DISCLAIMER- if you have a weak stomach, skip this post completely. I am sharing this because there’s far too much of a god damn stigma about some of these health issues that need to be addressed as well as the health care crisis in Amerikkka at the moment.

A little back story- I have never been the picture of perfect health. GI issues have always been a thing for me. My earliest memories were of me being in hysterics over suppositories and Metamucil. I named that nasty ass product “poo poo pellets” since they look like literal hamster shit.

At 21 years old I started with routine colonoscopies. It was told to me my first screening that I needed to avoid gluten. At that age I was a raging drug addict on a suicide mission who did not listen. Add chronic stomach issues, a horrific diet filled with gluten, and copious amounts of opiates and it’s a literal shit show.

For this post I am not going to go into my 17463 other health issues but instead focus on just the GI one. I’m currently writing this 12 hours post release from the hospital and it’s the more important of the issues to write on.

For months I was losing weight but I gaslit myself into thinking that it was from walking more and removing any alcohol or coffee from my diet. My endocrinologist knew something was wrong, with my symptoms she was questioning celiac or addisons disease. Symptoms included severe fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, and random rashes.

Addisons testing came back negative- I made the choice to just go gluten free on 9/11 because I remembered the instructions 16 years ago to cut it. The gluten detox is worse than coming off opiates by a landslide. I have never craved fentanyl in the manner in which I crave gluten filled foods. With the detox came a fear of food, a concern of malnutrition, and a full blown regression.

Post detox my mental health improved but 6 days ago I started feeling a pressure like you have when in active labor and I was literally convinced my ass was falling out of my body. As a good former Irish catholic we don’t discuss these things so I didn’t go in right away or ask a doctor when I started producing quarts of what I thought was black oil out of my body. Turns out that wasn’t oil that was fucking blood.

Here’s where the healthcare crisis comes into play. 10/15 I went to our local emergency room (rookie move as I should have done urgent care so they could have fast tracked imaging- remember that one people because ERs are going to get way worse nationwide). Well I went into the ER at 10:10am and it took 7 hours to be brought to any form of a room. Imagine if you will- you think your asshole is hanging out of your body and you’ve turned into a human jiffy lube and you’re stranded in an ER that’s got a massive amount of non local EMTs bringing in patients.

After talking to the staff and learning more about this hospitals exact situation I will say this as nicely as possible- we are all fucked. Massachusetts is a wealthy state and we had hospital closures going on in the past few years and it’s only getting worse with the current administration and the threat to Medicaid.

They do not have enough hospitals to treat the number of sick people we have in this country. Losing of government funded insurance is going to be catastrophic. My ER trip was 14 hours to get a cat scan, some blood work, and a piece of paper with a referral to a specialist because they can’t diagnose or treat. ER Beds are full of people waiting for placement in other hospitals/units of the same hospital. Wait times are going to get longer and longer and without the federal funding from our elderly and children on Medicare this is going to effect those in private insurance as well.

I don’t have any answers for my health issues at this time just referrals and waiting for exploratory surgery to get more details (I will update this as I go and share more on my Graves’ disease and myasthenia gravis as both of those aren’t discussed enough either and thyroid diseases are ignored far too often by doctors/patients).

Again bare with me on the format of these, my last blogging experience was in 2004😂