#rhs personal posts

Last night was... really, really bad. I thought I was going to be okay when I went to bed about 11pm, but it kept getting worse and worse until it was 40 minutes of hell curled around a waste basket and then it STILL hadn't settled down when I woke up this morning.

Between the pain, immensity of how sick my stomach feels, and knowing my stomach doesn't accept ANYTHING for a long time after a bout that bad (not even a sip of water), and how exhausted I already was at work yesterday from the sleep deprivation of being up with my stomach every single night lately, I just. I couldn't do it. I would've had to have gone home either because I got sick again or passed out.

And I'm glad I did. Because every little, tiny motion makes my stomach scream at me. I still feel like I haven't caught my breath. I tried to eat a mint candy and take a few sips of water around 1pm, but That Did Not Go Well At All.

Now I think my stomach's finally letting me drink, begrudgingly, but it's... not making me sick at least.

At what point do I blame this Suddenly Worsening on the pepcid? Because I know H2 antagonists make me worse. We did this same song and dance when I was 18. (My very first gastroenterologist I ever saw was soooo convinced I had GERD. And nothing else. Even though I didn't have ANY of the symptoms except for the nausea/vomiting. Even though we did a merry-go-round of medications for it and taking every single one of them made me feel worse. He simply REFUSED to consider That Wasn't the Case.)

And then when it started getting really bad in 2017, they gave me pepcid too. It Doesn't Do a Damn Thing, but I was too busy trying not to have a panic attack at my appointment last week to remember that "pepcid" is the brand-name for a drug I've Already Tried For This.

(My one failing, if I'd in fact followed the path to becoming a veterinary M.D., would've been that I remember drugs best by their active ingredient name for some reason, and I suuuck at remembering the brand names. I'd be confusing clients day in and day out with four-syllable chemical compound names and not being able to abbreviate to the Brand Name.)

But then I saw that it's famotidine, and I was like "...shit." Because I know what that is. Because I've taken it twice before. I know it doesn't help at all. I wanted to try it, because surely if doctors keep prescribing it, THEY'RE convinced it'll help, right? Maybe it'll help THIS time!

Nope. Not in the slightest. I've gone from being sick about once a day to being sick 2-3 times a day.

And the thing is, I'm actually convinced that my stomach produces less acid than it's supposed to. I... don't want to go into details, but let's just say Certain Things aren't as acidic as I expect them to be. Also the fact that I can't digest anything with a lot of protein or fat. (Could also be an enzyme thing, but I already take loads of digestive enzymes to cover that base.)

Also, having acidic food or chocolate or caffeine doesn't make it worse. :P Spicy food does, but it doesn't give me heartburn, it just makes me nauseous.

And when I was 18, the doctor put me on a "low acid" diet which in fact made me feel AWFUL for the entire two months I was adhering to it. (Now I know that was probably because I wound up eating a lot of wheat, that was before I found out wheat is my biggest trigger food, and I wasn't allowed to eat a lot of fruit and vegetables which are, weirdly enough, usually what my body handles best, but when I got sick of trying to prove acid reflux wasn't The Problem Here, I started drinking orange juice and eating tomatoes and such again out of spite and guess what! I didn't feel any worse for it!)

The last time I got this sick in 2017, the VERY DAY they put me on the reglan, I started feeling better! Three days on it and it was like a miracle had come into my life!

A few years ago, I started getting really sick again, but upon upping the dosage of that same miracle medication, I was, again, almost instantly cured.

They do make one more increment higher than I'm taking now... but I don't think you can take the next dosage up all day, every day for more than 6 weeks. And it has a risk of permanent and fairly severe side-effects that increase with dose, frequency, and duration.

And really, at least before I was taking the pepcid, the reglan was keeping it from getting as bad as it got in 2017. I'm keeping down at least SOME of what I eat, it's just... not all of it. There's less volume revisiting me and it lasts longer after I eat than I did in 2017, much longer. So there's still some nutrition making its way through my system before my stomach pitches its fit. That wasn't the case in 2017, even with the highest dose of zofran they'd give me.

I just... If the one thing that has ever, ever worked isn't helping enough anymore, what the hell am I supposed to do?

I'm going to stop taking the pepcid and see if that improves me at least back to where I was before. I was only taking it for 5 days so I don't think I need to taper down.

I have weirdly half-lucid dreams on weekends. Usually I wake up at 7am M-F, but because of the massive sleep deprivation that schedule leaves me with, I'll sleep until 9 or 10am weekends and then keep sleeping on and off until about 2, 3pm. The after-9am dreams tend to be weirdly self-aware.

But they don't usually take something that's often a nightmare of mine and turn it into calm acceptance???

I have a weird quirk in my nightmares I've never heard of anyone else having, which is that, for as long as I can remember (genuinely, since I was 5 years old after my first rabbit died), one of my biggest nightmares has been my pets coming back to life, and a ton of pets I never had alongside them, and I don't have the means to care for them because they died and I got rid of the supplies.

So, I say "half-lucid", because in the dream today, a bunch of diamond doves started appearing, and there were two separate cages, one had crashed into the other, I panicked that one of them was hurt but they were fine... But every time I looked in the cage(s), there were more diamond doves in there.

I realized, within the dream itself, "This is a situation that usually happens in my dreams. But I'm not dreaming? I'm awake?"

And I kept debating, "Wait, maybe I AM dreaming. How else could these birds be here? They already died. I don't have 4 anymore." This back-and-forth, thinking I'm awake but then doubting it and thinking I MUST be dreaming, went on for awhile.

And then baby diamond doves showed up, in the dream I knew they were babies of Blue and White's that died when they were still chicks (that happened twice in real life; both Silver and Ametrine were the only survivors of their different clutches). I knew they weren't socialized with humans yet (they'd been too young before they died), and it would make them uncomfortable, but I started stroking one of them through the cage anyways. And I decided, even if I am dreaming, I'm glad to see these guys again. It's kind of nice.

And for once it wasn't scary. About half the time I have pets-reviving nightmares, it's because I'm the one bringing them back to life somehow. Usually it's an uncontrollable accident. But in this one, it was just a baffling mystery. "How did they get here? Why are they here? They died. I don't have this many diamond doves." But I made peace with the mystery and decided to love and care for them anyways.

So that's been confusing me all day. Usually That's a Nightmare Scenario, but Today it was Rather Calm.