Finally went to see a specialist this morning. He told me things I did not want to hear.

The location and severity of my pain worried him: he agreed with my self-diagnosis of diaphragmatic endo. Which of course is exceedingly harder to treat than normal pelvic endo since it is much less accessible and cannot be dealt with via laparoscopy.

In short, I need to get myself a diagnostic laparoscopy in the near future and then count my chickens. Or whatever. I should be able to get the diagnostic surgery set up for a few weeks after I get back here from the States, or thereabouts.

The whole thing makes me want to cry. I am SO DAMN SICK of this pain all the time, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, I find it very hard to concentrate on anything. And yet the thought of being chopped open makes my stomach drop. I mean, I know the diagnostic itself is no big deal, just one teeny nothing incision: it is the results I fear. Because as far as I know the only way to cut out diaphragmatic endo involves slicing said patient wide open.

Because kirilisa is a damn pansy when it comes to anything that makes her unconscious/helpless/immobile/out of control.

The real question is: why have I waited so long to do anything about this? (Because of the above, I suppose) I have always been such a good stoic, so tough, so good at willing pains away and healing quickly. I thought somehow if I ignored this I could force it away too.

But it hasn’t worked.

It’s all so expensive. I feel like such a pointless money sink.

Yesterday was a great day. We got up early (I’m demented: I love getting up early on Saturday) and drove halfway to the city and then parked and rollerbladed a giant 20km loop through the city, over the bridge to the other side, all through West End, across the bridge into St. Lucia, through the uni, and finally back up to where our car was. By the time we got there my blisters were making themselves re-known and I could barely move my legs, but it was brilliant. I’d do it every day if I could.

[I can't wait till September 1 when I start getting my Wednesdays off. I'm gonna rollerblade every morning.]

West End was crazy because we didn’t really know where we were going, and there were these super tall hills which were ridiculously exhausting to rollerblade up and very daunting to rollerblade down the other side! It is just a mess of steep hills, tiny curving narrow roads, and dead ends. And it’s beautiful.

Then we dropped by the sax shop to get some #2 reeds (I am downgrading from 2.5 since my mouthpiece has such a large opening: I think I erred in the mouthpiece I bought) and then went food shopping since M & S were coming over for dinner.

Went home to clean house in prep for leaving the country in 6 days, and N. came over (she is going to be house-sitting! Hurray!) to meet doglets and see the place and ended up sticking around, helping us cook, and staying for dinner.

It was really a comedy of errors. Our washing machine broke and started flooding while we were doing laundry, our dishwasher went demented and stopped functioning right as we were trying to clean up the kitchen before M & S got there, and then Zaubi ended up pouring a whole bunch of tap water into the dessert that N. had so carefully prepared so it turned into a kind of watery lemon soup instead of pudding!

But, it was fun. N. went home at 11:15 PM and we kind of collapsed. Why aren’t weekends 3 days long?

Well, we didn’t get to keep the dog. (It is illegal to keep more than 2 dogs here anyway.) Zaubi took it to the vet and it was microchipped so the vet called its parents. Simultaneously he discovered that our dogs’ microchips are unreadable by the chip reader here – so we had them re-chipped this morning at $40 a pop.

How is it that the microchips that were *required* to be put into our dogs in order for them to *leave the country* do not work outside of the country? Please explain this logic to me??

Tomorrow is Friday and I tell you the weekend can’t come soon enough. It’s the last weekend in Oz before leaving AGAIN for the crazy trip back to the State for Steff’s wedding. Can’t believe it’s already time to make another million hour plane trip… how many can there be in a year?

N. is gonna house-sit and look after the menagerie which is a huge load off my mind. I hate putting the pets into storage. It’s bloody expensive too.

Speaking of trips, it is exactly 1 year and 4 days since I got back from Israel/Jordan. 1 year and 4 days since the Great Escape from Jordan when I staggered back into Australia thick with dirt, missing the soles of my boots, and lugging a busted backpack full of filthy underwear, ancient pottery and human remains.

So it’s hit an all time low for temperature here, apparently—2 degrees Celsius, that is, 35 Fahrenheit. That was, I think, last night. Apparently RHG has had to break ice off his windscreen before driving to work a few times in the last week: he lives almost an hour further west, though.

We found, a while back, that our aircon doubles as a heater and so we’ve been heating very small spaces once in a while when it gets too cold. Because face it, New Englanders, 35 degrees is just too cold inside the house. I was not raised Eskimo.

Went to the brass&woodwind shop today ostensibly to look at mouthpieces (since, as I’ve said, I have the loudest sax this side of the equator and I think it has something to do with my mouthpiece) but Flute Lady was there so we turned around. Not that I have anything against Flute Lady in particular, but I find her distinctly unwelcoming. Whenever I have gone there and she is there, I get the feeling that she is waiting for me to finish my business and leave. Definitely not conducive to wandering about and ooohing leisurely over musical instruments as I like to do.

We split/sawed up our giant bamboo (hey, I never posted anything about the Great Bamboo Adventure, did I?) and today lined up all the pieces and tied them together with twine to create a kind of fence which I have leaned up in front of the muck heap. Grow a few plants on it and bingo, muck heap vanishes! Pics later.

I love making stuff.

Feeling v. blah this evening. Maybe it’s the cold. And go ahead and laugh and tell me I’ve gone all pansy, but it is. Cold. I’m getting sick of winter.

Tried to go Wed. night rollerblading last night but just couldn’t hack it. I was on the way there, racing down the Coro Dr. bike path on my way to the meeting point, trying to ignore the pain in my flayed feet, when I felt my biggest blister stretch and burst with a disgusting soundless splut.

There are really few feelings as vile as the sudden gush of wet warmth in your sock that means you’ve just busted a giant blister. Well, I suppose, come to think of it, gushes of wet warmth are generally bad things, regardless.

Anyway, after that I was in far too much agony to keep skating. How is it that blisters can hurt so much? So Zaubi and I went to the Three Monkeys instead, which is a kind of bohemian teahouse that serves the best chai this side of the equator. He taught me how to play coin hockey and I had a ridiculously good creme brulee cheesecake which nevertheless did not make up for the sad lack of rollerblading. In fact, it kind of defeated the purpose. Oh, well.

Fed JJ graham crackers today at work and he liked them!

Today was an annoying day because or main server at work got wiped due to virus and simultaneously our modem crashed, leaving us lost and internet-less throughout the day. A few people could still get some work done, but, being a programmer, I was completely useless without access to the server where I run all my tests. Couldn’t run them locally b/c I never bothered setting up my machine for it and without internet you can’t download anything anyway. So I spent the day twiddling my thumbs, shooting the crap with P. and red-headed guy, and playing the beta version of a Pac-man-esqe kids’ game which one of the developers has been working on.

You know what? I’m boring tonight.