Tastefully Odd Blog Entries

As I mentioned earlier, we finished painting our house this weekend thanks to lots of help from family.  Again, thanks to everyone for the help!  It was greatly appreciated and it was nice to visit as well.   I took some pictures last night of the result.  It feels like a brand new house! ^_^

Surgery’s over and I’m awake and feeling fine! Thanks for all the support!

Meant to write about this earlier, but oh well.  I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning.  Over the past year or so I’ve had about ten instances where stomach pain kept me up all night.  It’s hard to describe when I’m over a week removed from an incident, but the best way I can describe it is a constant bloated feeling like you have to burp or possibly vomit to relieve the pressure.  Neither one really helps although vomiting does relieve the pain for awhile.  These attacks were pretty unpredictable.  They’d happen after eating a large meal with fatty/greasy foods, but what caused an attack one night wouldn’t be a problem the week before or after.  I could never pin it down to any food or food groups.  And since I couldn’t describe the pain very well after the fact and didn’t know what foods were triggering it I felt I’d be wasting my time going to the doctor with such vague symptoms.

A few weeks ago I had another attack and decided since I had a week off when we were gapped for coverage at work I’d try to get to the bottom of this.  My doctor scheduled an ultrasound and found a gall stone 2cm in diameter, which explains my problems.  When I lie down to go to sleep, the gall stone will move around and there’s a chance it will block the bile duct.  If it gets lodged in there and my body’s still digesting some fatty/greasy food,  my bile duct will be trying to squeeze bile past the stone, causing pain in waves as it squeezes until the stone finally becomes dislodged and rolls back into the gall bladder.  The stone has to block the opening and the gall bladder has to be still trying to help digest some food for this to occur, hence I only had this problem occasionally.

So tomorrow morning I’m getting my gall bladder removed since the stone presents potential problems beyond the random nightly pain (which would probably just get worse) such as inflammation and infection if it gets stuck for a long time. Here’s looking forward to less pain and more sleep!

I thought we proved that cats hate technology.  Guess I was wrong.

We’ve painted over half of the house now and got new carpet in the great room.  It feels like a whole new house!  The down side is I’m exhausted after spending all weekend painting and working extra to make up 8 hours from last week.  And then I get to finish painting the rest of the house this weekend.  Ugh.  Looking forward to a relaxing game night at least!

O’Keefe’s “journalism” smelled like bullshit when I first heard about it last fall.  Glad to know I was right.