Oct 27, 2009

Behcet's?!

THAT'S MY GALL BLADDER! Isn't it cute? That little blue thing right there on the left, that looks like an itty bitty robin's egg.

So school started...about two months ago. And a lot can change in two months. I got my appendix out. That was a fantastical week. I thought that would be my big news for the semester, really.

It wasn't. At all. But I got all these cool pictures from my surgeon.
You can click on them to see my purple, broken appendix in all its ruptured glory.

More pictures can be found in my Facebook album "In bun mode," which really just refers to the state of wearing a hair bun. In any case, my appendix did, in fact, rupture, but I was at the hospital already, and the operation was quick and easy. The whole ordeal was painful, but the surgery was cool, as always. FUN GAME: Try to stay awake as long as you can when they administer the anesthetics. [You always lose, but as a result, you always win.]

I also have three new scars because the operation was done...lapriscopically? Is that the right word? Something like that. They healed up pretty quickly too.

Then! In the midst of H1N1 sweeping the Allegheny College campus, of course I get something else, something totally weird and unexplainable. It started as a sore throat, which turned into lesions in my throat, which led to general inability to swallow, pee, or go to classness, to put it briefly. Then my eyes got super-inflammed and started to hurt. Then the swelling.

So you know what they diagnose me with? Herpes.

HERPES.

You just don’t tell someone they have herpes without being sure. You just don’t. Especially to a young woman with her whole life ahead of her, arguably. So for two days, I had herpes, and all the requisite emotional rollercoaster jerks of being diagnosed with an STD: the horror, the hopelessness, the regret, the confusion, the feeling that my youth had been stripped away. Then two days later, the doctor's like, Kidding, that was totally wrong. Sorry.

You don't even know.

I had to re-evaluate my entire life.

So the Health Office cut down on most of the symptoms with a late-but-welcome dose of prednisone, which I've been taking ever since.

Point is, they still couldn't figure out what's wrong with me, until they started connecting the dots...tonsillectomy here...mono there...appendectomy, oh my! Maybe she just has a crappy immune system!

And I do. Or they're pretty sure I do. The fun part is you can't easily diagnose autoimmune disorders, it's kind of like a process of elimination thing. So I'm spending all this week going to specialists to get blood drawn and tested, instead of going to class and distributing Overkill, which I would so rather be doing.

They think I have Behcet's Syndrome, which is common in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The symptoms match up pretty well, and there's no cure, but there is treatment. And this is really upsetting because

1. I AM DISEASED.
2. Um, how will I pay my health insurance someday? They'll jack up my prices like crazy. Right? Isn't that how that works? Like there's no getting out of it. Dude, this sucks.

And it doesn't help to leave every doctor's office with another handful of prescriptions to fill. I'm TWENTY years old, damnit. Just- ok, I'm dealing with it, I am. Just don't complain about your workloads for school or anything around me, because seriously, I have bigger worries right now.

Then I'm like, oh no, there must be people on campus with herpes and cancer and other bad things. How do they make it through the day? Good grief. I take everything for advantage.

Of Course Digital Face Recognition Finds An Asian