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Health update

This has been a long week in the health department. Since I boobooed my stoma, it has been acting up a bit. Tuesday I had to leave work. It just isn’t worth it to try to get naked in a public restroom thank you very much. But, it took me two hours to get a cab home, meanwhile the stoma is oozing and leaking and I’m trying to pack it with paper towels. Oh what fun.

It continued to do that during the night, so I stayed home the next day. I worked – actually I worked 12 hours that day – but I also had two more leaks before things started behaving. If I had gone to work, I’d have wasted all that time in the middle of the day trying to get home. Still, I think work is losing patience with all my medical crap. And that’s okay. I’m losing patience with having to freelance again in order to afford to pay my basic bills. I have this sense that things are about to change.

The other thing is that I’ve been so tired this week. But, it’s hard to argue to a doctor that this fatigue isn’t normal when you’re working a day job, a night job and doing HPS stuff. I just don’t have the stamina to freelance and work full time anymore – but until my pay changes I don’t have a choice.

Next week is NIH. I feel like every time I go to NIH I scoot in there on the verge of complete exhaustion. I worry that I’m so excited to be there, that the staff might start to think there’s something psychologically wrong with me – that I just like being the hospital too much. But, to be honest, while I can think of other ways I might rather spend my vacation time, it’s one place I can go where I truly get away from it all. I can be sick at home and the office still needs attention, but when I’m at NIH suddenly it’s as if everyone gets it.

At the same time, I’m hauling a number of things to NIH for work. I’ve also got a long list of other things I want to get done while I’m there that I don’t have time to do at home. I probably actually have more to try to accomplish next week than I would if I was at home. Grin – but hey, I don’t have to cook! No dishes!

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