Scared crapless

So, I've been sick a lot this year.  I've had the stomach flu about 3 times since February, and I have used all 64+ hours of PTO at work, and half the year isn't even over yet.  To me, it was just.. well the stomach flu, except I kept getting diarrhea, well to be honest, it never really left.

So both my husband and my mother were nagging me, go to the doctor, go to the doctor, go to the doctor.  I do not like going to the doctor. Let give you a bit of a background on this reasoning:

Rewind to 1992. I'm 12 years old, and I'm in tap, jazz, ballet, and lyrical dance classes. I love dancing, there was nothing that I wanted to do more than dance. Well I don't even remember how it happened, but I pulled a hamstring.  I had to be on crutches for 6 weeks, and well, I babied my leg pretty bad.  So much so that my L-2 and L-3 vertebrae got misaligned, and my hip stuck out after some time  Keep in mind, I was in 6th grade and not exactly of the popular crowd. Much teasing was had at my expense. So mom takes me to the doctor who refers us to a pediatric orthopedic surgeon who tells us. You'll need surgery.

So, September of that year (Just starting 7th grade), I went in and had surgery where they re-aligned my vertebrae, and put me in a body cast for 3 months.  I could not sit down for that entire time.  It sucked.  I had to take sponge baths, and couldn't sit on a toilet.  I had to eat laying down on my side, and forget about all the itching!!  I was had a homebound tutor because I couldn't sit at a desk. She went around to all the schools and taught the kids who couldn't go to school because they were sick. My classmate Phil and I were her only middle schoolers, the rest were high school teens that had gotten pregnant and couldn't go to school with their baby bumps. (remember 1992)

So finally 3 months later the cast comes off, and I head back to school. YAY!! I walk into class and I literally hear, "Hey Katrina, we thought you were dead"  Yeah, good times. Anyways, I get back into the swing of things, but then around February of that year, I got sick.  I was so sick that I could not keep anything, not even water, in my stomach.  So off to the hospital I go, where I spend 3 weeks in there and I get poked and prodded 3 different ways from Sundays trying to figure out why I can not keep food in my stomach.  They finally figure out that a nasty virus had settled in my stomach and just had to work it's way out.  Phil, who had leukemia, was admitted to St. John's about the same time I was for kidney failure.  He was released before I was because the doctor's argued about what was wrong with me every single day.  High point though is that I got to meet Cecil Fielder and get his autograph.  Bad point I left the Polaroid with the signature in the hospital room.  Anyway, I was released and I got to back to school.

Dr. Montgomery said that there was a small chance that the scoliosis in my upper spine before my surgery may get worse, and just my dumb luck, at a follow up appointment in March, the scoliosis went from a 13 degree curve, to a 36 degree curve. Great.  So mom and the Dr. decided I would wear a back brace that would stop the curve from growing and then I would have surgery when I was 18.  I had to wear it 22 hours a day, and it was HUGE.  I was 12 years old, and weighed 98 lbs, and had to wear size 22 clothing to fit over this monstrous thing, oh yeah, and go to school.  Needless to say, people had more ammo to toss at me.

I despised that thing, so here I was thinking I was being all cunning would sneak an extra set of my old clothes with me to school, and then hide that brace in a practice room in the band room, and then head on to class. This seemed to work for quite a few weeks, I even remember going to an appointment and the curve had improved by 1 degree.  So life was getting a little better. Until one day I was walking down the back hall of Kennedy, and there was a fight on one side of the hallway.  I walked around the fight going to my class, but then the fight came to me, and the two boys slammed into me which smashed me into the brick wall and knocked my dinky ass out.  So all the teachers freaked, "oh no Katrina and her back"  Once I came too I was fine, but everyone found out I wasn't wearing my brace.  So Mom and I had a good long talk, and I told her, if I have to have surgery when I was 18, why can't I just do it now and get it over with?  She agreed, and we both talked Dr. Montgomery into doing it as well.

So I got out of school two weeks early, and went back to good ole Beaumont hospital. I was in surgery for 5 hours and I grew two inches while they placed 2 rods and 12 hooks in my back.  There was no cast this time and I was in PICU, cause most people are not awake there. So if I was thirsty or just wanted to be turned., I was basically paralyzed and could not move on my own, I had to call out for the nurse.  Then on the 4th night, I wake up in the middle of the night, and there are a ton of people around me.  I had stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating.  I was physically dead for about 2 mins.  When I woke up and asked what was going on, the nurse explained it and showed me how the monitors would sound an alarm if they didn't move.  Well then my smart ass figured out how to get the nurses to come the next night by simply holding my breath.

I was thankfully moved to a normal room the next day, and spent another two weeks there, getting poked every single day.

So I spent maybe a whole 3 months in school during my 7th grade year.  I know that summer when I went home I knew I didn't ever want to be in the hospital again. That summer I did a ton of stuff I wasn't supposed to do, but I kept thinking, I feel fine, and I want to enjoy life.  I still keep doing stuff I'm not suppose to do. Dr. Montgomery would have a conniption if he knew I skydived.  Last two times I went to the ER because I twisted my ankle really bad and bruised my tail bone, the doctors always gave me that condescending look.

So fast forward again to this year, finally I relent and go to the doctors office about all my symptoms, and since my old sweet 80 year old family doctor finally retired, I get the new guy who I've never met. He fires off a barrage of questions and goes, "Well, we're going to figure this out" and signs me up for a bunch of test. To which I glower at my husband and then complain to my mom about, but she's happy as a lark because it's the full work up she's been wanting for ages.

Well they did a CT scan and found an "Abnormal Mass" on my uterus, and it's pressing against my rectum which is causing the diarrhea.  More than likely it's a fibroid, and it's been there my entire life, because I've always had crappy periods.  GYN's before assumed endomitriosis and controlled it with birth control.  But for some odd reason, this "mass" is growing, and it's causing issues. Which my new younger Dr says it could be cancer.  So They're doing and MRI to figure out where it is, what it is, and what it's doing.  I will probably have to have it removed, which means surgery, which means I'm not a happy person.

The throwing up is something completely different probably and I get to have more fun tests for that.

On top of it all, since I hardly ever went to the doctor in the last oh.. 10 years.. I finally decided, "I'll get the cheap insurance, I don't use what I pay for"

Murphy's Law