sickness (aka The Worms Aren't Happy)

As you can see from my china posts... I started to get pretty sick towards the end of the first week... you will see as I post more how sick I got and how un-fun it was.

The bad part about it is that I am still sick. I lost about 7 lbs while I was in China, another 3 once I got home. Now its not a huge deal, I had some water weight from stupid stupid birth control (which im off now, yay!) to lose, so I just got back down to the weight that I was before I started all that hormonal bs...

But my tummy is STILL quite unhappy.

So I got to poop in a cup.

Do you know how difficult that is? Actually, to be quite honest, its not as hard as you would think... but I can imagine that people who arent quite as ambulatory as I am might have problems spatially.... and if you dont play with bodily specimens every day at work like me, it might be a little gross. But it was okay. And my co-workers have taken the liberty of mocking me at every turn because of it... but anyway...

The stool culture (for bacteria... salmonella, shigella, camphylobacter, and a couple other major ones) was negative... and the initial ova and parasite assay (for Giardia and Cryptosporidium, the two main "worms" in the States) came back negative too.


I was rather dismayed. See... I would rather KNOW what the heck is wrong than to just have stomach issues every day that I cant treat.


So, since I have been to China (and back!), my clinical history suggests that it should be sent out to California for a full o/p assay to check for all of the different types of worms and eggs and crud. I called my doctor several times last week leaving messages to this effect. I finally got someone on the phone today who assured me that it WAS sent out for a full o/p and that it was negative. I dunno, I felt funny about it... so I came into work, and lo and behold, they HADNT sent it out, they HADNT called... so I got the micro supervisor to send it out.

but I was thinking, what if I was some poor little old lady with diarrhea who didnt know any better... I would just think the problem was ME. And maybe, in the end, it IS me, I dont know that yet... but it sucks that if I didnt work here at the hospital, I would never have known that it wasnt sent out to california and I would just be suffering away, no closer to any solution.

I guess my main worry is losing more weight. I am reasonably constant right now, which is good, but if it starts to drop again... well... I guess the point at the story is that I actually kinda hope that I do have worms. At least then I would know.



Sorry if I grossed you out.