The Biggest Posting EVER.

Yeah, 19 days is a bit of a stretch for not posting.

I have been sick. Badly sick. Sick with aches and pains. Lost my meds at Heathrow and that's when the trouble started. Two weeks without anything holding anything back turned me into a wreck.

Then I saw my new doctor. She's wonderful. She discovered that I was one big swelled mess from head to foot and at the worst of it could not even bend my chin to my chest. I had swollen toes, ankles, knees, fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders, my back muscles were seized up from the shoulder, neck...

Yup, I was in hell.

Worst of it all: right shoulder. It was never the elbow that was the problem-it was my shoulder. OF all the places. No wonder that thing was aggravating me so much in Rome...

I started new meds on Sunday. 4 OF THEM. Methotrexate being the biggie, 4 pills two days a week. Then folic acid because that's a given with the methotrexate. Add a small, tiny chaser of 40 mg of prednisone (that's 8 little white pills every day this week and ha ha, it's a high dose), and some Vitamin D once a week because apparently this cripple doesn't get enough sunlight even when she goes to Italy for a week and sunburns her nose (details to follow)

I am not better yet, not for at least another couple of weeks. Had a bad flareup on Saturday that literally took my right knee out from under me (doing dishes sitting down is harder than you'd think). Sunday morning wasn't much better and I wound up on Vicodin before the day was out because I knew moving in wasn't going to be fun anyway, so why not be doped up for it?

Moving in has reminded me why I hate it. These things have yet to see resolution:

Broken smoke alarm-torn off the wall. I really don't want to know how, but one could assume fermented drinks were involved in the process. Possibly drugs, too.

Trashcan/recycling bin: I haven't got either one yet. She said this afternoon. It is now night. I know they're trying to conserve on trashbags, but they should be conserving on my PATIENCE.

Bed delofted: With my right knee at a temperamental, tricky stage and my right arm completely unreliable, I don't really want to be climbing up the bed rails and find myself dangling by my left arm two feet in the air and unable to hit the floor without damaging something that wasn't damaged before. Like my head.

My back still hurts today and I tried to move a dresser. Ha. Like a canary shoving on an elephant. I got it where I wanted it (eventually) but the methotrexate makes me dizzy if I overdo it (now even my medication is working against me doing what I shouldn't. I CAN'T WIN...)

I should be doing homework. But I felt so guilty having Internet now and not having posted to my small audience that I decided to let you know everything is going someplace, even if I'm not even sure of where.

Now, I did say that this would be the biggest posting ever, and so a month late and with a million apologies the last Harlaxton trip report comes to you: ITALY. I also, when I did not have good access to post this stuff, wrote stuff after the Italy trip about my return home and I summed the remaining two weeks (some stuff might get repeated).

It's a lot but it's 19 days worth of posts.

Friday
Venice-Day 1

Well, we have just come back from touring Venice. This is the only day we get in this city, so we made the most of it.

Unfortunately, where the hotel is NOT near any of the places we wanted to see, but fortunately getting there was so interesting we didn’t care.

Last night we ate REAL ITALIAN FOOD. I had pesto. All I can say is ‘Gah.” You have not tried pesto until you eaten this stuff. I also sampled from my friend’s plate (alfredo was also very, very good) and pizza that Nicole bought and couldn’t eat all herself.

Things you must know about touring Venice-some tips.

First off, Venice is full of Carnivale masks and Murano glass (Murano is the island where all the glass is made. Story goes that the Venetian leaders didn’t want the fire hazard of glassmakers in the main part of the city and so sent them to Murano, where they flourished.) Anyway, there are loads of them. You can buy a mask and a piece of designed glass on every, single, corner.

Also on some of the buildings there are small memorials to different saints, like niches in the brick where they’ve placed a picture and maybe a candle.

Second, Venice has really narrow streets. I wound up saying “Scuzi” a lot.

Third, the people are the nicest I’ve seen yet. When we were lost this morning and trying to find our way to San Marco’s cathedral, this elderly lady pointed us in the right direction. Very nicely, I might add.

Fourth, Venice’s streets are very confusing to the outsider trying to navigate them because the canals going all through Venice interfere with the street pattern in all directions. The map looks like the city’s been patched together by little bridges here and there. We crossed at least a dozen today.

There are no cars, at least in this part of the city. There’s no point-the water would mess with building roads here. You either hoof it to where you want to go or take a boat.

This also means that luggage has to be CARRIED IN. Our group had to haul suitcases and luggage up over four bridges and down three streets before we got to our hotel, and two days later had to haul it all back out.

So we got within about two blocks or so of San Marco’s when we saw this large, white, arched bridge with half of Harlaxton standing under it (or so it appeared).

It turns out we had found the Rialto bridge totally by accident. This bridge is beautiful. It has shops on it (selling glass and masks just like everywhere else) and down just below it were more shops. Also some great views of the canal below it.

We went to San Marco’s, where Erin went inside but I stayed out because I had no place to put down my backpack and it wasn’t allowed inside. Then we walked along the Grand Canal for about an hour, just looking at everything because it was really, really sunny and nice out at the time (the rest of the day was fairly cloudy.)

The Grand Canal is definitely grand, and we saw water taxis, boats, and gondolas everywhere. We decided against taking a gondola ride because they are quite expensive (at least to the poor student traveler.)

We wound back through the richer district of Venice, where we saw Cartier diamonds, Dolce and Gabbana, Prada, and Gucci stuff for sale. We couldn’t afford those, either.

But I did get myself a scarf-thingy called a pashmina that seems to be sold everywhere in this city, right next to the masks and the glass objects, and also seems to be all the rage with the girls on this trip (last night I went to dinner with 5 people. Three of them had theirs on.) Erin has one, too. Bethany has one. But I didn’t. So today I bought a lovely blue-green one with a floral pattern, gold thread woven into it, and gold tassels. I look darn good in it, too.

I also bought a bit of glass, although I can’t specify more than that as someone who is reading this entry may very well wind up with it. Suffice it to say that what I bought will please who I bought it for.

(Later note: The piece of glass was a small fish. He looks like a clown fish, and I named him Murray, after the island where he was made. He went to Mom, and since her birthday has passed and he’s hers now, I can say what he is and who got him.)

So that’s Venice. I actually really like this city, wish I’d had another day to maybe see some of the islands, but tomorrow we are off to Florence, and I am betting they have less water than this place does…

Ta,
Bec

Saturday
Day 2-Venice to Florence

Turns out that Florence does have less water, mostly because we’re nowhere near the ocean anymore. We’re in the mountains-went through a bunch of them to get here.
Haven’t seen anything of the city yet, but I’m spending the last days of my 21st year here, so we’re going to get plenty of time to look around.

Our first partial day in Florence we didn’t really do anything-we went out to dinner again and that was about it. Both Erin and I were tired today.

Tomorrow we’re going to go to Uffizi and the Accademica, both museums. Wisely we’ve decided to avoid the cathedrals and churches tomorrow, because Sunday is always a bad day to tour a church, and do those on Monday instead when no one’s there.

Sunday
Day 3-Florence Day 1

We just got back from a very long day out in the Tuscan sunshine, seeing Florence’s sights. My feet ache like you wouldn’t believe.

BUT we went to the Ponte Vecchio, the famous bridge across the river Arno, the Piazza dela Signoria, where copies of famous statues stand around, the Uffizi, where we stood in line for two whole hours to get in to see stuff by Raphael (including his self-portrait), Michelangelo (one of his paintings) and a room full of practically everything Boticelli is famous for, including the Birth of Venus. Also there were a ton of statues and busts.

Then we went over to the Galleria Accademia, where we stood in line for a half hour to get in to see some minor works by minor painters, but really we came to see David. The David. The one that Michelangelo did, the statue they created an entire room just to house it in.

Erin went giddy and goofy, and I definitely thought David was looking pretty svelte despite it appearing that along with dispatching Goliath, David seems to have lost track of his clothes.

(Sorry, all you culture buffs. I couldn’t help the jibe)

He also seems to have grown damn tall. The statue is at LEAST 15 feet high. You should see how BIG his hands and feet are.

We came back to the hotel room after that, decrying our sore feet, but glorying in the fact that we saw everything we wanted to see today, and that puts us neatly on track for tomorrow.

Ta,
Bec

Monday
Day 4-More Florence

Today was less standing in line, more walking around.

We met up with Megan and Rachel, who are traveling independent of the school trip, and together the four of us started out in the cathedral that houses the Duomo, though we didn’t go to the Duomo part itself (that’s the dome of the place.) We didn’t spend long there; probably less than 20 minutes because we didn’t want to pay to go into some of the parts of it.

We then took off across the city, visited Megan and Rachel’s hostel, then headed towards Santa Croce, another cathedral. This one in particular looked very much like the Duomo (at least on the outside) but it happens to be the one with the tombs of all of these people:

Michelangelo
Rossini
Fermi
Marconi
Galileo
Machiavelli
Dante

The church was a beautiful one; even if it was in the middle of massive renovations. The frescoes on the walls were really lovely and after exploring the church, we found the backyard of the place. The crypt, where the less important people were buried, was a white tunnel of marble; it was a very interesting room off the gardens. We found a memorial to Florence Nightingale, who was born in the city (hence where she got her name from) but who’s buried in St. Paul’s back in London.

We got to look at some of Donatello’s work, which was in the church’s museum, and some frescoes and paintings by minor artists.

We had gelato (again) and I had two scoops-mascarpone and chocolate. Pretty good combination, although I think next time I will pass on the mascarpone-at least if I’m having chocolate, too.

Tonight me and Erin are having “ghetto pasta.” The idea is to buy already cooked pasta and sauce. Then you run a sink full of hot water and without dumping out the noodles into the sink you warm them up (keeps this process a bit more sanitary if you cook the noodles in the bag.) Then when you’ve got them warm enough, you dump out the water, leaving the noodles in the bag, and dump in sauce and just eat the damn stuff. Apparently this works if you don’t have a microwave (which we don’t) and is a cheap and fast way to cook noodles. I can half believe this would work if I wasn’t so certain it was going to end in disaster.

Erin is stirring her noodles with the handle of her toothbrush, while soaking them in the almost full sink. There are just no words for this kind of cooking-it probably doesn’t register on the list of gourmet cooking you should never do…

It actually did work very well, and Erin and I had a very decent dinner. We are planning on doing it again for the next two nights we spend in Rome, going out to eat on the last night.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, all. 22 is ME in about 15 hours. I’ve already been calling myself 22 for about a week, so it’s not that much of a change. I already had my “cake” when I had my gelato today; we’re switching cities tomorrow and going to the last one on the list-ROME.

I have a feeling that if we walk as much in Rome as we did here, my feet will reach up and strangle me.

Tuesday
Day 5-Florence to Rome

We didn’t do much today, as we were traveling from Florence to Rome for most of it. It was my birthday, but didn’t see anything as Erin and I both took a nap after getting to Rome.

Found out St. Peter’s is just outside on our back balcony, but we can’t see the Coliseum from here. One can only assume, by looking at the map, that that is in a different direction entirely.

Wednesday
Day 6-Rome Day 1

OY.

When and if, dear friends, you DO get to Rome…do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT try to see its 7 biggest city center attractions in one day.

DON’T.
We got started at 9 in the morning. Bought cheap metro tickets. Couldn’t find the metro; wandered around in the sunshine for an hour asking random people directions until someone told us we WERE GOING THE WRONG WAY.

SO, having wasted an hour, we found the metro about two blocks from the hotel. Got on, got off, and there BLAMMO was the Coliseum.

Yes, it really is that big and yes, it was really wow. We were inside it for about an hour and a half, taking pictures and just looking at it, because, well, that’s what we came to do.
The Romans may have built it for nasty purposes, but it was really awesome all the same.

So, we left the Coliseum and headed off down the road towards the Forum, which I think we started exploring until we headed up a flight of stairs and wound up among the massive ruins of a lot of buildings piled together.

We had already sworn we weren’t going up Palatine Hill because we didn’t think we had time for it, but finding ourselves accidentally on it, we decided, well, since we’re here…

Palatine was where the Roman nobles, emperors, and generally way too rich part of the population lived. They built opulent houses and gardens which promptly turned to ruins over the next 2,000 years.

Some of the decorations they had-mosaics, floor tile, and even some paint-are still barely visible on some parts of the walls. What was really something about all of this was that there was just massive amounts of stone left behind and you could see that these houses must have really been pretty cool back in the day.

Having thought we’d missed the Forum, Erin and I were surprised to find that we hadn’t. Turns out the Roman nobles built their fancy palaces right on top of Palatine Hill…and the Forum was at the bottom.

I still haven’t begun to process how much stone, marble, and just generally stuff was used to build this thing, but even with lots of weathering and time this place knocks you flat with its size. Half a mile (at least) of ruins, ruins, ruins, ruins…There was so much there that I still can’t really absorb how much there was.

We took off across Rome, headed towards trying to find the Pantheon. I was kind of wishing after an hour of searching that the Romans had built that thing a little closer to what would have then been the center of town.

When we did find it, we weren’t sure we had, mostly because we came at it from the side instead of the front like we’d intended. But I saw the edge of a round, Roman-era (you get an eye for what’s Roman built and what’s not after a while) building in front of us and I KNEW that the Pantheon should be around the corner, darn it, because the goofy map said it was, and there it was. That lovely little architectural marvel. I wanted to see it so bad…

It’s been converted to a church (big surprise here in Rome. Really.) and I think the floor tiles have been redone, and the walls have been redecorated so that it now has religious frescos, but the columns on the front are still there, the ceiling, and hole in the roof is, too. Raphael is buried there, with a very nice epitaph and memorial. Also Umberto I, the king of Italy, and his wife.

Though the building looks big from the outside, inside it’s not that big. Especially with all the people smashed inside of the place. How the hell they thought they could have a church in this tiny building, especially with a couple hundred people milling about and gazing up at the ceiling with a hole in it, or Raphael’s tomb.

After that, it was piazzas. We hit Piazza Navona, where there were some fountains of Neptune and PM Berlusconi’s guys setting up for him to have some sort of speech thing later on that night (we decided that we didn’t want to be there when he did).
We found Trevi Fountain, which we didn’t get near because it was too crowded around there. We were only there for a couple of minutes.

AND THEN we went off and found the Spanish Steps. A great place to sit after all the walking. Beautiful flowers all the way up the steps, and it turns out John Keats died in the house next door (he hung out there a lot).

Had ghetto pasta again; tomorrow we will have real food.

Thursday
Day 7-Rome Day 2

We went two major places today.

First, we had originally planned to hit St. Peter’s in the morning and the Vatican Museum in the afternoon, but we accidentally (this seems to happen a lot lately) found the Museum first.

It appears that the popes collected a lot of stuff in general over the centuries, and eventually had to find a place to house all of this said stuff. We saw the old papal apartments full of, well, there’s no nicer way to put it, STUFF.

We also saw statues, busts, statues, busts, statues, statues, statues…I began to think that maybe, just maybe, the popes had some sort of Roman marble fetish. Or they just liked the look of all those statues.

We found (I started geeking here) the statue of Laocoon and his sons being taken down by the snakes when he tried to warn the people of Troy about the wooden horse. One of the gods on the side of the Greeks didn’t like it and sent snakes to get him, along with his two sons. This is a very, very famous statue, and I was gleeful to have gotten to see the real, honest-to-God piece. Awesome!

We saw this marble thing that was just MASSIVE. It had to be six feet wide-a normal size guy could easily lay down in it. We wondered what this thing was, so fancy and purple and huge, and by sneaking a listen to a nearby tour guide, we found out it was a fountain.

Why in heck you would build a fountain THAT massive is an answer I think only a Roman could give, and it’d probably be something akin to: Flavius’ fountain next door is an average guy across, but we had to go for the deluxe model. We went up to a tall guy across…(I have no idea how the Romans measured things)

We went around and around and around, seeing signs that we were getting closer to the Sistine Chapel. Found the rooms Raphael was commissioned to paint in the papal apartments and found the School of Athens (cool. Very cool. Rocking the famous stuff today…) Traipsed through the modern religious artwork at a breakneck speed (having seen Raphael’s work, I’m saying they could NOT compare.)

When we GOT to the Sistine Chapel, well, we weren’t allowed to take pictures and we knew this going in there. Some fools tried, got shouted at by the guards standing in the doorway (whose sole purpose was to go after the people using their cameras and to tell everyone to be quiet, as this IS a chapel.)

Erin and I stayed there at least 15 minutes. It’s not a big room as chapels go; it was crowded, of course.

What makes you stay longer and not just stroll through casually (certainly not after weaving around inside for 45 minutes thinking you were getting there…and then finally getting there you wouldn’t just WALK through) is when you remember that to get all that painting done, Michelangelo spent over four years on it. Didn’t change his shoes in those four years (and apparently found them fused to his feet when he was all done with the painting). Did the ceiling painting on his back, arms in the air, and slept and ate on the scaffolding, and if the story is to be believed, insulting the pope when the guy pressured him to finish it. And what he did is beautiful, amazing stuff, and I can’t believe he managed it without A) going blind B) going crazy C) having some really serious chiropractic problems (sleeping on wooden scaffolding is not recommended.)

It was really something, this place. I could have spent a couple of hours in there analyzing each little panel on the ceiling and trying to figure out what they were, but we had to move on.

We strolled through MORE papal areas, and just when we thought that the popes couldn’t possibly have had that much stuff, there was more of it, and more of it. Erin and I were kind of in sensory overload at the time, so we didn’t see the whole Vatican museum (probably could have been in there for a couple of weeks)

We decided, after a spell, that it was time to get over to St. Peter’s.

St. Peter’s Square in Rome is not square; it is round. Very round, very large. We spotted the papal apartments (Pope Benedict was somewhere else in Italy today, according to reports) mostly knowing it was due to them being right there on the square and me remembering when John Paul II died and seeing the building he was dying in on CNN.

The area is really, really, big. HUGE. Couple football fields. It’d take you about three or four minutes to cross the widest part. They have four giant TV’s in the square, probably so when the Pope goes up to talk he can reach everyone in the place instead of just the group of chairs out front.

We figured out how to get into the cathedral, and walked up there to go through security (to get in St. Paul’s is free). There we met a very nice nun named Mary who spoke English and offered to be our tour guide, for free. She took us around St. Paul’s; explained things to us in detail, stuff we’d never have noticed without help. We spotted a couple of the Swiss soldiers on the way in (I always thought those guys weren’t just pretty decoration-Mary told us most of the ones in fancy dress ARE actually packing heat somewhere on their persons. They are real, honest, shoot you guards.)

She had to leave us at the Pieta because the guards in the cathedral quiet the place down at 4:30 and they were going to tell her to stop the tour, so we went on alone for a bit.

Okay, Pieta. Another famous piece that I’ve been dying to see. This would be Michelangelo again. This was earlier than the Sistine Chapel work and even David (he did that at 26); he was 23 when he carved this. It’s the only piece of his work he ever signed, because after having shown it to someone and gotten total disbelief that a 23 year old could have carved something that, well, GORGEOUSAWESOMEWONDERFUL, he wrote his name on Mary’s sash.

But it is his, and he did sculpt it, and it was just as awesome and lovely as the pictures make it out to be. Beautiful, beautiful sculpture. I was amazed.
But after wandering around St. Paul’s for a bit more, we were getting tired (still worn out from yesterday, I think) so we decided it was time to get out while we could still walk.

When we went into St. Paul’s, there were a few cars parked inside the square. I thought this was odd.

When we LEFT the square, it looked like an auto show was taking place. There must have been a couple hundred cars taking up most of the room. By listening in to a conversation we found out that there was a classical music concert on today, which would explain all the guys in suits and the enormous amount of shiny cars parked on the square.

We found an outdoor restaurant near the wall that surrounds the Vatican and decided that our last night in Rome deserved a good meal. I had spaghetti with meat sauce, a bit of garlic bread (I will never, never be able to eat garlic bread at home again), and tiramisu because we were in Italy. We had to. It was all wonderful. I haven’t had a bad meal since I got into this country…and now I won’t be able to eat Italian at home again without comparing it.

Having eaten all of that, it was then pouring down rain, so we trekked back to the room and took the rest of the night off.

April 25 and 26 with exponents added on

Since I’ve written you last, I’ve crossed two security checks, two borders, the English Channel, 1 time zone, three airports, and gone around London to get from one airport to the other.

We left the hotel at 9-ish. Got on the plane at 11-ish. Got off the plane at 3-ish in London (flight was uneventful). Carried our luggage what felt like half a mile through Rome Airport and into Gatwick in London, where the customs agent quizzed me on how much longer I was going to be in the UK. I told the man what I assumed would be a slight overestimate of 24 hours (read on and you’ll find out I was almost right)

I began to figure out that I might be more than a little tired when I actually slept on the three hour flight up to London. That’s not me, not usually, but I usually don’t walk 8 or 9 miles in the space of 2 days, either.

Picked up my luggage coming down from Harlaxton at 4:30 (didn’t want to cart my big red suitcase around Italy, and especially VENICE where you have to haul everything in and everything out) and then spent the rest of the day and night camped out on a floor in Heathrow, because our flight didn’t leave until 11 this morning.

That was “didn’t.” This morning we found out (much to our disgust, horror, and sighs of trepidation) that the flight was delayed two hours, so 19 hours of sitting has turned into 21. Or 22. I have lost count of when we started this.

HEE!

I barely slept last night (maybe 2-3 hours) thanks to Heathrow having horrible sleeping places for a person trying to save a few bucks (think cold tile floor. I had underneath me a towel and my coat and my pillow. No blanket.) My back began to really bug me around 4 AM and that’s when I gave up trying to sleep in between rolling over every time I started hurting in one position or another. How Jacob the patriarch slept on that rock in the Bible is confusing to me, because I slept on flat tile last night and this morning felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

I ran out of ready cash this morning, meaning the only thing I’ve had to eat today was a handful of M&M’s thanks to the generosity of one of my buddies, and that was only because I confessed that I needed to take my medication and didn’t know if I could without food. AND I had to call my mother at 1 in the morning her time to let her know I will show up two hours later than I’d planned to.

It is now just after 10:30. This has been, quite possibly, the longest day of my life and it isn’t even noon yet. And it’s going to get 6 hours extra added on! Joyous!

And another thing: They kyped my toothpaste this morning in security. There are names set for those people in hell for taking away my toothpaste. Funny how they missed it going in but got it on my way OUT of the country, and it was in a plastic bag like they said it should be.

But according to the nit at security, it was too big. Funny how there was less in the container than four months ago, but THIS TIME they caught it.

Surprising even to myself, I am not tetchy. I could have fought them on the toothpaste debacle but decided I was too loopy from exhaustion to make a good case in saving it. I could not be tetchy because this could be because I’m too tired to be. Wait till I get some sleep…

I’ll probably crash out on the plane, and not of my own free will either. When I get tired enough and settled enough, I will crash.

Oh, but that’s not all. No no no. When I hit the ground, I’ll be 6 hours back from where I am at this very moment, meaning my mind will know it’s 4 or 5 in the afternoon, but my body will be saying it’s nearer to 11 or midnight. Add that to the tiredness I was already experiencing and the sleep I didn’t get last night and you’ve got a recipe for some really serious exhaustion.

I am SO going to need a week to recover from all of this.

Ta for now,
Bec

Sunday
I’m home. Got back around 3 this morning. I slept partially in the car and partially here so I’m much saner than yesterday (the shower and change of clothes helped, too).
I actually have completed unpacking, amazing as that sounds. Stashed presents in various places, gave some away, set others in places where they can be easily taken out of the house when I leave.

Opened my birthday presents-got clothes, sandals, and Black Holes and Revelations. It helps you love a CD when you already have listened to it 89 million times before you take off the wrapping. I know most of the words; I just wanted the CD because, well, it’s Muse and I wanted the CD. Do I have to explain myself further?
Gotta answer e-mails and fill out those forms today. And call someone important. Can’t forget to do that.


YEAH, YEAH. It’s been two whole weeks since I’ve written anything down. Here’s what’s going on with me in summary:

Been sick (again). Right arm has gone completely rogue and I’ve been dealing with that for the past several days. Saw my new doctor last week Tuesday, and she was a very good rheumatologist to me. Took literally thousands of dollars worth of tests ( I got the bill today-eesh) and having lost my meds in the Heathrow airport, I am now back on steroids at a much higher dose than before, even higher than yesterday because I’m not getting better.

According to my doctor after her thorough examination, my ENTIRE BODY has gone into a massive revolt, and when I mean massive, I mean MASSIVE.

I mean my entire body, head to foot, was a swollen mess (still is, but a bit less now en gracias to a buttload of little white steroid pills) thanks to some form of arthritis last week (we’re sort of waiting to find out if it is rheumatoid or something else since those tests were negative last year. We just assumed that was what it was and went on living)

I had bad swelling in my feet and ankles, in both knees, a little bit in my hips…and then it gets interesting. While my spine wasn’t bad, the muscles of my back were stiff and painful from (this is really good, so pay attention) MY SHOULDER.

My shoulder’s baddest of the bad. It turns out the elbow wasn’t to blame all along. The right shoulder is actually my problem. It became so severely swollen (and hot to the touch, too) that it was affecting everything in that arm, my back, and even my neck (imagine my surprise when the doc asked me to put chin to chest and I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t bend it back either).

So, with my whole body screaming that something was clearly up, the doctor ran every test she could possibly have ran-24 of them, to be exact. We get the results of them on Friday. She re-ran tests that the first rheumatologist ran last year, but she was more thorough about this. Hopefully the answers are coming and I will get something resembling help. Every time it clouds over this week everything goes into Freak Mode.

Meanwhile I sit around the house all day, unable to do most housework and unable to cook up a storm, and unable to read for long periods because I can’t hold the book or turn the pages that long.

I am going stir-crazy.

I leave on Sunday-my life needs purpose and stuff again. I’m bored stiff. I tried to pack today and managed to do it, convincing myself that I might not feel this good tomorrow and I’d better do the work now. This justifies me overdoing it slightly.

This isn’t the same feeling as last year. First the wait’s longer this time-a week and a half instead of a week. I’m worse off this time because last time I had no hands-this time I have practically no right arm (YOU TRY living life, oh right-handed people, with your dominant hand pretty much useless for anything more than flipping the channel on the remote. And even that hurts.)

No, this time, I’m more at ease because I’m not waiting for the blade to drop, the end to come. Last year I was freaking. This year I’m laying back and saying que sera. I’ve already spent a year like this, so how much worse could her telling me what’s really wrong with me when without this knowledge I would be like this anyway?
(Look how old I’ve gotten. Terrifying.)

No, whatever she says on Friday, it can’t possibly be THAT bad. (She didn’t look that panicked, but maybe she has a good poker face.) This is just getting a label on the problem, so that the problem can be dealt with. Useful, helpful, but the only thing it’ll do for me is get me meds that can help make me comfortable again. And I do want to be comfortable again. That would be nice.

For everyone else, they’ll be able to put a nice sticker on the patient and tell you what she has and how long she has before her entire body goes up like a smashed Pinto.

Another reason why I haven’t written is that the home computer has been on the fritz and I can’t post anything to my blog from here, so although I can write some of this out on the computer you aren’t going to see it until I get back to the dorm on Sunday night.

Thursday
Well, they got my test results yesterday morning and called me up to let me know…that my Vitamin D was low.

HUH?

Joy. Thanks. That helps SO much with my fingers and wrist and arm and shoulder and just, you know, generally failing joints of my entire body.

But according to what I heard, everything ELSE came back either normal or it came back negative, meaning while my body may be showing it, my blood isn’t.

So same result as last year, which pretty much means she’s going to keep treating me as if I DO have rheumatoid arthritis, which they have no proof of. Not yet, possibly not ever. Some people never show the RA factor in their blood yet still have all the symptoms.

We’re in the same place as last year, guys. Life goes on. I’m still sick with what everyone supposes is rheumatoid arthritis but no one’s totally sure of this, so for now that’s what I’ve got.

I’m currently riding along in, no offense to Dad if he ever reads this, the Biggest Mistake Dad Made This Year, Possibly This Decade, MAYBE even Century.

Dad bought a new car. A NEW CAR. Not some old, fusty, rusting mess, but a car that does all these weird things:

Runs (with some of the cars Dad’s bought, this was an accessory)

Has all its wires, gadgets, and original engine parts. (UPGRADE. Definitely.)

A CD player (this is a step up from the cassette player that we had in the last one)

Electronic windows (we had these before, but these ones don’t stick in place when you push the button)

An electronic lock-thingy (you can be far away and unlock the doors)

Doesn’t clunk, scream, cry, creak, or otherwise die when you open the door and get into it. Or turn into the Flintstone car.

It’s a nice car, no offense, but with Anna and I out of the house next year in college and Sara right behind us the year after, I can’t fathom Dad’s logic on buying the thing. I can’t even bring myself to ask him the price he paid.

Mom, Grandma, and I have already told him that he’s paying for the thing and he’d better not be crying for money next year because NONE of us are giving him a dime.

It’s a little blue Honda by the name of Fit. Smells funny. I still can’t and probably will never, never understand the logic of this purchase…

Ta,
Bec