Well, isn't that special...

When I was seven years old, I got a stomach ache. In the 20 years since then, my health has fluctuated more than the US dollar and has inspired many Ben Stiller movie-esque scenes of embarrassment. Although I am still not entirely sure WHY my stomach behaves the way it does, I have had 20 years of dealing with its various temper tantrums and... Let’s just call them ‘flash floods’. You would think that one of the benefits of this many years of experience would be a greater knowledge and understanding of my body’s many complaints and that I, like a trained ninja, would know how to deflect and counter each one. To a degree, this is true. My stomach comes at me with feeling super acidy, I expertly counter with extra over the counter antacid with prescription acid reducer, HI-YA! My stomach attacks with sharp pains, I deflect with buscopan and really strong peppermint tea, BLAM! I feel a sneak-attack of grumbling and churning below my belly button, I switch to extreme bland diet and don’t make plans to leave the house that day. I would say about 70% of the time, I know what’s what in terms of my stomach but every so often my body still manages to flummox me. This brings me to what has been happening since my last blog entry. As my loyal readers are aware, I have been dealing with an unhappy stomach since a few days into my detox. My theory was that the super increase of fibre and reduction of soluble (AKA Easy to digest!) carbohydrates had sent my digestive tract into a tizzy that would soon correct itself. The trouble was, my “go to” eating plan for when my stomach is bad and the rules of the detox did not mesh so I had to call it quits on the detox and give my belly a little TLC. Unfortunately, my tried and true tricks did not seem to work and I actually found myself feeling worse. Not only was my stomach playing it’s normal pranks on me, but whole new symptoms were being thrown into the mix. I had a headache, I was dizzy and incredibly nauseous. Being the medical professional that the World Wide Web allows me to be, I decided that I was simply dehydrated and could remedy that myself as well. Unfortunately, this also failed to resolve my issues and I spent all of Sunday night in a cold sweat and shaking like a leaf until I finally got up and took my temperature: 101.8 degrees. Well, now I am confounded. My stomach, for all its quirks and inconsistency, could not cause a fever like that. I took some Tylenol and, since I already had a Dr’s appointment booked for the next day, just tried to get some sleep. Cut to: Me in the shower the next day. Alright, don’t linger too long on that image... As I think I have mentioned before, I got a breast reduction in June of last year. Since then, I have no feeling around where my incision scars are still healing. I noticed that on one side, I looked like I had a major sunburn. It felt hot to touch, but it didn’t hurt... mostly because I couldn’t feel anything. I went to the Dr and told him how I had been feeling and, as an afterthought, mentioned the redness on my chest. He took a look and turns out, I have mastitis cellulitis... or, an infection of breast tissue that can apparently make you quite sick.
That brings me to today: I am on heavy duty antibiotics, my fever and headache are finally subsiding and I am very achy in the chest region. The last few days have been so crappy that I didn’t even feel up to looking at the computer screen long enough to update my blog, which is why I have been radio silent for a bit. Now I am all kinds of curious about what affected my stomach at what point and if there was anything I could have done to avoid this mess. It has also presented me with some challenges regarding my weight loss: I have been so sick that I don’t think I have gotten a lot of nutrition out of the food I have been eating, which hasn’t been much because I’ve been so nauseated. I haven’t been exercising because of this either. I feel Sunday approaching and my Weigh In and I just hope that my big 1st week success won’t be completely gone by the time all this clears out of my system.