The only thing keeping me awake right now is the need to keep my streak of posting at least 500 words every day to my blog. I’d have to check when this particular streak started but it’s been a couple of months, if I could hazard a guess. I’m not going to stop writing to go check, though, because the main thing right now is momentum. Just gotta keep going. I’ll insert a sentence as an update at the end when this run began, and won’t count it toward my 500 words for the post.1
The reason I’m so sleepy is, and head’s up this is about body functions, my stomach has been mad at me since about 3 AM this morning. I woke up with a pain in the right side of my abdomen which immediately made me think my appendix was about to burst because my mind, like many minds, drifts toward disaster. I come from a long line of creatures who were able to survive long enough to breed by avoiding death and serious injury. I am sadly going to be the last of that line, not because I don’t avoid death and serious injury, but because despite many opportunities, I have not bred. There will be no generation after me.
I have no comment on the rightness or wrongness of that. Just a fact. I’m just stating a fact.
Unfortunately that just leaves me with avoiding danger, which is then turned into seeing danger around me at all times, which leads to lots of “That’s dangerous and you’re gonna die!” false positives. Like immediately thinking that pain in the vague area of my right side is an inflamed, infected appendix that is going to burst and kill me before I can get myself to emergency care.
I got out of bed long enough to stumble into the bathroom, where I did what ever I could think of to clear the pain from my stomach. While also googling the symptoms of appendicitis. Quite the relief to find out that appendicitis pain is lower down, more near the top of the hip. Aha, it wasn’t a killer vestigial organ, it was just, wow, a really sharp pain that makes it hard to take a deep breath. What the Hell is going on down there?
I’ve had this pain before, and in the past, after ruling out the worst case scenario of appedicitis, made me think it was that condition where a pit in the intestine becomes infected and explodes and causes the person with the condition to die. Lots of ways to die. Or maybe that’s just what my ancestors are telling me.
I took some pain meds (ibuprofren) and drank some water and went back to bed. When I woke up it was morning and a half-hour until my alarm was supposed to go off. I got up, took my temperature (no fever), got a shower, made and drank some coffee, and decided to go to work anyway. I figured it was a stomach thing not something contagious.
Work was distracting enough that I hardly noticed the pain most of the day. I even felt productive. I was honest about the way I felt to my coworkers and they were OK with me being there. I ate a salad for lunch because by that time I had decided this was a thing I could fix with fiber.
The fiber worked. By quitting time, I was about 80% better. I treated myself to a raspberry shake from Burgerville (because solid food still didn’t sound like fun) when dad wanted me to bring him a burger and fries for dinner, and now I’m ready to go to bed.
- My Day One post that started my current streak was posted on 2 April 2024, 113 days ago. ↩︎