I Will Not Suffer In Silence

Okay this is driving me nuts. I am constantly behind at updating about my condition, and it’s only hurting ME when I cannot track things in a timely fashion!

I have been in a relationship for seven months, so the whole “new relationship energy” should have died down a bit in order for me to get back to taking care of my blogging and whatnot…but it hasn’t died down. I mean, it’s good that the energy hasn’t died down, but I need to FOCUS! lol

Back in August, my doctor got back to me and reluctantly told me to stop taking 600mg/day of Gabapentin because of the side effects I was getting. So I went down to 500mg/day and stayed there until I felt comfortable increasing, again.

It wasn’t until October that I felt comfortable, so I increased to 600mg/day again. I’ve stayed at that dose for 13 days, though after this latest round of endo pain, I’m ready to continue increasing dosage!
Then again…I did have a terrible migraine today, which made me seriously light sensitive and nauseous.
One of the side effects of increasing Gabapentin last time was a bad headache, so I will wait at least another day before continuing the dosage increase.

This month, I finally began seeing a physical therapist for the latest diagnosis: Pelvic Floor Dysfunction. I received this diagnosis back on August 7th from a doctor who refers out to physical therapy. I was told that this diagnosis is NOT to replace Endometriosis or Dyspareunia. I was told I ALSO have Pelvic Floor Dysfunction ON TOP of the other two diagnoses. This is why I came home and sobbed back on August 7th.

Going to the physical therapist only confirmed what the referral doctor suspected. The first appointment was on October 1st. I told my story to Dr. Hale. She wanted to know as much detail as possible about my pain and cycles, what worked and what didn’t, what surgeries I’ve had, what meds… everything going back to age 14.
Afterwards, she said based upon my case history, and knowing I was so close to my next cycle, she would not perform an internal exam. Instead, I was hooked up to a biofeedback machine (with electrodes attached to my pelvic area and labia) and was instructed to bear down, then relax several times. It was very hard to relax the region at all, and it showed on the monitor. Tensing my muscles set off mild cramps, but I was able to get home without dying. The next day, george showed up.

For the second physical therapy appointment on October 17, my girlfriend drove me, as I was unsure about the amount of work to be done.
This time, an internal exam was done, but very lightly, as Dr. Hale could tell how intensely tight my pelvic region is. She winced several times and said she felt very bad for me. At first, I wanted to say, “Oh, it’s not that bad”, but I held back. She’s the doctor – she knows this is bad news. Me? I’ve just developed ways to cope with it all these years, and this is SO FAR FROM BEARABLE PAIN. So very far. Dr. Hale assured me of that.
Despite the lightness of her internal examination, I cried out in pain a few times. Again, I felt like a wuss for doing so, and was reminded that I am in no way a wuss, that my condition is severe! She told me, “You and I are going to be friends for a long while.”

I came away from that appointment with a directive to NEVER cross my legs again; something that is SO DIFFICULT to break!
I was also told that I must NOT sit like a lady anymore. I have to sit with my knees far apart, and I have to sit my pelvic area downwards, bearing down. This means I have to sit up straight.

I must also do exercises a few times a day for a couple of minutes each time.

So. My third physical therapy appointment is going to be this Wednesday. Unfortunately, most of the pain from my current flare will be tapering off by that point. She had wanted to catch me in a pain flare. But I cannot get in to see her any sooner due to work obligations already in place.

The goal of physical therapy is to retrain the pelvic floor and hopefully also end up mitigating the pain of endometriosis, and cease the pain of dyspareunia.

We shall see what happens.

On the medication front, I have hopefully ended the battle this month with Kaiser doctors refusing to refill more than 15 pills of Norco at a time for me. After going round and round between multiple doctors, I was finally granted 30 pills at the beginning of October’s pain flare.

I have 14 and a half left as of tonight. This will definitely see me through this pain flare and November’s. So the next medication battle isn’t until end of November so I’m prepared for December.

I made it through work today! It took 1,200mg Ibuprofen and half a muscle relaxer (the back/neck are still locking up, but not all the time), but I made it! YAY!

And then I took my husband out to sushi dinner, cuz today’s his birthday! The owners made him a special dish:

Now that the endo flare is over, I’m golden until the end of the month. Gotta be strong and adhere to the goals:

• Go sugar-free again.
• Do a better job from abstaining from alcohol again.
• Be serious about gluten-free baking at home, so I cut down on processed foods.
• Start biking to work every day again.
• Keep posting more positive entries – what I can do, as opposed to what my limitations are – and post between cycles, as opposed to during or right after an endo flare.

I have a few additional goals:

• See if I can manifest the idea I had recently to gift fellow endo sisters, to share positivity and love.
• Make a video update on how my life has been since surgery in December, 2010.
• Finish editing and then upload two more humourous videos I’d done in the past year or so.

Holy Moly, how did we roll into another year already?!?

Rather than chronicling all the bad stuff, let’s catch you up on some good things:

My uptime (no endo pain) began on December 14, and continued for 15 days!
December 22 was the last day of work for the winter break, and I got to spend good quality time with my husband and our local friends. I don’t normally celebrate winter holidays with family, because I live clear across the country from them, but I did get to talk to my family by phone. I even got to attend a party with my Michigan friends via Skype!

 
Giftmas, as I call it, was happily low-key. I am quite loved by my students and workplace, as there were a great many gift cards, hand-made gifts, and other wonders! From the gift cards, I received a bounty of new books to read. My husband got me a digital EMF detector, because I like to ghost-hunt, and because I’m also sensitive to EMF, so reducing it or avoiding it early and often is key for my well-being!

We spent Dec. 25 at a friend’s house; they are like family, so it is a relaxing, cozy environment. We went dancing on Dec. 26, and for New Year’s Eve, we went to two local bars to celebrate with friends and acquaintances.

 
My husband and I also watched a lot of Rome – an HBO miniseries. Our friend loaned it to us on DVD and we’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. I’m a bit of a history nerd, so we’ve been watching the series with the historical captions function activated. :)

During the endo uptime…actually from day 1 of the endo uptime…the discs in my neck pinched a nerve, and I have been dealing with that since December 14. It was the second time in a month that the discs pinched on a nerve in my neck; the same happened back on November 20, but the pain only lasted 3 days before righting itself. The pain this time was so bad for so long, that I missed 3 days of work. I spent all of winter break moderately to heavily medicated on muscle relaxers, Tylenol 3 and Advil. The doctor wants to do cortisone injections, which I put on hold until I got the results back from allergy patch tests to see if I have a sensitivity to cortisoids (I don’t, according to the patch test). My Ma had a really bad experience with cortisone treatment, and she and I are both highly allergic to penicillin. Because I share similar allergies to hers, I wanted to be tested before undergoing further treatment.

The joke during this time was that although I had pain, it was nothing compared to the endo pain!!

Excerpt from Facebook:
Definition of stubborn: driving self to doctor & errands on Tylenol 3 & Soma (pinched nerve is worse after trying new neck pillow). HEY, this is nothing compared to endometriosis pain! lulz
-December 30, 2011 at 1:05pm

I’d love to have muscle relaxers for each endo flare, too, but A) they’re addictive and B) they make me fat and depressed, so I usually steer clear of muscle relaxers unless the discs act up.

Of course, now that I’m cleared for cortisone injections, my neck decided to ease up! It was the longest period of time that I can recall pinched nerve activity. It was pretty brutal.

On Dec. 26 and Dec. 31, I wore eyeliner when I went out with friends, but for some reason, my eye hated the same eyeliner on NYE. Two days later – that’s today – I developed pink eye. It’s the SIXTH TIME since October 3, 2011 that I’ve had pink eye, all of which started around the time I began using Maybelline Great Lash mascara. I got a chemical and environmental allergy panel done at the end of December, and it did come back as suspect for sensitivity/allergy to cosmetics ingredients. I say suspect, because one doctor said YES it’s positive, and one doctor and one nurse said NO, it’s inconclusive. Damned doctors. No, of course there was no blood test – only skin patch test.

 
So although I’ve been sick with one thing or another throughout December, I am still happy to report 16 days of consecutive uptime between menstrual cycles. There is positivity in there, I swear!

I also went to the dispensary during winter break, which has become famous overnight, as it’s now part of a television series called Weed Wars. I re-signed up for acupuncture, reiki, chiropractic, yoga and the alexander technique. Most of these services are now experiencing a 3 month wait due to recent fame for the dispensary, and of course it’s wall-to-wall people at all hours, now. I’m really happy for the dispensary, and also feeling a bit selfish for wanting services sooner. ;)

I will finish my New Year’s entry with a list of goals for 2012:

• Go sugar-free again.
• Do a better job from abstaining from alcohol again (I know, that few-times-a-week glass of wine is awesome tasting and relaxing, but may not be doing your cramps any good!)
• Be serious about gluten-free baking at home, so I cut down on processed foods.
• Start biking to work every day again.
• Start posting more positive entries – what I can do, as opposed to what my limitations are. It doesn’t have to be one or the other, but just not all negative chronicling all the time.
• See if I can manifest the idea I had recently to gift fellow endo sisters, to share positivity and love.

The last day of george was February 13. There had been nearly no bleeding overnight from the 12th to the 13th, and then the cramps and bleeding ramped up by 9:30am.
I still went out of the house despite the pain, and an acquaintance helped me return the rental car I’d gotten for the weekend seminar. I came home and took a whole Tylenol 3. The pain radiated down the inner side of my thighs almost to my knees. I was nauseous. The pain reached 7.5 on the pain scale.

This of course proved to be the “last gasp” as we call it – the bleeding and pain abated by late afternoon and then I spotted on the 14th and 15th.

The good news of the February menstrual cycle is that I was not bedridden at all!
The bad news of the February menstrual cycle is that had the pain struck me on a week day as opposed to the weekend, I still would have missed two days of work, because the pain was above a 6 on the pain scale and required narcotic medication to treat.

Eight days later, like clockwork, mittelschmerz (mid-cycle pain, a.k.a. ovulation) occurred and lasted for two days. The symptoms consisted of sharp, intermittent stabbing pain in the uterus and left ovary (that damned left ovary!!!), which lasted for hours. On February 22, I took half a Tylenol 3 before bed. On February 23, I took 600mg of Ibuprofen before bed. The pain lessened but was still present (less stabby) on February 24 (today). It’s difficult for me to know if the pain would have been less sharp, because on February 21 and 22, I was intimate with my husband (funny how ovulation and an increase in libido happen at the same time, huh? ;). It could be the dyspareunia OR the mittelschmerz OR both. I’m special that way.

So the bad news is:

• The pain still got to 7.5 on the pain scale, which is unacceptable.
• I continue to have mittelschmerz.
• I continue to have dyspareunia.

Still, I am excited about what promise the March menstrual cycle holds. Each month my body recovers from surgery means hope that the really bad pain has been ameliorated by surgery. Hope is strong. Only at six months post-op am I allowed to throw in the towel with the hope that surgery worked. I am fully aware of the statistics of actual pain relief amongst endometriosis sufferers with surgery, and by that I mean I know full well that our numbers are low. But I am not one to give up so easily.

I am hoping with this next paycheck on February 26th that I can start up the acupuncture and massage treatments again. My masseuse also has endometriosis. She got a hysterectomy and had no relief even after that! She went to massage school and also had massage therapy on herself. What ultimately helped to relieve her pain was PUSH therapy. My masseuse is certified in Swedish massage, acupressure, Shiatsu, sports massage, deep tissue massage, reflexology, Dynamic Reposturing, and PUSH Therapy.

I also need to get back on the bicycle again. I’ve been a weather wuss, which is hilarious because when I lived in Michigan, I bicycled in 48°F weather all the time. The rain is another issue, I have never liked to bicycle in the rain.

Challenges to continue working on: omit alcohol, sugar and chocolate intake entirely.

Today I woke feeling exhausted, but had very little pain in the pelvis and lower back. I went to work and made it 3 minutes before the start of my shift, still feeling like I’d be better off back in my bed.

Once I got to work, the uterine pain returned, but it wasn’t debilitating. The pain remained at a 4 on the pain scale for the entire day, and even at this moment, it’s still about a 4.

I took 600mg of Advil liqui-gels at some point today, perhaps around 11am, because the pain was downright annoying. The Advil of course made me even more tired, but I still had to get through the lunch rush from 11:30am – 1:15pm whereby I first monitor children aged 3-5 eating lunch, ensuring they clean up after themselves, and releasing them to the play yard after they’ve finished. I then scan the play yard of up to 50 children romping and screaming at recess (I’m one of 5-6 adults out there at that time), dashing to and fro to stop arguments, stop children from crashing the trikes into each other and/or inanimate objects, and ensuring ground rules of the playground are followed.

The pain spiked to 5.5 a couple of times during recess because of all the darting around and bending over I have to do when interacting with young children.

At my lunch break at 1:15pm, I felt as though I’d fall face first into my food, I was so tired. But I had to eat because I still had to get through afternoon class with the kids.

When I finally got home around 4pm, I crashed on the couch immediately and slept for an hour. I only woke because my upper back was hurting, but I was too stubborn to change into my pajamas and crawl into bed. I knew if I got into bed, I’d be there for the rest of the day.
Of course, since waking from my nap an hour and a half ago, I’ve done pretty much nothing but stare blankly at things. I motivated myself to the storage unit at the back of the house to retrieve the heater fan, because our furnace pilot light is out again. Just weeding through the storage unit and hefting down a 2-foot tall heater fan is all it took to wear me out again.

Welcome to my life with endometriosis. The fatigue right before, during and after menses is ALWAYS like this. For some women with endometriosis, the fatigue is like this 24/7.

If I can muster any energy at all, I may start work on a new video blog – it’s been 6 months since my last video.

I have just over 3 weeks until bedridden time strikes again. Let’s see how many days in the next 3 weeks are actually pain-free before I’m bedridden and taking time off work again.

In September, I had a total of 8 pain-free days, and they weren’t consecutive.

Tomorrow I have an appointment with my masseuse, to get me on a regular massage plan for pain management, and I’ve also talked with a friend of mine tonight to see if she’ll practice on me, since she’s done massage school, too. Got an appointment with her this coming Sunday. :)

Other things on the pain management horizon: another liver/kidney one-month detox program and Chi Nei Tsang sessions, joining a gym again, recommitting to yoga and Qigong again, getting that menu book together I’ve been promising myself for years (culling from gluten-free recipes, yeast free recipes, sugar free/corn syrup free recipes, the endometriosis diet, etc).

As I get older, the pain will only get worse. If it’s not endometriosis, it’s the osteoarthritis. I must stay on top of this and continue to prove to myself and others that I’m doing everything I can outside of surgery and hormones to fight the pain.

Back on January 1, 2009, I made a list of things I wanted to do this year. I’m checking in today to see how far I’ve come.

This year, I will:
Become more of an advocate for Endometriosis awareness and humane treatment for those of us who suffer from it.

Put my life’s worth (1985 – present day) of diary entries about my chronic Endometriosis-related pain all in one place (this website!) (Well, I have a complete upload from 2006 onwards, but at least it’s all in one place now. I’m still putting up entries from further back when I have time).

Travel to the U.K. for the first time.

Buy Obtain my first ever kitchen table (our neighbor gave it to us yesterday!)

• Finally stop consuming alcoholic beverages because I know it will kill me based upon the medical condition that I have, and it’s time I started loving my innards every minute of every day instead of cursing myself for an illness I was born with
• Learn and practice yoga
• Live my first year of many decades under the new title of WIFE to my superhero (it’s not been a full year yet ;)
• Re-read every book I have on Tibetan Buddhism, and seek out more, because that more than any other belief system still really speaks to me 14 years after I found it
• Begin pardoning people who have incurred my wrath in years past (I’m not talking about small tiffs here, I’m talking full on silent treatment for years or decades) (still working on that, making surreptitious overtones)
• Generally start to practice true forgiveness on a grand scale

Heh, I didn’t realise I was going in order til I checked back in on my list. Weird. Level of difficulty was pre-arranged, I guess. ;)

Well I guess I prefer one thing following another rather than having it all at once!

TMI to follow, may be triggering…

Between January 31 and February 3, I got over the cold virus that was plaguing me. And then that allowed my body to start in with the premenstrual stuff.

Since about February 5, I have felt like I was developing a urinary tract infection, and overnight, I got a pea-sized bump on my right outer vulva. I’ve also been experiencing the worst anal shooting pains in probably ever.
It got to the point on Friday night while I was at a Taiko drumming show that I thought I’d need to leave and go directly to the emergency room. My entire abdominal region extending into my pelvic region felt bloated and inflamed, and it felt like someone was intermittently shoving what can probably be described as a splintered broomstick up my ass, plunging, then pulling it back out again. Dear gods. On several occasions, I gasped and elevated out of my chair. Same thing on the drive back home. I took medication when I got home.
The next morning, I was feeling better. The bump on my vulva even went down significantly. I had only a few moderate anal pain instances on Saturday, which can be described as someone shoving a safety pin into my anus. The pain was over much quicker.

Now, the first thing I think of when I get such pain is, what have I been eating or doing differently?
I have not had a drop of alcoholic beverage since January 1…but in the past week, I’ve added dried apricots to my diet, and I’ve been chowing down on gluten-free chocolate chip cookies out of PMS cravings. In the past week, I began drinking skullcap tea once a night before bed because it’s a calming agent (I’ve had a lot of self-induced anxiety over the past couple of weeks, centered around self-manufactured blogging deadlines).

I looked at the ingredients on the gluten-free cookies – they’re safe.

I looked up apricot allergy and found this webpage, which helped me a lot. Parts of the second paragraph really applied to me. It says, “Symptoms are more severe including generalised urticaria, abdominal pain…Individuals with apricot allergy also tend to develop adverse reactions to other fruits including peach, apple, cherry, plum, and nuts (such as hazelnut and walnut).”
Fascinating…I cannot eat the skin of apples or peaches without feeling like my intestines and asshole are being ripped apart. Now I know it’s all tied as an allergy. I don’t normally eat cherries or plums, so I can’t comment on whether I have a reaction to those. I haven’t paid attention to whether I have a similar reaction when I eat hazelnuts and walnuts, so now I can pay attention to that.

I looked up skullcap, and while I found that it won’t give me any abdominal or intestinal side effects, the webpage I found did go a long way in explaining why my anxiety was increasing rather than decreasing. I’ve been using the max dosage for my tea (30 drops of tincture) instead of the minimum (15 drops). So I’ll scale back on that and see if I notice any results.

With my thoughts on the apricots, on Friday, I phoned up my allergist and requested to go forward with the endoscopy that he wanted me to do last year. He wanted me to do this because he felt the blood test for celiac was not enough to go on, and he wanted a better test to rule out celiac. He really thinks I have it. I have not wanted to do the endoscopy out of fear, but now I feel that it is time I do this, to get definitive diagnoses ruled in or out. I spoke with the nurses there and they told me that peaches were tested for but not apricots, and the peach panel turned out negative for allergies. The doctor is to call me back this week and we’ll go over what all needs to be done in preparation for an accurate endoscopy reading.

In keeping with my ever-expanding goals for 2009, I am also trying to locate a rheumatologist so I can get my osteoarthritis looked at again, and rule out whether it’s rheumatoid arthritis or just osteoarthritis. This could be an important distinction, because of the fact that I have other immunological problems (endometriosis, allergies, spontaneous onset of acute pancreatitis at age 21).
I would also like to know definitively whether osteoarthritis is also considered an immunological disease like rheumatoid arthritis is.

I have osteoarthritis in my cervical spine, with bulging discs at C5 and C6. I thought this was from the car accident in 1994 but it may be that I’ve had degeneration since childhood. I definitely have osteoarthritis in my knees for example, and I had to have doctors notes exusing me from certain activities in gym class all my life. It’s possible that the car accident severely exacerbated the osteoarthritis and that’s why I now have bulging discs.

I also recently found out that I have osteoarthritis in my thoracic spine! I was looking back through all of my medical reports through the years and found a report from my chiropractor. In that report, it is noted that I have a diagnosis of Hyperlordosis and mild levoscoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Okay, I’ve known this since I was about 12 years old, and my family never had the money to fix it. And several of my aunts, as well as my maternal grandma also have/had this.

But the real kicker of this report was what I found at the bottom of the report: I also have osteoarthritis in the thoracic spince, from T6 – T8. I don’t recall this ever being properly explained to me. I’ve always focused on my neck injury. This totally explains the out-of-alignment bump on the spine that I have in my mid-back, which my husband likes to play with, because he finds it so weird-feeling. ;)

Now I wonder, did having this out-of-whack thoracic vertebrae CAUSE my acute pancreatitis when I was 21 years old? Hmmmm.

Anyway, to wrap up, the more immediate issue had been the abdominal/pelvic/anal inflamation and pain. I’ve not eaten any apricots since Friday, and the pain hasn’t been a problem at all today. Hopefully my system will get back on track in the anal region before the pain really sets in within the pelvic region by Saturday.

With all the pain in the past week, I was really depressed. The depression was already setting in the week prior – it’s my annual winter blahs, which always hit pretty badly by February. The pain just made the depression REALLY BAD for a few days. I hope I’m coming out of it, cuz I really need to be emotionally strong in the next week to be able to battle the endometriosis pain – and the fact that I’ll be bedridden for days again.

Happy New Year!

Today we slept in til 11:30am, got up, ate smoked salmon w/ cream cheese (B had his w/ baguette, I had mine w/ rice crackers), drank mimosas and also had some Peerless pumpkin spice coffee, and we watched Gonzo.

This year, I will:

• Become more of an advocate for Endometriosis awareness and humane treatment for those of us who suffer from it
• Put my life’s worth (1985 – present day) of diary entries about my chronic Endometriosis-related pain all in one place publicly on the Internet
• Travel to the U.K. for the first time
• Buy my first ever kitchen table
• Finally stop consuming alcoholic beverages because I know it will kill me based upon the medical condition that I have, and it’s time I started loving my innards every minute of every day instead of cursing myself for an illness I was born with
• Learn and practice yoga
• Live my first year of many decades under the new title of WIFE to my superhero
• Re-read every book I have on Tibetan Buddhism, and seek out more, because that more than any other belief system still really speaks to me 14 years after I found it
• Begin pardoning people who have incurred my wrath in years past (I’m not talking about small tiffs here, I’m talking full on silent treatment for years or decades)
• Generally start to practice true forgiveness on a grand scale

And I’d also like to quote my friend. This is second-hand as I do not recall the words as they were spoken last night, but Damion says that Chase said something last night that is so full of awesome, that I shall put it as my signature file in email…

“Let’s not hope for a better year, let’s MAKE a better year.” – Chase Worthington

Love and hugs and all that mushy crap,
steph

The pain is gone!
I’m free until January 22nd!

I had wanted so badly to go to a club last night, and I’d woken up feeling good. But by late morning, after a walk just two blocks away to the tea house for a scone, the pain kicked in again before I could walk back home. I took a Tylenol 3 and felt that it wasn’t going to do much good at the half hour point, when the bleeding ramped up again, and so I took another. I’m glad I did. I was able to drool through the worst of it.

The pain lasted through the evening, so I made a last minute decision to stay home. Determined to at least LOOK good on NYE, I did my makeup and hair. ;)

My man really wanted to go out for sushi last night, but I was in pain, so I waited it out til I had a lull in the pain, then we went to dinner around 7:30pm and I was armed with my drugs in case. We walked there – it was about three blocks, and to my surprise, the pelvic pain wasn’t bad at all!

We disappointed some friends who had wanted to come over on NYE cuz I’d told them I was going to be at the club, and then ended up having to stay home anyway due to the pain. So they had made other plans but y’know people, at least you MADE OTHER PLANS, wtf, leave your guilting outta this, sheesh.

We did have two friends who were happy that we stayed home cuz they wanted to avoid trekking into the city (massive traffic/public transit nightmare going into SF on holidays and special event days, not to mention all the drunken assholes – we call it “amateur night”).

So our two friends came over and we played card games and watched a comedy about zombies called Fido (I want to own that movie, it’s hilarious! If you liked Shaun of the Dead, you’ll like Fido).

About a quarter to midnight, some rambunctious people started screaming and letting off fireworks outside, so we stopped the movie and went outside to inform them of the time. ;)

At midnight, we cracked open glowstick bracelets/necklaces and got silly with them, and also lit sparklers. I was SO excited cuz I was no longer in pain! I had all this energy, so I convinced everyone to walk down to the beach – it’s a half a mile walk through the neighborhood, across a main road, through the shopping center, across the shoreline road and there you are. To our surprise, there were fireworks going off in San Francisco, and it was a very clear night, so we got a spectacular view! We caught the tail end of the fireworks, and pledged to go to the navy base next year to get a good view of the city to see the fireworks. Hopefully there’ll be no fog next year and it will be as clear again as it was last night!

My friend posted silly pictures of us on his flickr site. My man is the tough guy in the leather jacket and I’m the one with glowsticks as antennae, as well as the glow stick shoved through my ear – yes, my earring hole IS that big to fit a glowstick through.

So yes, lotsa fun and I’m super happy to be pain free for the next 21 days til the bastard comes ’round again! I spent my renewed energy today to finish cleaning house and run errands, and my man and I had a meeting over wedding venues. I need to get back on my exercise routine for this month, too.

In 2008, may I continue to find happiness and excitement to enjoy my pain-free days. I spent too many years bitter on my good days because I can’t be pain free all the time, and it just lends towards further misery. May I be strong and positive and happy and silly in my pain-free moments, hours or days when the pain is absent!

Just wanted to check in with my goals I had set back on November 13th:

• No more sugar – still holding steady with occasional mild slipups
• No more alcohol – initially failed; got REALLY drunk on wine the weekend after turkey day. Been really good since then though – only had a little bit of sake last night.
• Keep taking the Chinese herbs (as discussed back on November 5th) – holding steady
• Read more about the pH Balancing that someone on the DailyStrength Endo forum told me about – checked out books, reading them
• Check the West End library for the Budwig Diet books that my friend’s brother told me about, and purchase books from Amazon if the libraries in town don’t have them – neither library had the books but I still haven’t ordered them from Amazon.
• Keep doing acupuncture – did that today
• Borrow pilates for beginners yoga videos from the library or from friends – haven’t done that yet
• Keep assembling my personal recipe book based upon all my dietary restrictions (gluten-free, yeast-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, protein-rich) – haven’t been working on that

Okay, so what I still need to work on…

I need to order the Budwig Diet books that my friend’s brother told me about.

I need to borrow pilates for beginners yoga videos from the library or from friends.

I need to keep assembling my personal recipe book based upon all my dietary restrictions (gluten-free, yeast-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, protein-rich).

And now, results!
I have continued to take the Chinese herbal pills since my last cycle, and what I noticed this time around is that the blood at the beginning of my cycle was not brown. Yes, normally for me, I get the old dirty brown blood at the start AND at the end of the cycle. I didn’t have that this time. And the blood looks MUCH brighter, too.
There’s still a lot of blood, and the pain this time around feels deeper and worse than it has in the past few months. I am not seeing very many clots – those I do see are very small. So I want to say that the herbs are slowly doing their thing – “Decongest the blood mansion” ;)

The other thing I just tried is acupuncture. I’ve used this several times before for the back pain, but this is the first time I’ve done this for george. Wouldn’t you know it though, my shoulders and neck felt left out so they had to get all kinked in my sleep last night. >:(
So I saw Dr. Yan today mainly for george and secondly for the neck/shoulders.
I laid flat on my back on the table because it was too painful to lay on my side.
The acupuncturist used cupping – 3 cups across my abdomen, and he used the needles; two in each calf and one in each inner ankle. He used the electricity on two of the needles in my legs.
The pain went COMPLETELY away while I was in the doctor’s office. It was a slice of heaven!
As soon as the treatment was over though, the pain everywhere started to come back. When I got home, pain was just as bad again as it had been, so I was about to take more Tylenol 3 but before I could reach for it, the pain went away again, AND I had all kinds of energy! It was seriously manic energy. I used the time I had to carefully do two loads of laundry, scoop the catbox and take out the trash, and do dishes. I tried to be as slow and methodical as I could, but my heart and brain were racing. I’m blaming that energy on the acupuncture cuz I NEVER have this during my period.
But alas, I think I did too much. ;) And the pain set in again enough that I needed more Tylenol 3.

The Tylenol 3 has not been able to knock me out, although it did help to relieve pain.
I’ve been quite productive insofar as researching more endo stuff in general for myself, and reading the pH Balance books I got from the library.

But now it’s after midnight, so I should get some sleep.