Yesterday, we enjoyed waffles at Haley's parents' new home. We also had waffle parties at their house in high school, so it was fun to reminisce. Despite their protests, Dallin and I left the party early to visit some other friends. We stayed their for a few hours, and by 12:30, when we went to find our car, we couldn't find it anywhere. I had nothing but a spring sweater. Finally we managed to find a tiny sign on the unlit road that said "Authorized Vehicles Only." Turns out every one of the twenty cars on that street where people always park was parked illegally, and we had in fact been towed. We couldn't get ahold of our friends again, so we called an Über and shivered in the cold until 1:30 when the tow truck guy finally showed up. There went two weeks' worth of paychecks! The next morning, we found out that another person we were hanging out with also got her car towed, and every one else on the entire street got booted. Provo and Orem parking laws apparently believe that everyone should have a curfew and no friends, because the few visitor parking spaces in that entire complex are either reserved for the Clubhouse or have to be empty by 11 PM, and all of the streets within a mile radius have no parking allowed.
STOP HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR MY MEDICAL STORIES NOR SEE COOL MEDICAL PICTURES INCLUDING AN ULTRASOUND AND AN OTOSCOPY.
CYST:
One day I woke up in the worst abdominal pain I have ever experienced. I thought it was girl problems, but when the pain wouldn't ease up after several minutes, I felt nauseous, and couldn't stand up because I was both dizzy and hunched over in pain, I cried, "What if it's appendicitis?" Dallin called his stepmom, who'd experienced appendicitis, and then he helped me limp over to the car. We headed to Urgent Care. 45 minutes after the pain started, it finally eased up enough that I could walk if I kept my torso doubled over while keeping pressure on my lower abdomen. The doctor was worried it was an ectopic pregnancy, which would have been awful. Slowly, slowly, it started getting better. I took tests, ruling out appendicitis, ectopic pregnancy, and a kidney infection. Finally, after a couple hours, I was pretty much back to normal; I just felt sore like I'd done an insane ab workout for the rest of the day. I even took a test!
A few days later I got an ultrasound done, confirming the doctor's thoughts that I had an ovarian cyst. We don't know if it actually fully ruptured, or if a little bit of blood from the cyst leaked into my abdominal cavity. I will have to return in a few weeks to find out if it's still there.
The tech was HILARIOUS and told me he would print off a picture of the ultrasound to prank my friends. That I did. I posted a picture of it on my Instagram story with the dumb caption, "WHAT DO YOU SEE?" followed by a second picture that said "JK, I'm not pregnant, it was just a checkup." I think I crack myself up too much. I didn't tell Dallin I was doing this, and no one said anything to me on the first day, but Dallin got a couple texts congratulating him. His brother texted him, "Bruh. You ready to be a dad already?" My mom and I also eventually got texts from people who got freaked out when they first saw the black and white image before they realized there was nothing to look at. Even my friends who literally knew why I went to urgent care still jumped in surprise.
DYSPNEA:
My dyspnea {shortness of breath} has flared up this week. The symptoms are fairly asthma-like, according to Dallin, who had asthma as a kid. We have ruled out heart problems, anemia, environmental allergy, pulmonary embolism, and any abnormalities visible in an X-ray of my chest cavity. The second doctor was convinced it was anxiety, because it DOES happen when I was nervous, but he brushed it off when I said that it happens OFTEN when I am totally calm and just exerting myself physically. Recently my symptoms have occurred, for example, when I was ax throwing--I got so lightheaded I had to sit down twice {lightheadedness has only ever happened a couple times}. For the past couple days, I have a difficult time getting a full breath literally every hour between classes when I am walking to the next building with my backpack on. In both of these instances, I am COMPLETELY calm. However, I have noticed that I do tend to hold my breath when I got nervous, sad, or stressed, and I wonder if that makes it worse.
Yesterday the symptoms were on and off throughout the day, and then they lasted without rest for several hours in the evening. The best way to describe it is constantly feeling like I couldn't take a deep enough breath to satisfy me, with a dull ache in the chest cavity/lungs that felt as if they needed to be stretched. My back would pop sometimes when trying to get a breath; I would have ten-minute long spells of constantly feeling the need to yawn as if that would make the dyspnea go away. Dallin even commented on my loud or vocalized exhales while I heaved my shoulders and moved my body forward to try and get the oxygen in.
I don't know what's going on. Maybe the second doctor was right and it's anxiety, but then I want to know why it's happening all of those other instances, and if there is any way to relieve the symptoms without sticking me on anti-anxiety meds. I am so curious to see what the specialist says this next time, now that I have created a several-day-long diary of every time the symptoms happen. He is incredibly nice and has been really trying to think through all the possibilities.
TYMPANOSCLEROSIS:
I LOVE being a TA for Hearing Science. We did a video otoscopy in class, and we looked at several student's healthy ears before I begged the professor to take a look at mine. I had always wanted to see my tympanic membrane (eardrum)--I explained to the class beforehand that my eardrum had ruptured a couple times and that I had gotten tubes twice because of chronic otitis media (ear infections) as a kid. The whole class got to see cerumen (ear wax), so that was embarrassing for sure, but it was also incredibly cool see a real-life example of tympanosclerosis (scarring on the ear drum) as taught in lecture! In the pictures below, the white splotches on the pink membrane are all scars. A few days later, the professor performed a whole audiogram on me and found that I have a mild conductive hearing loss for the low frequencies in my left ear. Although I don't have this particular picture, I got to see that an entire HALF of my left tympanic membrane is white with scar tissue.
The next day I asked a different audiology professor if tympanosclerosis ever improves, but he went off on a slippery slope tangent that "tympanosclerosis is caused my otitis media. If you have otitis media, it's critical to get treated, or it could progress into mastoiditis, and then eat through the temporal bone, and infect the meninges, and then you could die from meningitis." The whole class went silent. "What I got from this whole thing is that Katie is going to die," one of my friends texted in the group chat. Not quite. I haven't had an ear infection in years, haha.
