day 4: the wrong bus.

today was stupid from start to finish.

all week i had planned that today i was going to go to the DMV to take my permit test. come to find out this morning, you actually have to send in a physical paper application with a check for $10, and then in 2-4 weeks they MAIL you a date to come in and take your test. [sigh]

it was supposed to be an adventure day to the mall, with the highlight being finally getting my permit and admitting to myself and others that i am ready to learn how to drive.

instead, i ate a big bowl of leftover mac & cheese (this recipe was ridiculously delicious, and i am not easily impressed by impostor cheese) and dicked around on the internet.

but after as many hours of lounging as i could physically tolerate, i decided that DMV bureaucracy couldn’t keep me from trying on pants. to the mall!

IKEA busted.

well, IKEA bus (the squeakquel) has come and gone, and i’m finally recovered enough to write about it (a mere 18 days later) (i know) (i’m sorry).

well, recovered enough to half ass my way through a recap where i’ll omit a lot of details and probably not tell you what you want to know.  i’ll pretend that it’s because i want to preserve the mystique for future riders. yeah. that.

but be kind, i’m lazy because i’m exhausted.

there were actually a number of passengers who asked me how often i  run the IKEA bus, and recommended that i do it more often. which is totally a nice compliment, if woefully uninformed.

IKEA bus is actually a lot of work. not that i’m complaining (i’m totally complaining), but the snack research, and the phone calls, and the paperwork, and deposits, and movie selections, and ticket hawking/guilt trips… twice a year (or monthly, as recommended) would probably kill me a little.

but enough of my whining. for all the work, of course it was AMAZING. some highlights:

NSFL: uterine artery embolization is horrible and disgusting PART II

when last we saw our heroine (that’s me), she was smacked out in a hydromorphone haze, leaving her bed only to go to the bathroom (and frequently), get water or juice, or take more pills. i couldn’t walk my dog (trusty nurse zak to the rescue!), put on pants, or eat food of any kind.

at this point, the only major pain was in the gaps between pills if i overslept or forgot. i can’t tell you how many times during those first few days i couldn’t remember whether or not i actually took my pill or not. sort of like those groggy mornings where you can’t remember if you shampooed your hair or not. unfortunately, i would have to err on the side of not taking the pill at all- rather than take a double dose. poisoning myself is a slightly greater concern than too squeaky hair.

but then on tuesday, i sort of woke up. mostly lucid for the first time in days, my first thought was- WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY MOUTH?

again, if you’re about to bite into a big sandwich or you want to ask me out on a date- now is the time to debark the story.

blood loss.

i know. i’ve been gone for weeks. i gotta tell you, these grapefruits got me DOWN.

when last we met, i was about to go in for an MRI to see if the embolization surgery was the right option for me. and the good news/short story is that i am. my surgery is scheduled for the 6th, and the grapefruit reign of terror will soon be over. assuming that is that you think 2-6 months means soon, and that 40-60% reduction means over.

some things i learned during the MRI process:

1. if the intake nurse is worried that she’ll “jinx it” by telling you that she’s good at inserting IV lines, she’s probably not very good at it. 2 painful punctures and a lot of crying later- she had to go get the lady who can insert an IV on a baby. 45 seconds and virtually no pain later, i was in business. next time, i will ask for that lady up front.

2. if the intake nurse stabs you a bunch of times and makes you cry, the MRI tech will do virtually anything to shut you up. that includes piping radiolab into the headphones that drown out the noise of the machine.

3. the machine is really fucking loud. and they put your chest in a plastic cage and you can’t move, and sometimes you aren’t even supposed to breathe. in general, this would make for a long hour. however, if you are lucky enough to have taken an ativan during the intake, this part does not seem too bad.

but that’s over now. now all i need to do is GET PUMPED for the procedure. i’ve been trying hard not to google too much, but there aren’t really any answers to what i want to know anyway. like “when will the abdominal bloating go away” and “do i really need to be catheterized?” it seems that people only write about their personal experiences with uterine artery embolization if something either went really wrong, or they’re writing a testimonial for a doctor’s website. not exactly the most helpful cross section…

i’ve been busying myself by buying “sick supplies” like crackers, a blender, and a space foam pad for my bed. i also maybe accidentally spent $100 on books at amazon.com. oh, and i should probably mention the hot pink sweatpants with LOVE written across the butt in glitter (they were on sale).

but the biggest problem that i’ve been encountering through all this pre-surgery busy-ness is the overwhelming fatigue. these fibroids are essentially stealing all my blood! according to my MRI, there are no fewer than 5 fibroids of “significant” size (ranging from grapefruit to golf ball). the big problem is that they are both causing me to lose blood (probably TMI, but it has been shark week FOR LIKE A MONTH), AND the blood that they are not expelling, they are hoarding in their giant hard engorged tumor bodies. wow. that’s gross. but true!

these bitches are stealing all my blood and i feel like i’m dying a little. my usually perky on 4-6 hours a night self can’t be satisfied with even 9 hours. and when i do sleep, i’m waking up every 2 hours to pee (did i mention that there is a grapefruit sitting directly on my bladder?), or because of the stabbing stabbing back pain. i even had to stop sitting on my balance ball at work. i am the living dead. i can essentially get up (barely), walk the dog, go to work, come home, and curl up on the couch until it’s time for bed.

it’s not that i don’t want to write. i think about it every day. i just can’t do anything. i’m hoping that after my surgery, i’ll wake back up again. you know, after i’m done vomiting.

i’ve been making a lot of jokes about how i’m going to live tweet my surgery. but maybe that’s only hilarious to me. but anyway, i’ll keep you posted.

my lovely lady lumps: adventures in uterine fibroids.

i am not an animal!

have you ever seen one of those “i didn’t know i was pregnant” tv shows where the lady doesn’t know she’s pregnant until she’s in the delivery room with what she thinks is appendicitis? well, i have. so imagine that you’re me. imagine that you’ve seen A LOT of those types of programs, and that you’re also kind of a hypochondriac. you’ve sworn off web md entirely because maybe it gives you panic attacks sometimes.

now, imagine that you’ve noticed that your abdomen (despite some recent weight loss) has become quite bloated. and when you press on it, you feel something hard and round. imagine that when you lay on your back and look at your stomach, it is notably distended to one side. you might ask a friend or two to palpate your uterus area. you might start palpating your own uterus area obsessively, and work yourself into an anxious frenzy imagining that there is a baby or a tumor or a dinosaur egg in there.

but that’s crazy, right?

i had my yearly physical coming in two weeks, and i spent the entire time bouncing back and forth between utter panic, and feeling like a idiot for thinking that anything at all was wrong (with panic winning out in the final few days). i almost went to the emergency room on at least 3 occasions.

but it’s probably nothing.

bargaining.

so today i googled “7 stages of grief”. what i learned is that there are actually only 5 stages (not one of which is shopping). well, this website says there are 7, but it does so entirely in comic sans- which is in no way a credible way to deal with sadness.

but as i was saying before, i just finished up the shopping portion of my coping process, and am getting ready to start the packing stage. but in between these two critical stages comes BARGAINING. this past weekend, the ex and i spent an entire day walking around the condo staking claim to all of our worldly possessions.

he gets the “dead like me”, i get the “futurama”.

he can have all the bamboo spatulas, but the kitchen scissors are mine.

neither one of us will take ownership of the pink kitchenaid toaster with the broken handle.

it’s weird. now that all the yelling and crying at 4 am watching “sense and sensibility” stuff is over, only the practical sediment remains settled at the bottom. now, we’re both exhausted and forced by time constraints to be all “business time” (not the sexy kind) for a while. i strongly suspect that there will be more late night crying at movies when i’m moved into my new place, and the gravity of this life change smacks me across the face. but for now, everything is oddly calm.

perhaps as a true testament to our lack of compatibility, we split every single thing 50/50 without argument. sure, i was a little misty to see “legend of zelda- twilight princess” disappear in the “HIS” box. and he was equally heartbroken when i reclaimed a number of the entries in his “all paul rudd all the time” dvd collection.  maybe he’s just smug because he gets to keep the tempur-pedic mattress? or maybe he really just does have terrible taste in everything (i did find a copies of “shrek” and “goldmember” that i had hidden deep in a closed cabinet because i was ashamed to let him put them on the shelf- yet somehow i let “k-pax” slip past the goalie).

or maybe, i assert my autonomy too much in relationships to the point where i can pretty much cut and run with all of my stuff at any given moment. this one was a little different. i bought a house (“we can just sell it and split the equity if i change my mind”). i got a dog (“i’ll just steal him in the middle of the night if i have to”). but even that time i got married, i didn’t change my name. i kept my own bank account.

well, this unearths a whole bunch of unfortunate questions about my commitment issues that i don’t feel like dealing with right now. maybe i’ll dive head first into the packing/unpacking stage until i’m ready for the bad internet dates phase. i’m pretty sure that’s where all the good stories are anyway.

weekend pickthrough- bottom of the sea edition.

changing jobs is hard. somehow, i forgot about that part. i spent the majority of last week either lapsing into couch comas or trying to keep myself from bursting into hysterical tears at inopportune moments (with mixed results).

and then there was the part where i didn’t have time for the internet. which is weird, because i pretty much live on the internet full time. it’s my natural habitat (well, the internet and target).

basically, i was either trying to get my bearings at my new job (situation improving, if slowly), alseep, or sobbing hysterically in an unfortunate place. no twitter, no facebook, no gchat…  i feel like i was incarcerated, or in a coma, or at the bottom of the sea for the last 7 days, and i’m just finally resurfacing. i’m disoriented, and a little cranky. but i’m back, and as always, sorry for dropping off the planet for a bit.

i have a full lineup of posting schedule for this week (including my annual bad halloween costume roundup), but for the transition back into normalcy, let’s just start with a few easy links:

weekend pickthrough- mail call showdown edition.

this has been a good couple of weeks for free stuff in the mail. between the soy milk and the cleaning stuff, i also applied for some samples online, which showed up this week. i realized after i wrote that post last week about product testing sites, i had completely left out free sample sites! you may not get full sized products, but i am a sucker for tiny scale models of real products, and they almost always come with a pretty decent value coupon.

this week, i got two sample deliveries- one from target, and one from proctor & gamble (evil i know, but FREE STUFF!). when i originally saw the post for the target beauty bag on my favorite freebie website, i thought it might be a phishing scam. so much awesome stuff for free! my bag arrived a mere one week later.

though not packed with the same goods pictured (where’s my full sized sally hansen nail enamel?), still had some pretty hot shit inside (full sized neutrogena lip balm!). also, it came packaged in the most adorable tiny makeup bag known to man, and had $25 worth of target beauty coupons. and you know what that means… STACKING!! i was blown away.

then, i got my p&g brandsaver… and there was blowing alright, just not the good kind. one tiny sample and two tiny coupons? i hear these stories about people getting all sorts of crazy awesome shit from p&g, but i have never gotten anything good. this was better than the time they sent me a single metamucil packet in a huge box, but not much.

sadly, the target beauty bag is already sold out, but i would recommend finding yourself a freebie listing service so that you have a chance of getting in on the action next time around. i also follow deal seeking pros like hip2save on twitter, who usually have first knowledge of the good shit.

but since you’re probably still really jealous about not getting the beauty bag, here are some links to ease your pain:

say NO to the dress: why paying the rent should be a bigger priority than feeling like a princess.

anybody who follows me on twitter knows that i’ve been watching A LOT Of say yes to the dress (there are 78 episodes on netflix instant!). the thing is, it’s a TERRIBLE show. like the worst possible people that you can imagine whining, and crying, and hissy fitting all over the store until some poor frazzled family member agrees to spend $11,000 on a skin tight cacophony of beads, lace, tulle, crystals and bad taste (don’t even get me started on the whore-bride trend…). this dress will invariably made by a woman named pnina tornai. this woman must be stopped. but again, that’s a conversation for another day…

i can’t seem to stop myself from watching the show, but with each subsequent viewing, i become more and more furious.

as you will learn shortly, there are actually only 2 kinds of brides that shop at kleinfeld. they are both equally revolting. 

shit, i forgot the coupons.

for xmas, i gifted myself with a subscription to the sunday paper. it’s minimally cheaper than buying it at the store, and conveniently delivered to my front door before 7 am. thus, i can stay in my sweatpants and be lazy and not brave the cold cold walk down to the sketchy sketchy 7-11. or so i had hoped! first sunday, NO PAPER. i figured maybe it just took them a minute to get the party started. last sunday, NO PAPER AGAIN (later resolved with an agitated call to the circulation department- i hope)!  thanks to a 7 hour a chorus line rehearsal on sunday, i didn’t have the time or energy to go get one on my own. i hit the grocery store on tuesday, but sadly, there were none left. a couponless week! what’s a girl to do!?

when i first started my coupon clipping adventures over a year ago, a moment like this would have sent me into a panic spiral. to think of all the deals that i would miss, the freebies loaded into the carts of strangers that wouldn’t be available to me without those magic slips of paper… i don’t remember if i ever cried over such a situation, but i also don’t remember not crying. when i first started out, i would get a crazy high off my deal mongering and would hit multiple drugstores multiple times per week- often spending hours in the aisles trying to cobble the perfect deal (poor boyfriend left to languish in the car).

but then, i kind of got over it.

i don’t have any idea how extreme couponers keep the ball rolling… it’s so much pre-planning and work! after a while, my coupon energy ramped down and my desire to have every single deal faded away (my stockpiles grew too large… i ended up with items i couldn’t use or donate…i was fucking tired…). if i missed a newspaper, so what? if i forgot to bring my coupons to the grocery store, meh!

i still go through peaks and valleys of coupon focus/mania, but in terms of the emotional highs and lows that i used to hit, i have figured out a few things along the way that are guaranteed to always talk me off the ledge: