pot at the end of the rainbow

Change

When I first started working in my current job, about 5 years ago, absolutely everybody smoked. We'd all go out on our breaks together and a 5 minute smoke break easily became a 20 minute break.

Then oneday, quite out of the blue, a woman decided to quit. She'd had a major health scare, but chose not to tell anyone. She announced that she was quitting smoking. We all rolled our eyes.

One by one though, we all quit smoking for various reasons. I quit because of the Crohn's Disease and I was getting sick of being chained to this habit.

Now only one person in the office smokes and every time he goes downstairs for a cigarette, we all roll our eyes...

Glycoprep

I am one liter through the three liters of glycoprep bowel prep for tomorrows stricture dilation surgery. No matter how often I drink this stuff, it never gets any easier. And they've flavoured it with lemon now, yum! I'll never be able to look at lemons quite the same way again.

Every two months I'm going to have to do this. This is my third go at the dilation surgery. I have two strictures which need to be stretched out every three months, but instead of doing them at the same time (which would make sense, be less traumatic for me and mean less general anesthetic) they have elected not only to do them separately, but for them to be done by different surgeons. In practice it means I have to go in twice as often, which of course means I have to endure the bowel prep twice as often. It also means that I have to be the go-between for these two surgeons.

I know what you're thinking, how did she get so lucky?

Normally they tell me to arrive first thing in the morning and I sit around with my arse hanging out the back of a gown for most of the day before eventually being called in somewhere around mid afternoon. This time, I don't have to get there until 1pm. I'm hoping that means I won't have to wait around as long, that they've finally figured out that asking everyone to get there at 7am is a dumb policy and not that I'll still have to wait as long and will be leaving there at midnight.

Urrgh. Another couple of glasses down. I really hate the feeling of this stuff in my guts. My lower abdominal region just feels full and heavy... not to mention the burning ring of fire. How can I possibly still have 1.5 liters to go???

It's usually around this point in the process that I start to question whether this is the right course of action. Do I really want to keep going through this every 6 to 8 weeks? Maybe I should just take the resection and run. I remember there were all these good reasons why this was the better option, but damn if I know what they are in this moment.

I was asked on formspring recently what I would wish for if I had only one wish. Talk about a no-brainer, I'll take a cure's for $1000 thanks Alex.

Meanwhile, tomorrow the surgeon will also be taking a really good look around while he's in there, this will be the first evaluation of whether all the drugs are doing their thing or not. This time last year I was in hospital for 3 weeks in absolute agony and facing an almost certain ostomy. Now a year later, it's time to check in and see where things lie.

I'm quietly confident. I feel better within myself, so I'm certain the news will be good. In spite of the bad days and the regular feeling flu-like, generally I feel much better than I have in a very long time.

Good grief, there's still just under a liter to go. Maybe less typing more drinking is in order.

:-)