So, I guess I’m ready to write about this now.  Let’s just get straight to the point.  I have a disease but I don’t really know what it is yet.  How did I get from disease-free to disease-something in the past six months?  Good fucking question.  I’ve been asking that a lot.  Let’s just go back to how this all started.

If you been reading this blog you’ll already know that I don’t go to the doctor a lot because my social anxiety makes me absolutely hate being the center of attention.  When you go to the doctor and you’re the one sitting on that little table with the paper conveyor belt on it, guess what?  You ARE the center of attention.  However, I just turned 50 last December and common sense dictated that I get a full physical, anxiety be damned.  So I screwed up my courage and did it.  Except for a slightly elevated cholesterol level (good bye red meat, bread, and pasta; hello fish, chicken, and leafy green rabbit food) I was given a clean bill of health and I was a happy camper.

Not a month later I started having these dull aches in my back, sides, and chest.  I also realized that my energy level was dropping and I was finding it difficult to concentrate on things.  As the weeks went on, my energy level dropped so low that I found it hard to even get my ass out of bed and go to work.  The dull pains became sharp and extremely painful.  Of course my mind immediately went to thoughts of cancer, so at this point I forced myself back to the doctor and told him what was going on.  He seemed to think I had strained some muscles or something but I knew that wasn’t it.  I tried to explain to him it felt like something down inside of me was pushing to get out.  Kind of like when the little creature burst forth from that guy’s chest cavity in Alien.  That was an interesting conversation to say the least.  I also discussed the possibility of Lyme Disease with him because I’m at high risk of tick bites from my frequent hikes.  I almost wished it was that, because my wife actually contracted it several years ago, and while it always stays with you, it is easily treatable.  In the end he decided to do a bunch of tests to rule out things one by one.

So I went to the lab and gave a gallon of blood, went home, and waited with my alien baby to hear the results.  The first one came back that I was cancer free which was a relief of course.  The next one ruled out rheumatoid arthritis which was also a relief since my wife has had that all her life and I know how bad that can be.  The Lyme Disease test came back negative.  The next test that came back indicated that there was some type of inflammation of my organs going on.  The doctor cautioned me that this was not an indication of anything serious and could point to a number of things.  There was one more test result to wait on that would tell us more.  That’s when we hit the jackpot.  This test came back and the doctor informed me that I had an auto-immune disease.  I said auto what now?  WTF is that?  He explained to me that it’s a condition in which my immune system attacks healthy organs.  Furthermore, the test showed a high chance of me having Lupus.  I’ve heard horror stories about people that have Lupus so of course off to those interwebs I went to look it up.  Basically it told me that they don’t know why, but my immune system gets bored and decides to fuck it’s own house up.

I still have not been 100% diagnosed with Lupus yet.  That’s because I have been waiting a fucking month to see a specialist that will determine this.  In the mean time I asked my doctor what I could do for the pain.  He told me to take some ibuprofen.  Yeah, that’s like taking one single tic-tac for a bad case of dragon breath.  It doesn’t do shit.  So here I am in pain almost every waking hour, no energy to do anything, and a brain that is in a fog so thick that it keeps me from even forming coherent thoughts, much less try to be funny on a blog.

The good news is, next Tuesday, I have my appointment with the specialist.  I hope he can tell me more of what’s going on.  I hope he can give me something for this pain.  I hope he can come up with a treatment plan that would give me back even half of my normal self.  I hope you realize I’m channeling Morgan Freeman at the end of The Shawshank Redemption.  I hope.

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