SAD? obvs.

i have SAD - seasonal affective disorder. basically, you get depressed in the winter. a surprising number of people prob have this and don’t know about it. i bought a ‘happy lamp’ at costco. mine uses ‘blue wave technology’ (blue LEDs instead of full spectrum white lights) and it’s portable and rechargeable. it rocks - i just carry it around with me in the mornings while i get ready and i get to go around not hating the world. however, once i started snowboarding, i kind of stopped using it. i just started forgetting to charge it or use it and gradually stopped. there were dreadful consequences. this has been the crappies feb/march ever. get this:

in mid feb, i had a crappy fall while snowboarding. then i had a crappier fall and hurt my tailbone to the point that a friend had to drive me home. this was painful and it sucked. not to mention i left my WHOLE keychain behind so some friends could drive my car home, so i couldn’t get into my apartment. that extra sucked. plus having a moot court rough draft due that i had to write while laying down bc i couldn’t sit due to my painful tailbone.

about a week later, i had some weird stomach pain - more like discomfort than actual pain. i called into boynton health service (the u of m’s health service). talked to a nurse, she thought it was a UTI, although i’d had a UTI before and this didn’t feel like it… she gave me a guilt trip for not walking in while i was on the phone. i had a oral argument to present for my int’l women’s human rights class. nurse was all ‘i know school is important, but this is your health!’. i was like… ok, lady. an hour will not make a difference with whatever this is. either way, i skip 1/2 of class and go in to boynton. blood in my pee test - could i have bruised my kidneys while snowboarding? no, kidneys are fine… but oh crap, there’s stuff going on in my liver on this CT scan! they don’t make a big deal about the blood clot, but i have nodules that could be nothing or could be lymphoma. and it’s friday, so i have to wait until monday to figure out whether or not i have cancer.

monday i go to my MRI, go to work. get results of MRI at work. nodules are benign, but remember that blood clot? yeah, you get to be stuck in the hospital for a work-week. or school-week, if you will. almost had a risky procedure done, luckily i skipped out on that one. had a colonoscopy though, because we all love those. oh and they pumped me full of estrogens to stop my cycle. yay - beginning of march!

i get home, have to poke myself 2x/day in the stomach for a week with a blood thinner. then i’m just on pills and thinking things are improving. then i get a cold. a nasty in-bed-for-two-straight-days head cold. (bike season showed up for just those days…). and i get a UC flareup. more meds. and that fever i thought i had because of the cold? oh no, i now have hot flashes bc of the high doses of estrogen they gave me in the hospital. fucking hot flashes.

oh and i had to cancel my spring break trip to mexico. doctor’s orders. and i can’t drink. and no more hormonal birth control, so i have to get an IUD (luckily there’s now mirena - it’s all plastic, which is much less creepy). that’s another ‘procedure’. thank god my dad has good health insurance. and he pays the rest of it. i’m totally lucky on that count.

however, i’m finally able to breathe (relatively, here) through my nose after od’ing on vitamin c for 4 days. i’m kinda scared. what else will march bring? i mean, seriously? i don’t even want to imagine.

i dug out my light therapy lamp today and charged it. this is more of a superstitious thing at this point, than a therapeutic thing (although it really does help!). i’ll be using that damn thing until it’s consistently over 60 degrees. or 50s, at least. i’m pretty lazy. wish me luck!