Cerebrate Good Times

The other night I woke up around 1:30 with chest pain. I was mostly annoyed that it was keeping me from sleeping, and eventually I got up to take some ibuprofen. I kept tossing and turning, however, and a couple hours later when James woke up and came in I decided I better take it more seriously. I ended up going to the emergency room, which (as Brian Regan pointed out) is a nice, relaxing drive. Someone else was checking in right in front of me with chest pain, so I guess it's all the rage right now. I went back to the triage room and they got me hooked up to an EKG machine right away. It was normal. They took some blood to check for the marker the heart releases when it's distressed. That was normal. They took a chest X-ray, which was also normal. They repeated the EKG and blood tests a couple hours later, and they were normal again. After talking with me for a while, the doctor decided to have me get a CT scan to eliminate a problem with the aorta. That came back clean as ...

l like movies. In fact, I like most of the movies that I see. Some people could say I’m not discriminating enough, and that’s fair. I think that I like to see the good in things, because enjoying things is more fun to me than just looking for flaws for the sake of doing it. Here are a couple examples. Star Wars I have always loved the original Star Wars trilogy. The prequels aren’t very good, although the story itself is pretty interesting and there are a few cool moments. When it comes to the latest trilogy, I really like them. In fact, The Last Jedi is one of my favorites, despite how controversial it is. It’s very different from other Star Wars movies, particularly Luke’s story. Star Trek If you watch the original series, or The Next Generation, Star Trek is about peace and the evolution of mankind. If you watch the current movies, or Star Trek Discovery, it’s very different. It’s become far more action-oriented, and most people would probably say it’s not being true to t...

Okay, I think I feel a little more comfortable now discussing the vague "health issues" stuff from a previous post. Last fall I had a colonoscopy and my doctor kind of led me to believe I was teetering on the edge of having cancer. A few months later I had another appointment in preparation for a follow-up scoping, and he explained things a little more. Apparently I had something called dysplasia, which is the beginning of cells mutating into cancer. There's high-grade dysplasia, and low-grade dysplasia. For months I was convinced I had the high-grade kind, thinking it was just a matter of time. But he finally explained that it was "indefinite" dysplasia, so I guess it wasn't totally confirmed that the mutations were going on. His philosophy is to treat everything that has the potential to be cancer as seriously as possible, which makes sense. But in retrospect I felt a little misled. He had me try some more intense treatments intended to reduce the infl...

All right, this is hilarious. I wasn’t sure whether to add this to the last post or what, but I think it’s funny enough for its own. Here I have been mentally preparing myself for weeks of illness, sitting around all “Woe is me.” Then once I got healthy I would have to take weeks to slowly regain any semblance of fitness so I could start running again. Then this morning I get a call from the doctor’s office, informing me that I in fact have salmonella poisoning. It wasn’t the crohn’s. It was never the crohn’s. It was freaking bacteria. I either screwed up cooking some meat or eggs, or someplace I ate made me sick. A few days before I got sick, I went out to this little burger place with a friend at work, and he also got sick last week, which we assumed was unrelated. But now he’s waiting for test results from the doctor, and we’ll see what they have to say. Is this the first time anyone has ever been happy to hear they have a thriving colony of malicious bacteria in their gut?

Thoughts going through my mind as I prepared to write this: I can literally eat anything I want and still lose weight. Some people would kill for that ability. Can that be a superpower? Six weeks ago I could run for more than three hours. Now, if I stand for more than five minutes I get light-headed. That’s pretty humbling. Whoa, that’s a little bit dramatic. It’s not like I’m dying. Then again, if I lived a hundred years ago, I would be. (I actually posted this on Facebook) I feel like I swallowed a tiny karate class, and they've been pummeling my insides for the last two days. Well, it appears that the moment I have dreaded for the past six years has finally come. The infamous Crohn’s disease has apparently decided to rear its ugly head again in my life. I know I’m far luckier than most people who have had to deal with it, since I went so long with no symptoms. For the first couple years I was worried if I ever had even the tiniest pain in the gut, but then I took my re...