Thursday, February 12, 2004

What a glorious feeling...

... I'm happy again...

I just thoroughly enjoyed watching Singin' In The Rain on AMC, even though I've seen it like 1 Million times. It's impossible not to smile at Gene Kelly stomping in the puddles, or Donald O'Connor... "Moses Supposes"... the colors are so out-of-this-world vibrant they are practically surreal. It's a real picker-upper. Plus I love it that bitchy, controlling, shrew Lena Lamont gets her comeuppance in the end. Hee!

Today was another super-busy day IRL... ran DD to school, came home, had a phone conference; picked DD up at school; took DS2 to his well visit (A-OK), stopped for gas and at Sam's for groceries, picked up DS1 at school... I was running around all freakin' day. I hate days like this, sometimes, but today was not so bad.

One of the good things about being out so much of the afternoon is that I missed the final drama/trauma at the "Oz" forums. I have a huge mix of emotions over this situation....

First, I'm very sad that the forums have been brought down, and it looks like they are gone for good. (I'm also profoundly relieved that I copied my journals out of there, yesterday. Even with 20 minutes notice, I wouldn't have been able to get everything out of there!) There were a lot of people who depended on it for support, encouragement, recipe ideas, a good laugh, a hug, a familiar face... I'd bet that a good three-quarters of those folks had no clue what was going on behind-the-scenes. I feel really bad that those people have been cut off from a place that they had come to depend on. That is just not right, IMO.

I felt very conflicted and a bit hypocritical in my own participation in some of the "WTF happened here?" threads. I really tried to be reasonable, and encourage people to find out for themselves why everyone left. I, in fact, did not choose to leave the forum, only my journal, because I need (not just want, need) to have control over it. I need to know I can get to it whenever I want, not dependent upon the capricious mood of someone I don't even know.

Still, at the time I was posting my hopefully-reasonable approach, I was feeling guilty because I also felt like we should all just shut up about it and clear out. After a brief flurry, all the uproar would die down and it would recover, and move on with a new crop of folks.

Then I started thinking about everyone who had already become heavily involved there, only to be betrayed, lied about, threatened, banned, spied on... and I thought, it's not just OK, it's actually necessary, to caution the forum participants there not to divulge too much personal information or become too embroiled in local power struggles. My decision to continue posting there was with these cautions well in-mind, and I felt good about the LC-related posts I made. The "WTF happened here?" posts were a lot more difficult.

There had to be a balance: folks needed to know that things over there were a post-at-your-own-risk proposition. Making that risk public was most certainly viewed as destructive by TPTB over there, but IMO, the destructive aspects were balanced by the constructive. Still, what a mess. What a mess of feelings, and I'm not even going to bother sorting them out, because it's over! I'm actually relieved that I only have to keep track of one forum, now! :)

So, in spite of all the drama/trauma, I am feeling emotionally very good today. It felt wonderful setting up this blog yesterday, and setting up MakeItLowCarb.com, even though there's nothing over there, yet. There will be, someday... eventually. I don't know what happened but it's like my creative energies have suddenly become unblocked. I think that journalling really helps with this. If you want to write, you have to write, just sit down and do it. Get the words out of your head and onto the paper (or screen). It's almost as if it's a muscle that needs working out, and now that I've been writing daily for a couple of months, I'm in pretty good shape, again.

Now, physically, things are a different story. Paradoxically, I don't feel horrible even though I haven't been getting much sleep, my RA and fibro are flaring (I'd say I'm averaging a 6 on the 1-10 pain scale these days, when usually I'm a comfortable 2 or 3), my sciata is kicking up because I've been carring all 31.5 lbs of DS2 around alot lately (he is in cling-mode), and I've got this nagging, occasionally stabbing pain under my ribcage on the right.

Now that pain is the one that apparently is caused by my gallbladder, which is severely under-functioning. Apparently a normal gallbladder has a 35% transfer rate, and mine is only managing to move 11%. That's more than 2/3 decreased capacity or output or whatever you want to call it. Ewww. It would be nice if the dr called me (this is the one who reminds me of I-Man hehehe) or at least his nurse, with the referral info to the surgeon, if that's what I really need.

Stupidly I'm hoping I can get it done sometime before March 1 when my Mom goes back to MA. I wonder if that would even be possible? How complicated is it to remove a gallbladder? I've got some serious webcrawling to do on that topic. Speaking of which, here are links to my favorite websites for medical research:
MedicineNet and MedLine. It's also a great idea to Google your particular condition/disease/symptom, because just about everything has its own support site. It's quite astonishing. At least with the first two sites, you know all the information is vetted by actual M.D.s, so you can trust it.

So... physically, falling apart but able to ignore it for now, and mentally pretty perky, too. I wonder how long this will last? Is this just part of the hormonal roller-coaster? I do hope not. It feels more real than that.

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