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Thank you everyone for your well wishes...Yes, I am alive! Thanks largely to my dear husband who made sure I didn’t gnaw my arm off during one of my daily pain seizures, or starve to death.* It was a rough weekend. You could tell just by what we had on: J was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a camouflage shirt he found in a bag of free clothing years ago, and I was wearing…oh, who knows…a dry-cleaning bag? I was in too much pain to notice.

Anyway, it is a good sign today that we are both in fresh outfits. I’m still afraid of the shower, as my last cocky attempt at clean living was met with an hour of agonized writhing and shouting shortly thereafter. (Showering was painful because of uh, all the standing. Tricky stuff, that standing upright!)

Had my follow-up visit with an unfamiliar doctor this morning—and any time you visit a new doctor for ‘female trouble,’ your nerves are bound to get a workout. This one entered the exam room before I was ready, which was embarrassing enough, but then I had to sit and discuss my bowel habits with him afterwards. I can honestly say this is the first time I uttered the phrase, “I had a BM on Saturday” to another human being, as nonchalant as “I had a V8.” But what was I going to say, “I dropped the Browns off at the Super Bowl?”**

The verdict? I have a giant, intact cyst on my left ovary, but the stabby-stabby-pukey pain is on my right side…which led my doctor to guess that I’d also had a cyst on my right, and it got tired of the party and ruptured last week. Wheee! Best party favor ever! Anyway, I am praying that Lefty doesn’t also go piñata on my ass and model the inappropriate behavior of Righty. I have another appointment in six weeks, this one for an ultrasound, to see what Lefty’s up to. He will either ‘go quietly into the night’ on his own, or he may need a little help from the bouncers to exit the facility.

This is all necessary because I want a bun in the oven. Let’s just hope I have the self-cleaning variety.

*He even sautéed some mustard greens, shiitake mushrooms, and garlic for me! Mr. Supersecret Burger King Himself!

**So, have you ever ‘passed’ a Rubik’s Cube? Yeah. Fun lil’ side effect of the painkillers.