At last! The Sludgies are officially done. Don’t mind the fact that I had to hire my Aunt, the professional seamstress, to get them done. It was well worth the expense. Firstly, because she is a professional and she did SUCH a better job than I ever could and secondly, because they are dah-dun-dah-dun-dun-DONE. I would have never ever gotten them done. I can barely comb my hair regularly these days.

They are so cute! I’m totally in love with my little Sludgie character. He’s almost worth all the pain and sickness and surgery I had to go through. He’s almost worth the deadly stinky farts I now suffer from. Yeah, you guys didn’t tell me about that. Who says you don’t need a gallbladder. You do! Gallbladders regulate the smelliness. Oh. My. Goodness. Is there anybody out there who knows what I’m talking about? I practically kill my own self when I fart these days. What is up with that! Ugh.

But it’s all okay. I’d take smelly farts any day over weeks and weeks of puking. The weight loss side effect was kind of nice but the PAIN, I’ll never ever go through that again. I’m not even afraid of morning sickness if I ever get pregnant with kid number two. If I can make it through three weeks of puking and writhing on the floor, I can handle a little nausea.

And now we have to distribute the lovely Sludgies! Are any of you contest winners still reading? I’m going to have to track you down. Below is a list. If you see you’re name, please email me your snail mail address and I’ll ship out your very special “Sludgie the Evicted Gallbladder” package. (No, I won’t sell your info to any junk mail companies. I promise.) Please feel free to take him out of the package and hang him on your Christmas tree (or nose) this winter. That’s why he has a little ribbon loop. And if you do, please send me a picture. It will make my poor gallbladder-less body happy. If anybody doesn’t want their Sludgie, let me know. I have a few nieces who think they NEEEEEED a Sludgie. I think they need more stuffed things like a hole in the head but whatever.

1. Pam
2. Lola
3. Jennifer
4. Bethany*
5. Kelly
6. Lin*
7. Nicole
8. Wendy
9. Andrea
10. Paula
11. Emily
12. Beck’s Mom*
13. Kate*
14. Jd
15. C
16. Lexi
17. Lyndsay
18. Ellen
19. Marissa
20. Mama Knucker Hatch
21. Beach Mama*
22. MamaBear
23. Gretchen
24. Jora
25. Lauren*

*=I have your address already. Strike-thru means I’ve tracked you down, not that you’re not getting one. Unless of course you said you didn’t want yours.

Edited to add: Hello Pioneer Woman readers! Due to the increased traffic of people looking at this post I have added Sludgies to my shop!

I’m working on a little something something for those of you who participated in my “help-me-entertain-my-baby-while-I-die-of-gallbladder-pain” contest. I thought it might be fun to make gallbladder pillows/Christmas ornaments as a prize. Doesn’t everyone want to hang a little green gallbladder with googlie eyes on their Christmas tree? At least those of us in the no-gallbladder club will appreciate it since we’ve evicted our own gallbladders (Thanks to my friend Kate for that reference.  She called me up pretending to be my gallbladder contesting her eviction.)

My problem is that there are too many of you who had good ideas that I actually used. Measuring spoons in a box! Junk mail! Toys all over the floor! I used them all. I wanted to make all 31 of the participants a gallbladder pillow but it took me TWO hours to make just this one. Mostly because I was sewing it at my Aunt’s shop and I spent most of the time yapping. But what else is new? I love hanging out with my Aunt in her sewing shop.

Yesterday I was super anxious the whole time because I left Baby Bug at her Aunt Becky’s house and I kept imagining her crying because she missed me. I’m sure in reality she was fine and didn’t miss me a bit because she loves her Auntie Becky but trying to get that through my thick skull is impossible. Because I was such a worry wart and I had to get back to Becky’s so she could play taxi and pick up her own kids from school, I only had time to sew one gallbladder pillow. The pinking around the edges took a lot more effort than I planned on (the felt is wool and quite resistant to cutting). So I hope everybody who participated is patient (and likes Sludgie the Gallbladder) because it might take me a while. OR I might just think up a different prize.

*Stuffed toy not recommended for children under three. Unless you are like me with an eagle eye watching your little kid because it is possible for little babies to pry off the glued on eyeballs with their wiggly little fingers and eat them.

Today is a good day. The baby is asleep, I’m sipping freshly brewed coffee AND I’m wearing my old skinny jeans. The really old ones. Like almost before I started wearing low rise jeans. Well not that old. I’ll never go back to waisted tapered leg jeans again.

With my body type it’s best if I stick to low rise flare leg style forever. I don’t even care if my daughter is embarrassed of me when she gets old enough to know better. I’m sorry, but I look terrible in tapered legged jeans. They are so unflattering to my ample sized butt and speed skater thighs. I’ll go right along with every other 80′s revival trend but peg leg jeans will never touch my womanly shape again. Not unless I grow another gallbladder.

We’ll see how long this skinny jean wearing lasts. Hopefully longer than Baby Bug’s nap. Gotta run, I hear somebody waking up!

Is it normal for a nine month old to eat more than an adult? Baby Bug has a huge appetite! She just shovels the food in. She keeps me hopping trying to think of new things to let her eat. My favorite foods are things that she can pick up with her fingers because this slows her down a bit. Pasta is great. So is buttered waffle and toast and really slippery pieces of banana. But the problem with letting her feed herself is that she just inhales the stuff. She has no teeth so I can’t really tell her to chew her bites but is it normal to gum it twice and then swallow? She worries me, this baby. I’m afraid I’m raising one of those hamburger swilling pigs from a Carl’s Jr. commercial. Her appetite is voracious!

She can eat a whole cup full of macaroni and cheese, some bits of leftover chicken, a fourth of cheese sandwich, two cubes of squash mixed with rice cereal, about a zillion sips of apple juice mixed with water and the crust off a slice of pizza! (Broken into baby pinky sized pieces of course).

Yet she has no appetite for anything pureed. Still. I can only get her to eat her homemade baby food squash by mixing it with plain yogurt. She loves yogurt. Good thing too because back during the great illness of 06 I wasn’t producing much milk and I was really worried that Baby Bug might not be getting her vitamins. But things are working again now.

But I didn’t really want to blog about food. That’s just the picture I had handy. I wanted to blog about how I didn’t listen to you all about taking it easy. I worked like a mad woman yesterday and cleaned my house from top to bottom. It felt so good. After letting things go haywire for three weeks straight it felt good to have a clean carpet again. The laundry is done (thanks to my mom), the groceries are bought and put away (also thanks to my mom), the beds are made, the bathroom is clean, the cat litter and cat food is vacuumed up off the carpet… all is well again. Sigh……

And I’m fine! I am! Really! I thought I might have pulled a stitch trying to put away a 20 pound bag of rice in the cupboard where the water heater is (I know! But I have no other place to stow it!!!) but I’m fine. Just a little twinge and it was gone. I lift Baby Bug all day long and sometimes I even hoist her onto my hip that is dangerously close to incision number four. But it’s fine! It barely hurts! Maybe I didn’t even have surgery. Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe they just cut some surface cuts on my skin and charged my insurance a whole whopping lot of money. Cause I don’t feel anything.

I’m thanking God and moving on. It’s good to be healthy again. For a time there I thought I might have to live the rest of my life with pain. It was something I had to consider. I have a friend who has had serious back surgery and pain is a daily thing for her. I am in awe of that. I couldn’t do it. I hate the thought of being dependent on medication just to get through. But this is how it really is for a lot of people. So if anything this whole ordeal has taught me to be thankful.

I’m thankful but not necessarily smart. I didn’t rest a bit. We even went to the park yesterday. I had to put Baby Bug in the sling for a few minutes too (on top of my stitches!!!) just so I could get the stroller out of the trunk without having to put her down on the cement to play with oil stains and broken glass. It was a tiny bit uncomfortable but not that bad.

I miss the sling. The stroller is great but I don’t get to see her moving her arms up and down when she gets excited. She’s way out there in front of me behind the massive collapsing shade thing. If I want to look at her I have to stop walking and walk around to the front of her. I loved the sling because she was close to me. Like my own personal little friend, listening to every word I said as we ambled down the street. My mom thinks I’m nuts that I like to harness a sack of potatoes to my chest and take a walk. But I do. It’s just easier. Maneuvering a stroller up and down curbs, in between people is kind of a pain. It just doesn’t fit everywhere. Also it’s a pain in the neck to push up a hill. I’m much better at hiking up hills with something strapped to me than I am pushing something that wants to roll back onto me.

So maybe I’ll have to look into some kind of back pack. Or maybe I just need to find less hilly places to walk.

Sigh… I know this is a boring post. I wish I could hire a babysitter so I could have more time to be witty. But I guess that’s not really a high priority on the list of things to budget for.

*I think I used that title before… but again, no time for wittiness…

I think I might be part super hero. I’m almost healed from my surgery already. Or maybe it’s just a really easy surgery. I was so worried that I would be doubled over in pain for days. I thought for sure I’d be in bed for a week. I was freaking out about taking pain killers and drugging Baby Bug through my breast milk. I even asked the anesthesiologist if I could skip the pain killers and he shook his head, no. “No way,” he said. “You’re going to need those pain killers for a good while.” And he looked like he meant business. He was wielding the long sharp needles after all. I figured he knew his stuff.

But he was wrong! Ha! Ha hah! I haven’t taken a single pain pill! Toby picked up my months worth prescription of vicodin and I’m not going to take one pill! I hardly hurt at all. You know how they have that zero-to-ten pain scale where ten is the pain of having a baby and zero is no pain at all? Well, I barely got up to a three. A measly three! Nothing that three advil won’t take care of in a jiffy.

I admit I’m uncomfortable though. My right shoulder hurts sometimes (a strange side effect they told me might happen.). My back aches because I’m using different muscles to avoid using my abdominal muscles and I don’t feel like I can take a deep breath properly. It’s the breathing that’s bothering me the most but it’s not really painful. Just annoying. Oh yeah, and I can’t laugh. So don’t send me any joke emails. Cause I won’t read them. Of course Toby has been making me laugh all day which is fun but hurts.

I gave myself quite a scare in the shower this morning. I was trying to wash all the orange iodine off my body parts (that stuff won’t come off) and I inadvertently let some water splash on my bandages. You’re not really supposed to get them really wet but I was a bit careless. Well, suddenly blood started oozing out and down my abdomen. Blood! My insides are coming out!!!! Oh no! I’m never going to heal! I thought. I was so scared that I quick hopped out of the shower and never completely washed the shampoo out of my hair. I’ve been walking around all day with half washed hair. It’s not a look I’m proud of.

So anyway, unless I’m jinxing myself by being so proud of the lack of pain, I think I’m doing fine. Finey fine fine. Isn’t it weird that you can take a body part out and everything seems to continue to work? In fact I’ve eaten some foods with fat in them today and nothing sent me to the bathroom. I had a bagel with cream cheese this morning (CREAM CHEESE!!) and house special chicken from Pick-Up-Stix (CHICKEN WITH FAT!!!) this afternoon. Those aren’t exactly fat free healthy meals. But nothing happened. I’m good as new. This is really really strange. I’m just waiting for the pipes to work and I end up in the bathroom hating life.

I’m just really really thankful that everything is working out. Maybe it’s all the well wishers from this blog. Maybe you guys are magic. I think that’s it. So you deserve a big fat THANK YOU. I really needed to get better quick and all your comments and good thoughts and prayers worked. So far so good. And it’s a good thing too because you all know what it’s like to take care of a nine month old. My mom left today and I’m going to miss her.

Here are some scary pictures that will put you in the mood for Halloween. I’m home convalescing. The surgery went fine. I was scared to death that I wouldn’t wake up again, but sure enough I woke up and I seem to be doing fine. The nurses even said I looked better than most patients do coming out of surgery–health wise. I guess I’m pretty healthy and I’m going to snap right out of this in no time. Good thing too because Baby Bug is not liking the new no-nursing and no-mommy arrangement AT ALL. Poor thing. Thankfully my mom is here and Grandma is the next best thing when it comes to being rocked to sleep. My mom is the best. She sings when she rocks and then Baby Bug sings too. It’s the sweetest thing.

So far I think the hardest thing about this surgery is hearing her cry and want me and not being able to do a single thing about it. I put a pillow over my incisions and tried to hold and cuddle her but it just wasn’t good enough. She whined and carried on something else. The anesthesia narcotics should wear off by noon tomorrow so depending on how bad vicodin is for babies, I should be able to let her nurse tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll have super duper pain tolerance and be able to get by on tylenol. I don’t know. It’s hard to gage right now because I’m still flying pretty high on whatever they gave me.

In fact, other than a horrible case of hiccups that hurt like crazy, I’m feeling pretty good. It’s weird. Kinda surreal. Like maybe it’s too good to be true. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. It’s probably too early to be celebrating a quick recovery. I’m trying to be careful and not twist or turn or pull anything. I really want to get better quick and not end up in bed for days.

One good thing about being in bed is that I get to play on my computer! I haven’t had my computer to myself without the baby climbing up on my chair and begging to be picked up so she can bang on my keyboard in ages! Uninterrupted computer time! Wow! This is kinda cool. If only I didn’t feel so lightheaded and woozy.

But I’m not too woozy to upload the pictures we took the other day at the pumpkin patch. It was a really fun family outing–just Toby and I and the baby. She doesn’t seem very happy in the pictures but that is because the sun was really bright and my daughter is very good at scowling. She’s my little “scowl-ly wag”

I wanted to carve the pumpkin tonight but I think I’m just going to have to give up on that idea. I think carving or bending or walking around is off limits. And ouch! The hiccups are back. %$# hiccups!

I went to the surgeon yesterday afternoon. He’s a funny little man with dark hair and beady eyes. A grandfather probably. As we sit in his tiny little waiting room, restraining Baby Bug from ripping up the three hundred worn copies of outdated People magazines that are stacked from edge to edge on the coffee table, I hear him through the wall ask a man to drop his drawers, bend over and grab his ankles.

What? I turn to Toby with eyes wide and eyebrows lifting up underneath my bangs. Are we in the right place? Why are the walls so easy to hear through in doctor’s offices? Everything seems so dirty and low tech. Like I could be in the waiting room at a used car dealership or a mobile home park, or maybe I’m waiting to hear if I won a time share or something. A black plastic clock radio sits on an white whicker end table blinking at me, beside it sits a Gideon bible. The standard Motel 6 oil painting of a boat sitting in still water rests on the muted floral wallpaper behind us.

I don’t know what I expect of a surgeon’s waiting room, but this is not it. I am so disappointed with the field of medicine these days. When I was at the hospital getting my ultrasound, everything seemed so high tech. The machines whirred silently as images of inner-space flashed across a monitor above me. It really seemed like they were looking inside me and getting to the bottom of things. But now I’m here and I’m supposed to trust this guy who wears a funny tie? I feel like I’m in the land of doctorville where medicine is a business and this surgeon is just as happy to cut out my gallbladder as a Jiffy Lube technician is to change my air filter.

When he calls us into his office, (all of us: Toby, me and baby–which was really nice of him) he ruffles through my chart. He looks at me. He’s quiet. He seems to be enjoying some kind of inside joke. Then he shows me a paper inside the folder he is holding. It says “Brenda Ponnay, diagnosis: hemorrhoids”. Hemorrhoids!? Who said anything about hemorrhoids? I don’t have hemorrhoids. This is really not helping. I’m starting to freak out.

“So I gather you do not have hemorrhoids,” he says with a chuckle. He scratches out the offending word with a ball point pen from behind his ear. I have the feeling he sees about a thousand gallbladder patients a day and this is his way to liven things up. I am not amused but I’m so anxious to trust this man, who is supposed to be an expert, that I try to see things his way. I tell him about my pains and he rocks back and forth in his squeaky metal chair, sizing me up.

He leans forward and puts his elbows on the paper of the examining table that I am sitting on. “It’s like a game of bridge,” he says. “Do you play bridge?” Toby and I shake our heads. Neither of us have ever played bridge. “Someday you are going to have to have your gallbladder taken out. You can do it now or you can do it later.” He looks at us to see our reaction. We have none so he continues on, “You can spend the next four months talking to an intestinal bla-bla-bla bla-big-word and they might find out your pain is caused by something else. Or they might not. Or you can have your gallbladder taken out and that might solve your problem or it might not.”

And the answer is…? I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s just a great big mystery. So why not just take your gallbladder out! You don’t need it. It’s a useless body part! An extra piece that God threw in just for kicks! It’s easy to take out, so why not? It could solve everything. Or it might not. You came to a guy who takes gallbladders out, what more do you want?

What I want is to see the pictures from the ultrasound. I thought he would pull them out, show me the sludge and stick them up on the wall or something. Maybe he would have a pointer and point to the sludge. I thought he would have numbers and percentages and maybe he’d circle some things and boggle me with science. But no. There are no pictures. I can see everything in my file and it consists of the questionnaire I filled out in the waiting room, a form saying I will sell my next child if my insurance doesn’t cover all my expenses and some kind of fuzzy faxed xerox copy of something that probably is related to the ultrasound pictures. There are no pictures though. It probably just says that I am actually a candidate for gallbladder surgery.

I’m so bugged about the missing ultrasound pictures that I ask him about them. “Did you see them?” I ask. “No,” he scoffs. “I don’t read ultrasound pictures. I have readers that read them.” Oh. My bad. Like ultrasound pictures are such a waste of time for surgeons.

But seriously. I don’t mean to doubt him. I’m sure he is a very good surgeon. He probably has the steadiest hands this side of the Mississippi. I’m sure that it’s totally normal that he doesn’t “read ultrasound pictures”. It’s just that I wanted to feel a little more assured about this surgery. I know it’s routine and probably the easiest thing to do next to pulling a tooth but still it’s my body and I’m usually pretty healthy. I don’t like to mess with things. I don’t even take birth control pills because I like to keep things as natural as possible. Cutting me open, taking a body part out and then clamping it back together with METAL tags that STAY THERE FOREVER just doesn’t feel very natural.

Buuuuuuuut, neither does puking for weeks on end either. So it’s a gamble. And even though I don’t have a good feeling about it, it’s a gamble I’m going to take. (Not that I don’t mind a fat free diet. I’m doing great on rice and broccoli. I love broccoli. I found out I can have skim milk too so I’m living high on Kellogg’s Special K with strawberries. Good thing I’m allowed to have sugar.)

I set up an appointment to have the surgery on Monday at 10:45.

IN OTHER NEWS…. I owe you guys a movie. Guess who turned nine months during the great illness of 06? Stay tuned.

My doctor finally called. Did I tell you she left on maternity leave yesterday? I was fit to be tied this morning when I finally got through to her office and they told me that. What?!!! I’m just left here hanging with no news of what’s going on with my insides that hurt like they got caught in a bicycle chain?!! No follow up appointment? No nothing! Help!!!!! I can’t live like this!

Thankfully her office staff is on the ball. I told them how serious my problem was and the woman on the phone told me she would call the ultrasound place, get my report and then have another doctor call me back with my results. Then a few hours later my phone rang and it was my doctor calling from her home to give me my results. I could hear her kids in the background squabbling.

How cool is my doctor? She’s out to here pregnant (though it would have been nice to know she was leaving on maternity leave two days after I saw her), she takes care of me and THEN she calls me WHILE she is on her maternity leave AND her kids are going nuts in the background. I love her. She must know how terrible it is to feel crappy and have a baby at the same time.

So the results are this: My symptoms are not typical (I have no pain in my shoulders or upper quadrant of my body) but I do have sludge in my gallbladder. Not stones but sludge. This could be what is causing my problem or it could not. She is referring me to a surgeon so that they can access it better than she can. My doctor says that these surgeons are experts at this because they get people with theses types of symptoms all the time and they will not perform surgery unless they are 100% sure it will improve my life.

SURGERY! Yikes.

I hope it is the gallbladder though. I’m tired of this mystery illness. It would be nice to know I can avoid pain by just avoiding high fat foods. But even better I just want to yank that sucker out and be done with it. I hope I can have surgery and get better before Thanksgiving. Can you imagine not being able to eat fatty foods on THANKSGIVING DINNER!!! NO GRAVY! NO STUFFING! NO MARSHMALLOWS on top of the yams! (Wait, do marshmallows have fat in them? If not, I need some stat.) What am I going to do? I hope I can get in and get out quick and get better even quicker.

I’ve never been so sick before and been so starving. Usually if I’m going to be doing any up-chucking, the last thing I want to do is eat something but nooooooooo….I AM SO HUNGRY!!! I am literally starving to death. All I think about is what I could eat if I wasn’t sick. Cold pizza, cheesecake, meatballs, spaghetti, butternut squash with lots of butter, Reese’s peanut butter cups… man oh man am I hungry. And all I can eat is oatmeal. Out of desperation, I ask Toby what I can eat. He looks at me with a straight face and says, “Oat bran?” Great. Thanks a lot. Just what I wanted. I might as well just go eat some hay.

Toby doesn’t think it’s my gallbladder. He could be right too. It definitely is related to eating though. I get really sick about two hours after I eat anything. It just so happens that the sickest I got was from drinking a big ol’ glass of milk (but it tasted soooo good!), which is high in fat. I don’t know. I’m totally confused.

I’m just relieved that I’m seeing the surgeon tomorrow and things are moving. I’m actually feeling better on my new diet of oatmeal. Oatmeal is really boring though. I think I might try rice tonight.

I went to the ultrasound. The technician didn’t say she found anything. I didn’t press her though. She seemed very efficient in her job and reading the pictures she takes is not her job. She told me my doctor would contact me in 3-5 days. THREE to FIVE DAYS!!! Well. I don’t think so.

I’m going to call my doctor this afternoon, if she doesn’t call me first. Right now they are on their lunch break so I can’t pester them too much. And man is my doctor busy! The office only has two examining rooms. It’s just a cracker box of a doctor’s office and there were about twenty people in the waiting room!!! I had to wait to see her for over a half an hour yesterday. No worries. I could hear her in the next room talking to an overweight man about losing weight. She’s very kind and thorough so I don’t mind waiting because she spends just as much time with me. I love her.

I’m thinking since the ultrasound technician didn’t exclaim something like “Wow! Look at that tumor the size of a grapefruit!” or “Your gallbladder looks like it’s being attacked by asteroids!” that I don’t have anything wrong with my gallbladder, my spleen or my liver. I think those are all the things she checked. It was tricky deciphering the code on the monitor. “RK Liver” means what? Anyway. I think the ultrasound proved nothing. Which is good but a bummer, ’cause I just want to know what’s wrong with me already!!!

When I got home I was near faint from hunger so I was brave and made myself a bowl of oatmeal. Guess what! The oatmeal has stayed down! So far so good. It might be too soon to say though. It was 11 when I ate it. It’s 1:45 now. No major pain. Just burning and some achiness in my back that I can almost ignore. I’m even thinking I might have enough strength to go to the store since we are seriously out of groceries. Baby’s gotta have diapers too.

At 2 I’m calling my doctor and I HOPE she’s not too busy to give me some news.

Until then!

Edited to add: at 2pm left msg with dr. I guess no news is good news.

I have to admit I’m scared. I can see my bones popping out in the mirror. I like being skinny but I feel like the character in Thinner who just keeps getting skinnier and skinnier after a gypsy curses him. I’ve already lost 12 pounds in just one week and two days. It’s not right. Starvation diets never work. You always gain it back and then some.

I don’t even care about that though. I’m just scared I’m going to keep losing and losing and then I’ll start blacking out and then what? I’m just plain scared. I’m not ready to be admitted to the hospital yet. There are so many bad habits I have to train out of the baby before I let someone else take care of her full time. No nanny or babysitter will wake up with her four and five times a night just to sit with her and attempt to nurse with boobs that have no milk. She won’t take a bottle. She hates formula. No nanny is going to understand her silly pacifier ritual we go through. I haven’t written down all the important things on the grocery list like what size diaper she wears and that she doesn’t like any store bought baby food that has potatoes or peas in it.

Maybe it’s just the odd hour. Maybe it’s that I’m up at five am and it’s dark and the long fingers of nightmare-land still grip my brain. I dreamt all night long that a small dog (a min pin to be exact) was trying to shoot me with a gun. I also dreamt about loved ones dying and planning parties that got all screwed up because everyone came on the wrong day. The things that scare me…

I guess I’m scared because at my doctor’s visit yesterday she dropped the “C” word. She said there was no reason to even be afraid of getting stomach cancer but that I did have some H. pylori bacteria show up on my blood test and it would be a good idea to get rid of it because in some cases it does lead to stomach cancer. But all I heard was CANCER. Am I’m dying of stomach cancer?!!! I was just kidding before!

It’s most likely an ulcer or gallbladder stones or even still a rogue virus. She said it’s not food poisoning because usually the vomiting only lasts for two to three days. I’ve been vomiting for a week and two days. I finally figured out how to stop throwing up: stop eating. No food=no puke. Sounds like a plan. Except I can feel myself getting weaker and weaker and weaker. I can’t go on like this much longer.

And that is why my doctor moved my abdominal ultrasound up to 9am this morning. I just have to hang in there for four more hours and hopefully there will be some answers and some medication that won’t harm the baby through breast feeding. Hopefully things will get better.

But hey, look on the bright side! Only twelve more pounds and I’ll be down to what I weighed in high school! This ain’t no sinusitus anymore.