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.

I am a patient boy...I wait I wait I wait I wait.....

To hear about the visit with the almighty doctor at UCSF. What exactly did the the Wizard of Oz have to say? What was it like being in that
creepy looking building that loomed in the distance when I lived in the Outer Sunset? Grab a beer, a comfy seat, and read up.

My brother drove my mom and I over. I pressed my face against passenger side window, tried not to feel queasy, and hid teary eyes behind my totally fucking awesome checkerboard Kanye West sunglasses. Even though I knew going to UCSF was the beginning of finding the answers I need to get better, I just couldn't shake the feeling of impending doom. We zigzagged through Hayes Valley, Nopa, Upper Haight, and then through Cole Valley, I kept fighting the urge to jump out of the car and run. We finally drove up the last hill, pulled up in front of 350 Parnassus Ave, and I slunked out of the car and shuffled up to the large glass doors and up to the elevator.

The office itself wasn't anything special. Very much a small, cramped office on the corner of the fourth floor with a "built in the 70s" kind of vibe. The grumpy, Russian receptionist shoved paperwork at me. I filled it out and joined my mom on a chair in the waiting room. There were a couple of random cougars were giving me the tv eye. It was a rare instance where I wished I would have had the one and only Captain Chase Corum at my side instead of my mom, but then I realized that the cheap Tiffany's jewelry wearing ladies prolly aren't that into low rent thirty something dudes that like stoner metal. Finally the nurse came and got me and away we went.

The nurse practitioner grilled me about my health for about half an hour before bringing me into an exam room and giving me really the first thorough exam I have gotten from any doctor since this whole fucking mess started. After she wrapped that up, the man, the myth, the legend, the guy I crawled out of the hood for, finally came in to see me. He asked me if I had any other significant illnesses throughout life, and about other circumstances surrounding me life at the time of the onset of all these problems. At the end of the conversation, his prognosis is that there is most definitely something wrong with me, but can't distinguish whether it's a huge, horrific problem, or a smaller issue that has magnified over time due to stress and time passing. He ordered an ultrasound of my gall bladder, another gall bladder specific test, some more specific blood tests, and a second endoscopy with a specific small intestine biopsy. He told me to unrestrict my diet because he wants to see my body at it's most annoyed and fucked up. He wants the best samples he can get. We all shook hands, I got another prescription for nausea suppositories (the sexiest way to feel better), and I headed back to my grandparents' apartment.

Was it a victory? Sure. Is it a the start of the end? Possibly. But no matter what you call it, I'm still waiting. I had an amazing day yesterday cruising around Oakland with friends and I felt pretty good, but I started my morning by throwing up and had to take a 3 hour time out from socializing to throw up again and rehydrate.. Today I left my cousins housewarming party and seeing a lot of my family because I didn't feel bloody diarhea was an appropriate house warming gift for my cousin Tony.

Tomorrow a close friend comes back into town, and Monday I schedule all my tests. I am trying to change the tide of my feelings and get my hope to find an end to this nightmare, but I can't put my head in the clouds when my guts decide to rip my back down to Earth and into my grandfather's black tiled bathroom.

Sorry for the missed day. I'll get back to my daily blog hustle tomorrow.