The Highs and Lows

Today was a day I had been looking forward to for a long time. Make fun of me all you want, but today was Wild 94.9's Wild Jam concert featuring Drake, who as pop as he may be, is one of my favorite rap/hip hop/urban/whatever artists currently out there, and my good friend was able to get me into the show for free. I was super fucking excited to see a dude who I had been pretty fucking into since last summer, and it was going to be nice to get out of town for the night. So I finished up a rather lackluster night of Djing at Eli's last night, sped home, and fell asleep as early as I could, but it was hard because honestly it was like how a little kid feels trying to sleep on Christmas Eve.

When I woke up today, I had a couple of missed phone calls from my internist. I am not a particularly big fan of using the phone in general, so I figured I'd get back to him when I was damn good and ready, and hopped in the shower. I hadn't been in the shower for more than three minutes when I heard my grandma pounding on the bathroom door and telling me that Dr. Chen was on the phone, Now, as I have stated in earlier posts, tensions in this apartment have been running a tad high due to being in such close quarters under the stress of me being sick combined with the generational differences in methods of coping with illness and stress, but I know that my grandma wouldn't be pounding on the bathroom door mid shower for no good reason. I told her I'd be out in a minute, turned off the shower, grabbed a towel, and went into the kitchen to get the phone.

On my Tuesday doctor's visit, my doctor ordered some blood tests, specifically for my liver, kidney, and thyroid. Almost in passing, I had mentioned to him that my sex drive had been more or less non-existent over the last two months. I told him I'm aware that a 30 year old male shouldn't have that perma-boner, fuck anything that walks libido of a teenager, but I figure I am going to tell my doctors anything that's weird or out of character for me because it may lead to finding an end to all this suffering and bullshit I'm going through. My doctor decided to test my testosterone for the hell of it. Low sex drive is normal in people suffering from depression, but hey, what the hell? They already were sticking a needle in me anyway, what's a little more blood, right?

He had called me back to tell me that my liver, kidney, and thyroid tests had all come back normal, but something was seriously wrong with my testosterone. I asked him to explain to me what that meant.

According to my doctor, the average range of the testosterone level of an adult male is between 200 and 800. A thirty year old male in relative good health should be somewhere around the 500 range. What level was I, you ask? 34.

Yeah, you read that right 34. Not even in triple fucking digits. Not even the low side of normal. If you want my term for being that far off of the normal range, it would be PRETTY FUCKED UP.

He had ran some tests regarding my pituitary gland, and the findings to that were also not up to par. He told me he had already referred me to an endocrinologist, order two very specific blood test that the endocrinologist would need to start her work, and ordered me an MRI for my brain. His early prognosis is that I have a tumor in, or near my pituitary gland, which is located a the base of my brain at the top of my neck, and that it would have to be cut out in order to render this problem solved. He said that while it isn't necessarily related, he wouldn't rule out all of my gastrointestinal issues being a side effect of this gland problem, but that would have to be something that was studied and documented after i had addressed the pituitary issue.

So, to sum that up in a real short sentence, brain surgery is in my near future.

When I got off the phone, I didn't really know how to feel. On one hand, this was the first bit of medical info I have gotten since all of this started that actually had like, a tangible end to it. It was the first thing a doctor had said to me that made some sort of sense, and discovered a problem that had a solution. On the other hand, its a fucking TUMOR that requires fucking BRAIN SURGERY. That's a little more of a big deal than like, getting your wisdom teeth pulled.

I called my parents, let my besets of friends know, let some other people know, then got it together enough to head down to the show. I mean, tumor or not, fucking Drizzy was playing tonight and I wasn't about to miss that for anything. His set was incredible, and it completely got my mind off of my health for 45 minutes. However, I headed back to Oakland from San Jose, stopped by a friends, and before I knew it, I was back to being alone in my room with the weight of this new found discovery bearing down on me like a whole new, much larger monkey is now on my back,

So now its 2:23am, I'm eating graham crackers and drinking cranberry juice, and riding a pharmaceutical buzz (sorry family, you drink wine or smoke weed, I eat the valium that I'm prescribed, accept reality). I have lived through hard times, walked through the fire, made mistakes and took lessons away from them, and am not one to cower in the face of adversity. It still kills me, however, to think back to June of 2010 and think of how happy and normal my life was going. I had a girlfriend I loved, a job I could tolerate, plans to go to grad school, was playing great music with great friends, and watched all of that slip away from me as I puked and shitted and cramped and cried alone in my grandparents' guest room. I am not asking for free ride. I am not asking for life to be easy. I just want life to not be complicated for like, a year of my life. I want to not have to fight, to be brave, to be strong, to have to endure misery, just for like, a year. How the fuck did I go from riding my bike freely down Broadway every morning to work, bullshitting with Greg, making dinner with Paisley, and playing shows with Loose Endz, to losing 30 lbs and screaming at my grandmother about how i have given up hope on ever finding a cause for my sickness and how I have thought about throwing myself off of the seventh floor balcony of their apartment on more than one occasion? And now, when an answer may have finally presented itself, it mostly likely will involve cutting the base of my skull open to remove some shit from a gland? What the fuck bro?

I've cried more in the last six months than I have in my entire life. I've thrown up more in the last six months than most people probably do in a lifetime. I won't get into the diarrhea because its just downright unpleasant. I have tried to keep my head up and to not put this on everyone I know, and been told I was too self-absorbed to be a good friend. I have cut out negative elements of my life. I have been told that I am too candid in public about how I feel, and that the few small things I do to keep the illusion of having a regular adult life are either counterproductive to my health or detrimental to my feeling better. Essentially, I am failing people at even being sick. I have taken all of this and still I pull myself out of bed, in the morning, in the afternoon, and sometimes after dark. I have done everything every doctor has told me to do. I shit onto saran wrap and scooped into vials and dropped them off to be mailed somewhere and examined. I have gotten so much blood drawn I have track marks. I take antibiotics, anti depressants, anti nausea meds, anti anxiety meds, all of which have side effects that make me feel just as sick, albeit different sick, than i feel anyway.

After doing all that, I now get told that the key to getting this all fixed is going to be a bone saw, a scalpel, anesthesia, and an incredible amount of pain and discomfort.

While I am happy to finally get a lead on something that may actually put an end to all of this, the severity of what the cure may actually be is incredibly soul crushing, and its very hard to smile and keep my head up when brain surgery looms over my future like a squall over open ocean.

I just want a few months of nothing. Of just existing. I don't even remember what that's like. I don't even remember what being me in average health feels like anymore.

I'd like to thank Dre Stewart for getting me into the show tonight, and continually doing me favors like that whenever he gets the chance. I don't ever take what you do, or our friendship for granted, and I look forward to gladly being able to return the favor in any way I can throughout our friendship in the future.

I'd like to thank my family and friends for putting up with me and all of this, and for putting up with however this unfolds in my future. I am fucking scared and angry and puzzled. I am sure I will snap on some of you, say horrifically scary things to others, or perhaps clam up and fall off the face of the earth and not be around for others. I am only a 30 year old with less than perfect social skills who has never been this sick before in his life. I am doing the best I can, and I know that sometimes my best sucks. Just bare with me. I wouldn't wish how I feel right now on anyone in the world. Not even anyone on that very short list in the back of my mind of people who I fucking despise with every inch of my being.

I just want to be me. I am scared of what my future holds, and fuck, I don't even know how to keep talking about this. I am crying all over my keyboard right now. I should probably just shut the fuck up and go to bed.

Either way, today was a day that for 45 minutes, I felt like I was on top of the world screaming along with 15000 other kids to a Canadian rapper who knows to sing, and was pulled to the lowest depths of hell dwelling over the fact that I have to get my skull cut the fuck open.

"...and you just tell me what you down for. Anything you down for. I know things have changed; know I used to be around more, but you should miss me a little when I'm gone. i just hope you miss me a little when I'm gone...gone...gone..."

I don't want the news, I have no use for it

Friday was by far one of the most fucked days of my entire life. I had no idea what was coming my way.

So after a night of staring up at the ceiling because sleep and I have a very touch and go relationship these days, I pulled myself together and headed down to the car with my grandma. We drove over the bridge and my phone kept beeping with well wishes and funny anecdotes to cheer me up, but there really wasn't anything that was going to ease my mind. It was a rare morning where I actually felt hungry when I woke up, but due to medical restrictions, there was no possible way for me to eat food this morning. Traffic on the bridge wasn't so bad, and we got to 400 Parnassus Ave early for my first appointment.

The first appointment I had this morning was un ultrasound. I was lead into a dark room by a young Asian nurse, told to take off my shirt, put on a hospital gown, and lay down on a reclining chair. The nurse then squirted warm lube onto my abdomen. Its not uncommon for guys to have fantasies about asian women, dark rooms, and warm lube, but I guarantee that this isn't what most guys have in mind. For the next thirty minutes, the nurse ran a plastic tool with a rolling edge over every square inch of my abdomen. Part of the restrictions for the tests were no food six hours before the test. I hadn't eaten anything but Wheat Thins since midnight, so when the nurse asked If I had breakfast and looked at me funny when I said no, my mind instantly went WHAT. THE. FUCK. However, it is clearly posted all over the ultrasound department that the person administering the test is merely a technician, and they are not qualified to answer anything regarding the results of your ultrasound. Hey UCSF, if you don't want your patients asking questions, tell your lab techs to keep a straight face when they see some weird shit. Dicks.

When we finished at the ultrasound department, there was about an hour and a half to kill before my next appointment. I wrote in my last entry about how I couldn't read my doctors handwriting because it looked like black metal font and there were undecipherable words written on the test order. Well, after taking a second look at the sheet, I was a little wrong. There was one word that clearly stood out that I had either overlooked or blocked out mentally: INJECTION. Seeing as how I actually felt like I was starving, and no matter how interesting Chris Nieratko's Skinema is, waiting in the food court would have drove me insane. Grandma and I decided to head to the other appointment early to see if maybe I could get in there early. It seemed unlikely, but hey, you know never know, right?

We headed to 505 Parnassus Ave and took the elevator to the third floor. Upon going to the third floor, I saw a sign that scared the absolute shit out of me: NUCLEAR DIAGNOSTICS. Let's do the mental math here: nuclear means radioactive elements often used in bombs that destroy everything within a couple hundred miles of where they detonate, and diagnostics are means to diagnose or uncover a health issue. I quickly realized that my morning took a turn for the worst. We walked up to the check in desk and waited as the young, brunette nurse in purple scrubs apathetically argued with a patient over the phone over an appointment time. When she hung up the phone, I handed her my sheet, explained that I knew I was here early, and asked if it would be remotely possible for me to be seen earlier than 11. She told me she would look into it. That wasn't my only question though....

"So what exactly is a HIDA Scan with a CCK Injection?" I asked.

"Oh, um, it means they're going to take a bunch of pictures of your abdomen and kidneys," she answered in an odd, uneasy tone.

Listen lady, you're cute, but you fucking fail at keeping a poker face.

We sat down to wait, and I nervously finished reading Ben Snakepit's new anthology, Life in the Jugular Vein (which is really good). Twenty minutes go by and a male lab tech calls my name, and leads my grandma and I down to another, smaller waiting room. The lab tech, Craig, told me that I would need to be outfitted with an IV, and lead me into a triage station to get me ready. As we are walking into the triage, I figured that this guy would know what the HIDA scan/CCK Injection is. He won't bullshit me, right? So I ask him. I really wasn't prepared for the answer.

"Well...we are going to shoot radioactive material into your blood, which will be absorbed into your liver by the (insert sciencey as fuck word), which is where bile is made. Once its made into bile, were going to track how it gets to the gall bladder. After an hour, we are going to inject the CCK, which is a chemical that makes your gall bladder contract, releasing the radioactive stuff out of your gall bladder. Don't worry though, there aren't any side effects or anything like that. So let's find your vein here...."

Uh...what?

Craig gets my IV in, and walks me back to the waiting room. Seeing as how it had been eleven hours since my last meal of Wheat Thins, I didn't have a lot of gas left in the tank, so Craig had to keep me from falling over three or four times on the way back to the waiting room. I sat back down, attempted to read, but realized I was still too nauseous from the IV and had to put my head between my legs. Five minutes later, Craig came and got my grandma and I, and took us to the testing area.

As we entered the room, to the left was a large, box shaped machine with a bed coming out of the middle of it. Craig told me to lay on the bed, and then slid the bed under the box. He attached a bag of sketchy looking liquid to my IV, lowered the large, square camera down so that there was about two inches of room between the camera and my chest, hit a few buttons, and the party started. I felt every bit of that liquid go into my arm, and I was overcome with this feeling of great discomfort. I instantly had the urge to shift my body as the liquid pumped itself in. It wasn't painful, but it took everything I had to not push my way out of the camera, and I kept writhing and moving side to side the best I could given the small amount of room I had. It was the longest hour of my life. Luckily enough, I managed to fall asleep for about twenty minutes, but was woken up by a family who had a seven year old sun receiving a CT Scan next door. The only solace I had was taken by a poor kid who I'm sure had no idea how bummed he was going to be in a couple of minutes.

At the end of what seemed like six or seven years, Craig came back wheeling a table with a small appliance fitted with a tube of clear liquid in a plunger on top, with a connectable IV tube coming out of it. I am not a doctor, I'm not even a smart man all the time, but my Spidey sense knew enough to know that what was on that table was bad, bad news.

"So I'm going to start the CCK Injection. We are going to infuse the CCK into your bloodstream over fifteen minutes, then observe for another fifteen minutes. Oh, you may experience some nausea or slight pain, but that really depends on how your body is."

By nausea and slight pain, Craig meant severe, shooting pains that I couldn't even react to because I had no room to move. Even though it was only my gall bladder contracting, it felt like my entire stomach was trying to fight itself. The last thirty minutes of that test was abosolutely agonizing. After the appointment, I had plans with my grandma to go out to a celebratory lunch. I quickly realized that any plans I thought I was going to be able to keep on Friday were out the fucking window. My life was hijacked. Again.

Finally, the torture ended. The camera was lifted, the bed was moved outward, Craig pulled my IV out, and my grandma and I were sent on our way. I don't know how I looked when I made that walk back to the car, but I know that I couldn't stand up straight and that I was out of my fucking mind if I thought I was going to be eating at the Cheesecake Factory anytime soon. We eventually got back to the car, drove back to Oakland, and I had a couple of eggs before passing out for hours.

Could anyone tell me what's wrong at that day? Of course not. I woke up Friday night feeling dirty, gross, depressed, and still without an answer. They said the radioactive chemical had no side effects, but I haven't felt off like this since getting this sick. So I went through hell and back and I still have to wait and wonder. I know no more now then I did Thursday night other than the HIDA Scan fucking sucks.

To sum it all up, my body went through hell and I still don't know what's wrong. Yay science.