Twitterpied

I did it.

I resisted as long as I could.

But in order to vote, I had to.

   
I joined twitter. I think I might use this one just to post things about vasculitis and what not- see if I can get any followers. HA.


I can be found here: https://twitter.com/#!/AkujiWit

I did it so I can vote for the vasculitis foundation :) You should too, it's for a great cause!

Hurk Hurk

Bet you can't tell what this post is going to be about! Warning, this one might get a bit nasty.

Back in October it was decided that maybe part of, or most of, my dry heaving/gagging/nausea/sometimes vomiting was due to a gall stone instead of my chemo. A single thing, about an inch to an inch and a half wide wedged in the neck of my gall bladder, the removal of which cost me an overnight stay in the hospital watching bad TV and having my attempts at sleep forever frustrated by a very determined candy striper that wouldn't leave the lights alone in my room.

For a time this seemed to help the sometimes vomiting portion of my problem. Things were looking great!

Then, as November began its too quick turn into December things began to go terribly wrong. My equation went from dry heaving/gagging/nausea/sometimes vomiting to VOMITING EVERYDAY with a side of dry heaving/gagging/sometimes nausea.

I find myself retching into the toilet every time I eat. Hard enough that my ribs pop, my neck cracks and I swear one time my shoe was expelled past my lips to float in the bowl like some limp, dead fish.

Like the other day. I get it into my head to do a little bit of a stir fry thing for lunch. I put the veggies in the pan, got some noodles to put in there, things were going awesome. It was going to taste delicious and be the best lunch I've ever fixed for myself ever. Not too mention the fact that it was healthy! Double points!Not too mention the fact that it tasted wonderful.

It tasted wonderful all the way to the bathroom where I then purged everything. I don't even think I made it all the way into the bathroom for that one. It's just a good thing I have decent aim.

After upchucking not just my meal, but probably everything I had eaten in the last seven years, I began to wonder how it was that I am still so fat. That's when it came to me.

Vegetables.

My meal was kind of healthy and apparently hard to digest. I don't think it's confirmed at all, but, my theory is that junk food is just easy to process since there's nothing to it but calories.

This makes me sad, I actually like vegetables and fruit.

Now, there's some question as to whether my vomiting is due to my gall bladder or not. The doctors were hoping having it out would solve the problem, but it might actually be due to my Imuran so they've also lowered that at the moment to see if it would help. It hasn't.

But I am well on my way to figuring out the possibilities of puking up your own bones!

More Awareness

I know, I know, I talk about awareness A LOT, but we always need more of it. Always.

For many awareness equals ribbons! Lots and lots of ribbons!

Vasculitis doesn't have it's own ribbon, unfortunately. Currently we are kind of borrowing the ribbon color for AIDS (it's AIDS awareness day, BTW) which causes some problems. For one thing, it make people assume you have AIDS for another, it can lessen the impact of the AIDS awareness ribbons. This isn't something we want, but we're kind of limited in color options.

AIDS had the first ribbon, it was red. The Susan G. Kolman foundation then latched onto this idea of ribbons and changed the color to pink for themselves (funny, they can take the ribbon idea from AIDS but when the Vasculitis Foundation wanted to use the word "cure" in their slogan Susan G. Kolman threatened to sue because it would "confuse people").

There are many different ways some of us are trying to raise awareness for ourselves. Weggies Unite suggests having a a pajama AI day. Check out the link, it is an awesome idea! Maybe if we can get a symbol for ourselves we can make actual autoimmune pajamas for people to buy and wear.

We tried the Chase Giving thing, but apparently there were issues with certain groups cheating and using robot voters. We're still trying, several people have started doing drives of their own, trying to raise awareness in their own ways. Friends can help too. They can read about vasculitis, they can talk to others about vasculitis, suggest it for school fundraisers, work fundraisers. Whatever. Every little drop in the bucket helps!