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Happy Birthday, Beautiful

Beautiful!

Beautiful!

Today is the day I most look forward to each year. Beautiful thinks my birthday is my fave, but it’s really hers. Sure, I get excited about mine out of celebration of kicking CF’s butt one more year and seeing what she has secretly planned behind my back, but I get more of a kick doing whatever the heck she wants and trying to surprise her.

This year has been a roller coaster on many fronts (mostly related to stress in one way or another from one source or another), but a combination of dedication and stubbornness on both our parts has us ready to take on the next 8 months of 2011 with a vengeance! So, while today may not be the most well-planned day we’ve ever had, we are sure to have fun… and I’ll see if I can slip in some surprises along the way. She thinks I don’t plan things because I’m so good at actually freaking out about some things (like presents she asks for) but she doesn’t see scheming. Yes, Babe, I scheme about your big day, too.

Since you’re reading this, presumably before I wake up, don’t rush, but let’s try to leave a little early, pack our lunch like planned, wear street clothes over our beachwear, and take a detour to eat. I am pretty sure you’ll like it.

Take a walk with me down memory lane…

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A Night and a Morning in the Hospital

My ER: TGHWe left off with Part One with an inconclusive contrast CT scan, a super slow staff, and a previously unmentioned multitude of requests that they call my CF doctor, who is on staff in the building, to let him know I’m in the ER that has gone unattended to for over 12 hours. We now know to call the on-call doctor on the way to the ER or call the coordinator if it’s during the day. I’m not messing around with blockages any more – I may even opt for corrective surgery the next time, because I really can’t describe the pain and suffering that goes on during a 24-52 hour blockage.

The only good thing that comes from a blockage is the relief afterward. However, even that was taken from me this time.

Oh, now you’ll listen to me anyway?

After hours of hammering them with my requested treatment method using reason, history, rage, and anything else I had available in my condition, they finally sent me down to radiology to get my enema. Long story short, I waited in the hall long enough for my morphine to wear off so I could experience the full torment of radiological hell without pain relief, but the treatment worked and I was sitting happily on the gurney waiting to be wheeled back to Beautiful when I gave them the “all clear” sign that I was “all clear.”

It didn’t take long back in the ER for me to realize that I wasn’t completely clear, though. I was very, very tender, along with an abnormal mass where I have my bottleneck. I was thinking that it only cleared out some of my problem, but that I’d had so much to eat at Outback that it just got re-plugged with that partially-digested food. Things still weren’t right.
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For Your 31st Birthday, I Give You a Blockage

My ER: TGHI definitely had a birthday to remember last year for my 31st birthday. I got the spend the next while in the hospital, but all of the misery began on my birthday. Let’s rewind a bit and start from the beginning, just for those who haven’t read everything about my history up until now.

I was born with meconium ileus and had about 25% of my small intestines removed in my first few days of life to repair the damage. Subsequently, I have a bottleneck of scarring that has always presented itself as a problem with various foods throughout my life. At first, it was whole kernel corn. For whatever reason, probably just because I became a better chewer of my food or my body grew big enough to let corn get through, I only have a problem with melted cheese when I haven’t taken enough (if any) enzymes. To keep this a little shorter, here is what happens and what normally solves my intestinal blockages.

My birthday is December 18th – one week before Christmas and two weeks before New Years. It’s been our tradition since we started dating to go out to a nice dinner (or as nice as I could afford when her birthday rolled around) to have a memory of the day. I can remember quite a few of my birthday dinners with Beautiful, and maybe even all of them… so you can imagine my horror when I started to feel cramps in the mid-morning on my birthday.
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