretty self explanatory.
It’s not usually lit up this much but Siske needs the light to change my vac dressing.

Medical supplies all over the bed.

More medical supplies.
Siske likes to make a mess all over me.

This is my cheese pizza wound stewing in gauze soaked with acetic acid, which is basically vinegar.

I’m going to use a cut tag here for the squeamish.

(more…)

Death Threats and Hate Crimes, Attacks On Women Bloggers Escalating

There was a big surprise in my mailbox today!
Lots of Anne Rice books and Into the Wild on Blu-Ray!

Definitely watching the movie tonight while I paint and Blake’s at yoga!

Today was our last module for metabolic clinic, I am officially DONE!

I didn’t really lose any weight, I would be down a few lbs and a few inches from my waist and then I’d be back up and then down and then up and then down, but now I have the treadmill and eating is more on track than it’s been in a while so I’m positive about the experience and all that I’ve learned. If anyone is interested, I thought I might go over the modules and make them sort of into blog posts? Would anyone be interested in that? I think everything’s copyright the Ontario government and they’re not going to sue me for dispensing information, so it’s  totally doable and would probably help me to retain everything I’ve learned. Just an idea.

Right now I’m working and TRYING to listen to HugNation but the Ustream doesn’t seem to be working for me and that’s really really frustrating because the topic is “Staying positive in social media”, which I was actually looking forward to because I think that’s a lesson I could definitely use. This blog of mine is sort of a catch-all for every emotion I have, including the negative ones, and in the past year I’ve been trying to be more aware of the energy I put out into the world. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I haven’t (or at least I’ve been trying not to) been bitching about as much as I usually do over the past year and part of that is that my life is just more positive than it’s ever been, I think, but a lot of it is also not getting upset about every little thing and trying to live by the 3x rule. I mean, I have this amazing outlet where people actually listen to me and I’m going to basically feed my guests a steaming pile of shit? That’s not right. At least not all the time. My bad vibes from having a bad day could very easily affect YOUR day, I think, so I’ve been trying to have a better attitude both in life in general and in this blog. Halcyon of HugNation says, “You live the life you narrate,” so I asked myself one day what kind of life was *I* narrating and I realized it wasn’t a very good one, so I changed my tone. Whether anyone’s consciously realized that I’ve been doing this or not, the response has been positive. You get back what ya give out. I used to live my life believing in that principle and now that I am again, I’m wondering how I ever forgot it.

ANYWAY…

I got a box of stuff from Amazon today so I must be doing something right.
;o)

I am not going to yoga tonight because as I’ve explained before, work + metabolic clinic = too much to do in one day for me so I haven’t been going. I think the new session starts in 2 weeks and I’ll be starting again, as well as doing 30 minutes a day on the treadmill when I’m NOT ON THE RAG. That’s the rule. If I’m in pain, I don’t have to push myself or feel guilty for not doing it.

Speaking of pain and the treadmill, I haven’t been using it the last couple of days because of this:

That is my heel.
That is a giant blister that my shoe rubbed raw.
That is a giant blister that is now infected.

I planned on trying the treadmill barefoot when I was finished work today to see how that would go because wearing shoes and power walking is impossible, wearing shoes just for metabolic clinic today was really really painful. I have this antibiotic ointment that the doctor gave me a while back for my ingrown toenail that I’ve started putting on the blister but being on the foot, which I’m guessing is full of bacteria more so than other body parts, it’s not healing as quickly as I’d like. I want it to callus up so I can keep wearing my shoes, actually.

Annnnnnd speaking of shoes, Blake got me a pretty cool pair of pink Converse One Stars while he was in Militiagan that are going to be treadmill only, so I have two pairs of treadmill only shoes and can alternate depending on which ones are giving me blisters. Ideally eventually neither pair will give me blisters, but that is not the case at the moment.

Blake’s home with the groceries and I am STARVING so I’m going to stop writing this blog post and oversee the making of BLTs while I finish working. Busy busy day and I couldn’t sleep last night so I’m very very tired. Hopefully dinner will give me a second wind.

Happy Tuesday!

PS. I am 14 days smoke-free!

Remember when I asked people to e-mail me just so I know that they’re actually out there?

Well, some folks did.

And I asked if I could share their words, in the spirit of maybe encouraging myself, as well as others.

I dunno, to talk, to speak up, to post, to comment.

To know it’s okay.

So here’s the first one, from “Lurker Linda”.

————————— Original Message —————————-

Subject: The lurker Linda

From: nunya@goddamnbusiness.com

Date: Mon, January 17, 2011 12:59 pm

To: “Sunny Crittenden” <Sunny@SunnyCrittenden.com>

————————————————————————–

Ever feel like it’s too late to speak up? Kind of like you should have known someones name, but you are too embarrassed to ask it after the 5th meeting? That’s how I feel about your site. I have only made about 3 or 4 minor peeps in the decade I have been reading. I don’t have a livejournal account, and I think I may comment once in a while now, but in the past I was very guarded about what I put on the web. About anything. I had an early site experience where in the first three months of my blog (before the word existed) I had a stalker of sorts. It freaked me the fuck out and I shut it down and did not return to having an online presence until facebook in 2004. And I still share very little.

But all that aside- this is what kept me coming back over the years.

I adore Courtny Love and Hole.

I had a fucked up childhood glossed over by appearances.

I have had panic and anxiety attacks

I have had a vacation to the psych ward once or twice.

I spent years leaving my house as seldom as I could.

I have a husband and children.

A cat and a dog.

I like flowers and growing things.

And well, those topics have been many topics of your site. I relate to a lot of what you talk about. I was also fascinated by your cam way back when cams were portals linked on peoples sites. Probably pre-camgirls portals. My friend had a portal and your cam was there. What made me click on yours was you held up a sign that said “sunny” and you were smiling. Every other cam that day was a boring shot of someone staring at their computer. I was also very fascinated by your confidence with the photos you took of yourself. A confidence I did not have. You were the fist person I read who shared the difficult. And it was nice to be able to read what you have been through and relate. I was so not one for group therapy and shit. Therapy off and on…but you were a lot of that for me. My therapy. Reading your struggles…relating. I didn’t know anyone IRL or online who spoke as frankly as you did. Trying to purge my past from me and grow the best I could….you were doing the same thing. I have often said to my husband that I feel extremely weird knowing so much about you, and you not knowing me. Completely my fault.

But anyway. I think you are awesome. I’m happy for your little victories; I have concern when you are down. But I never felt qualified to say anything. I agree, it isn’t right after all this time to not say anything. So, I hope this brings you an understanding of the kind of lurker I accidentally became. .=)

Linda