Vampires, Jehovah's Witnesses, The Probability of My Survival, and Kinks Even Weirder than Adult Babies

I'm still sick from powerful medication and am still looking very much like the twelve-to-sixteen-year-old-girl who was taunted as  "Anorexis," but I'm beginning to figure this thing out slowly. I take the medication at 6:00 a.m. It gradually works its way into my system until by 10:00 a.m., when I am worthless to the human race unless someone is conducting some sort of research for which they actually need, for research purposes,  vomitus, or even perhaps something that is expelled from another orifice.  My brother (How does he know some of such things while others elude him seemingly forever? Some sitcom -- "Scrubs," I think,  had a presumably intentional error of displaying a chest X-ray backward on an illuminator. Matthew used to watch the show each morning while he ate breakfast our first year of med school, and he never commented on it. Curiosity got the better of me, and near the end of the school year, I asked him what looked funny about that X-ray. He had no idea and presumably had not yet, after nearly a year of anatomy lab, learned the differences between the right lung and the left) tells me that there are people who will actually pay for such by-products to fulfill their kinks, but I want no part of such sick-in-the-head-ness. And to think I thought adult babies were weird. I understand why someone might want to illegally purchase one of my kidneys or maybe even my old kidney stone, but barf? Holy Mother of God! To what depths is the world sinking? P.S. If you want to know anything like how best to sell the scrapings from under your fingernails or your used contact lenses, ask me and I'll check it out with Matthew for you. He's sure to have plenty of insight.

Then I'm out of commission for the rest of the day. I sleep or don't sleep,but even if I'm lucky enough to sleep, I feel as though I am dying. The time does pass more quickly if I sleep, though. If I have the TV on or have any music playing when I sleep, it all gets incorporated into a sort of Bohemian-Rhapsody-level-of-weirdness dream from which I try to emerge but can't, where it feels like I'm smothering in my sheets or my arms are tangled under me and I cannot free them to move. It could be a song as tame as a Mozart flute andante and it would still turn into a nightmare about vampires or Jehovah's Witnesses chasing me.

Somewhere around almost 2:00 a.m.I  wake up and start to feel almost human again. I try to get fluids down, because if i cannot, I have to have another iV. By 4:00 a.m., I'm ready to eat, as in ginger ale and soda crackers.  I won't absorb all the nutrients, but as bad as barfing is, it's worse to go through the motions when there's absolutely nothing to come out. Dry heaves are almost as bad as it gets. Two things are worse. One I will share with you, which is when the barf comes out of your mouth and nose simultaneously. The other one is too gross to share. If you pondered for long enough, you would come close to guessing correctly, so I'll leave it to you to decide just how intensely you want to ponder.

The epidemiologist I'm seeing told me that what I'm experiencing resembles the reaction to certain forms of  chemotherapy except that I'm not going to lose much hair, though if I stayed on this drug for long enough, she said, I probably would. It differs also in that, barring a positive test, I'll be done with it for good in something like 22 days. (I'm beginning to lose track.) She said it's also a lot like a major bout with hyperemesis  gravidarium -- the pregnancy-accompanying morning sickness that some women are unfortunate enough to experience that doesn't stop once high noon hits and often lands women in the hospital. Duchess Katherine, the mother of those adorable toddlers Prince George and Princess Charlotte (Jaci doesn't like them, but I find them perfectly charming) had a particularly nasty bout of hyperemesis gravidarium and spent time in the hospital with, I believe, both pregnancies. My mom never had the grave form of morning sickness, which was a good thing, as she barely birthed healthy twins once out of two tries even as it was. Had she been nutrition-compromised, I'm not sure what might have happened to me, as roly-poly 6 lb, 9 oz. Matthew was clearly the placenta hog of the two of us, with me weighing in at 2 lbs, 2 oz., or 2 lbs 4 oz., depending upon which birth certificate and hospital record one chooses to believe; as far as other matters are concerned, Mathew's level of acumen could only have gone in one direction as a result of maternal prenatal hyperemesis gravidarium,  and we all know he has few IQ points to spare as it stands..

I'm becoming one much like of those old ladies who talks about nothing but what ails her. I promise soon -- not immediately, but very, very soon, to change the topics of my discourse.