So…it’s been a bit. Normally I don’t really feel up to giving a drawn-out update of my life, because generally my life is boring and you all likely hear enough of my whining about my dissatisfaction with it every other post anyway. But I’ve dropped the ball on my monthly blog post goal for this year, and actually, there’s been a little bit of a reason this time—sort of the same reason as last year, when life was so overwhelming I couldn’t find the words or motivation to reach out, but this time, this exact afternoon…I need to take another opportunity to lay out the last few months and shake my head at them and wonder how it came to this, anyway.

There’s going to be some squicky medical talk and some facepalming, likely more on your end while I giggle weakly at my own follies, but if I’m going to pay nearly as much for surgery as I did for this website, then darn it, I’m going to journalize and no one can stop me.

It started in October, when I started having right shoulder pain and seeing some adverse bathroom reactions in my mornings. I had also been having intermittent upper right quadrant torso pain every few months for the past couple of years, but I’d always chalked that up to bad gas and suffered through the incidents (despite it feeling like the meat of my ribs was doing its best to crush my entire chest cavity inwards and it was hard to both breathe and think while it was happening). The shoulder pain, I treated by not picking up my niece as much and trying not to sleep on that side, and eventually it went away. The bathroom troubles, however, started to become more and more consistent, and more and more insistent. I had to pee all the time. Every morning I had a bowel movement that was kinda painful and loose. I thought it had something to do with my eating cereal, and did my best to stop doing that, switching to egg sandwiches and finally just granola bars. I knew I wasn’t eating the healthiest (especially when my morning routines took me out of the house earlier than usual for a while and I would eat fast food breakfast and lunch more often in a week than not), I knew I wasn’t exercising much, but I reckoned my issues were just a product of that and therefore manageable.

Around mid-March, I had a month-long period, and three abdominal pain attacks that lasted much longer and felt much more severe than before. I once again blamed gas, or my period, or my new medicines, but relented to parental insistence and at the end of April went to the doctor, feeling silly and like I was overreacting. Once I explained all of the issues to my doctor, several things happened:

• They drew about six vials of blood to run a wide number of tests. This was unexpected and freaked me out pretty badly, leading to a panic attack that got me sent home from work
• I got referred to a gynecologist, who put me on birth control again and sent me on my merry way (because, young folk with uteri, birth control helps protect against certain types of cancer in your uterus, cervix, and ovaries, and whether or not you’re sexually active, birth control is an important part of your health that you should consider along with yearly pap smears once you turn eighteen, and if you’re like me and you have a hormone disorder, they help even more with the regulation of that)
• I had two ultrasounds, one pelvic, one upper abdominal

The results of all of these tests and screenings came through after about two weeks: I had a fatty liver, I had a gallstone, I had a cyst (benign and probably the same one I had a couple years ago when I was first diagnosed with PCOS), and there was an unusual elevated value on my celiac disease panel that would require further investigation.

Phew.

Somehow, it’s almost as if knowing signaled to my body to immediately begin getting worse. Or maybe it was the stress of having all of that dumped on me at once. Suddenly I was scheduling a consultation with a surgeon, and being referred to a gastroenterologist, and on top of all this, work had decided to take on double the child load for summer camp and hire more teachers, putting me in charge of their training and of the summer camp program as a whole. The gallbladder surgery was scheduled, work tensions began running high the closer to the end of the school year it got, and I was sent home two more times from work for being unable to stay out of the bathroom for longer than an hour at a time at most. During that time, I decided to go ahead and start eating gluten-free in an effort to make myself feel somewhat better, I started trying to shift my eating habits to try and mitigate the damage to my liver, I began relying more and more on my new coworkers to take care of responsibilities I had always been capable of doing at work before, and I did my best to try and make it all work even though I was definitely feeling more stressed and burned out than I had in a long time.

The shift to gluten-free was what I was most emotional about. I felt incredibly stupid for being so upset about it, but, well, May is my birth month, after all, and I’ve had the gluten-free baked goods. I spent a good week before deciding to cut out gluten going on something of a tour of my favorite gluten-rich foods: fried chicken from Popeyes, hamburgers on buns, double chocolate muffins, cookie cake, and my absolute favorite, sugar cookies from The Great American Cookie Company. There were still a lot of things I missed—Domino’s pan pizza, and Blue Bell cookie dough ice cream, and homemade chocolate chip cookies, and Nashville chicken made with real panko breadcrumbs—but I was trying to eat healthier, too, not just gluten-free. I’m pretty sure I annoyed my entire family with my moping, and my best friend who has a sister with celiac disease was doing her best to be peppy and show that I had some pretty good alternatives available to me, but on top of everything else that was going on, I was hungry all the time and unable to keep out of the bathroom for long no matter what I ate and overall I was feeling pretty justified in my little pity party.

Last week was my birthday. I had the leftovers of a gluten-free cake that my best friends had made for me a couple of days before (covered in sprinkles), a gluten-free version of one of my favorite chicken dishes that wasn’t half bad, and Mom attempted to make me some edible cookie dough to put in some ice cream (fun fact: protein flour made from beans tastes fine in savory dishes, but is not great for making sweets; all the love and sugar in the world can’t mask that flavor).

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Three days later, I went in for my first surgery ever, feeling nervous but overall ready to have this troublesome marble sack out of me already. The surgery went well, I only threw up from the anesthesia once and it was in the parking lot and not on anything or anyone important, and soon I was bundled up in bed sleeping it off and feeling pretty much exactly how you would expect if you had four stab wounds and a missing non-essential organ and, oh yeah, you started your period the same day as the surgery and boy, was it a doozy.

As it turns out, my bed was too high for me to get in and out of comfortably the first few days, and my plastic waterproof bandages started to seep from the strain. So I swapped to sleeping on the couch. Earlier in the year, I had bought a $400 gaming chair and a much cheaper desk because I was tired of back pain from sitting in my bed or in a disk chair to type and do my work; this chair, already my best friend, became the love of my life during the early recovery days (and still is, at this exact moment. If you’re going to splurge on any one piece of furniture, my friends, do it for the one that’s going to be supporting your back and butt for hours at a time). I tottered around to prevent blood clots and to clear out phlegm and fluid from my chest (one day maybe we’ll have a more elegant solution for breathing during surgery other than “stick a tube down there”, because trying to cough after an abdominal surgery is pure hell). And just this morning, I had my first appointment with the gastroenterologist.

This was the appointment that I had been dreading and anticipating the most. I have an advantage when it comes to adjusting to gluten-free eating in the form of my sister-in-law, living with us for well over a year now, who has a gluten allergy and already had us shifting our diet around slightly as a family to accommodate her more. Truthfully, I hadn’t been noticing much of a relief from my bathroom problems by switching to gluten free eating before the gallbladder came out, and afterwards, I was a bit nervous to try gluten again until after this appointment. I didn’t know what to expect or what to do to prepare for it.

As it turns out, what I should have been doing this entire time was eating gluten as normal (or at least healthier than normal, given my liver).

I’ll give you all a moment to recover from your stinging foreheads from slapping them and your busted guts from laughing, because like many moments in life, it’s either laugh or cry.

I’m going to have to go in for a biopsy to check out how my innards are reacting. But in order for them to ascertain if there’s a problem with me eating gluten, I have to…you know…be eating gluten. Causing problems on purpose. It’s entirely possible that my bathroom troubles and my elevated celiac panel were both related to my gallbladder, but for the next month, I’m back to eating gluten, just to make absolutely doubly sure. I’m also sure that if I had been eating gluten normally for the past month, I would not have to wait nearly as long for this biopsy. So my upcoming month is about to look like this: either I’m about to return to work in a couple of weeks still feeling bad and needing accommodation during a time when I really need to be independent and, y’know, capable of staying out of the bathroom, or I’m about to feel just fine and have the biopsy just to make absolutely sure everything’s alright and have a less fun Fourth of July weekend than normal.

It’s funny, sometimes, how the things we do thinking we’re helping ourselves out turn out to be shooting ourselves directly in the foot instead.

Meanwhile, I’m happily going back to eating sandwiches, and I have some real cookie dough ice cream and a yummy cupcake just waiting for me to properly celebrate myself and my well-meaning idiocy. After I take a nap, because I am still in recovery, and it’s been an exciting sort of day, after all.