Man, I missed chewing.

…But that’s skipping to the end of the story. A lot of you know pieces of this already, and I’ve lost track of who knows what, so I thought I’d put all of this down in one place so anyone who’s interested can get the whole story. Warning: TMI! Because IDGAF.

Right, so a few months ago, about midway through Tears of the Kingdom, I started getting real bad stomach aches. They were not very different from stomach aches I got as a kid, in fifth and sixth grade, and that was always “gastritis,” so I thought, eh, real bad gas, it sucks and is extremely painful but not the end of the world. I’d drink a lot of water, burp a lot, and be okay in an hour, maybe two.

They started at about, eh, once a month, and moved up to about once a week. I had a lot of theories about what might be causing it: Bra band too tight? Carbonated drinks? Eating too much after not eating all day? (By the end we were up to more like three times a week, and no amount of water helped.)

In late July, I thought hey, this might be pancreatitis associated with using Ozempic, and that would be real bad. It is basically your pancreas digesting itself! So I went to the ER during an episode to make sure it wasn’t that. They were great and did a ton of testing right away: bloodwork, x-ray, ultrasound, CT scan. They concluded it was nothing immediately dangerous and referred me on to a GI doc, who I couldn’t get in to see until October.

That doctor decided to give me a colonoscopy/endoscopy to take a look and see what the problem might be, and anyway I was running behind schedule for a colonoscopy so why not? That didn’t turn anything interesting up, but my bloodwork did. My liver enzymes were getting pretty bad; that and the location of the pain suggested a diagnosis: a bile duct stone. An MRI the day before Thanksgiving confirmed it.

See, it turns out just because you have your gall bladder out doesn’t mean your body stops making stones! And because I am an overachiever, this was no paltry stone: it was 1cm. Your bile duct is only ever supposed to be about half a centimeter wide… It’s a wonder it was hurting me only two or three evenings a week and not all day every day.

Anyway, last Friday I had a procedure to get my stupid bile duct stone out. Fortunately no holes are cut in your body for this! They use an endoscopy camera with another, smaller camera coming out of it to go into your bile duct (I can’t help but think of the alien from Alien, with a mouth coming out of its mouth.) So anyway they went in, used electricity and a water jet to break the stone up, eventually got it out, and some three and a half hours later I woke up ready to move on with my life.

And then. It started hurting. Real bad.

A short anatomy lesson here: the bile duct is a tube that goes from your liver to your intestines, and it releases bile, which is necessary to digest fat. (Your gall bladder is a little sack off the bile duct that holds and squirts out the bile as needed, uh, if and when it works right, not that I have much experience with that.) Your pancreas is right next to your liver; that’s the organ that secretes insulin and other key hormones. The tube from the pancreas to the intestines shares the same opening as the bile duct, which means if you do something to the bile duct (like breaking up a massive stone) there’s a chance your pancreas is going to be a whiny little bitch about it.

This is what happened to me! It was not an enjoyable experience. First I got Tylenol, and that helped not at all. Then I got fentanyl, but not really enough fentanyl to, you know, not still hurt a lot. At about this time the doctor decided to keep me overnight to calm down my stupid pancreas and make sure I didn’t get real full pancreatitis, which happens about 5% of the time for this procedure. I got like 3 liters of IV fluids that day and peed once an hour. I got dilaudid and finally stopped hurting. I got about three and a half hours of sleep and caught a ton of new Pokemons in the middle of the night. My roommate desaturated to 55% blood oxygen and was sent to the ICU at 6am. An eventful time, to be sure.

But! When the dilaudid wore off, I did not hurt anymore (though everything still felt kind of... bruised up in there for a couple of days, which, fair, tbh.) So they let me have breakfast! Which was jell-o and bad green tea and a Boost Wildberry (surprisingly delicious?) And then around lunchtime I was allowed to go home, with strict instructions to go right back to the ER with any of a long list of complications, plus a very gradual reintroduction to solid food.

And then, that first night at home, I couldn’t sleep past around 3 in the morning because my arm started hurting opposite the IV site, and it was hot and a little red and a little swollen, and… ugh, isn’t that the symptoms for a stupid blood clot? …Yes, yes it is. So we went back to the ER at about 7am, and long story short (haha too late) probably just a stupid staph infection somehow? But I was already on antibiotics so whatever. It sucked and was exhausting but ultimately a nonevent.

Which brings us to right now! And food! On Saturday I was on clear fluids. Sunday was “full liquids,” which includes stuff like milk and tomato soup. Monday I moved up to apple sauce, flan and mashed cauliflower (because the store didn’t have mashed potato.) When I wrote this I was doing okay with cream of wheat, and later I did so great with chicken noodle soup that I had pancakes! Livin’ on the edge, that’s me! By the end of the week maybe I’ll even move on to my ultimate target: the sacred tradition of wine and pizza. Or maybe next week, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway chewing is pretty great, you guys, and your mouth starts to taste and feel extremely weird on a liquid/soft diet, even when you’re brushing and flossing your teeth like normal.

So. That’s what’s been going on! It’s been very exciting, in the bad way! But it seems like pretty much everything is sorted out now. Stay tuned until next time, when I… maybe tell you about my book? And how book writing is going? Maybe. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.