My Life with Long-haul - Part 6
The Terrible Medical Care I Received Before I Left Chicago
Link to previous post in series - part 5
***SPECIAL NOTE TO COVER BEFORE I GET INTO THIS ARTICLE: A FEW WEEKS AGO I WROTE A BLOG POST ABOUT SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS TO SUGGEST TO MY READERS FOR THEM TO TRY. ABOUT A WEEK AND A HALF LATER, I RECEIVED ONE OF THOSE PRODUCTS IN THE MAIL, AND I DIDN’T ORDER IT. IT WAS A FACE SERUM FROM FIG 1. IT DIDN’T COME WITH A NOTE OR ANY KIND OF INFO ABOUT WHO SENT IT THOUGH. SO I HAVE NO IDEA WHO TO THANK. IF IT WAS YOU, PLEASE SHOOT ME AN EMAIL (krista.m.atkinson@gmail.com) AND LET ME KNOW, SO I CAN PROPERLY THANK YOU! IF YOU DECIDE TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS, THEN PLEASE ACCEPT THIS AS MY THANK YOU!!!***
Well, I haven’t written an installment of this since November. I like to break these up with essays about other things. Not only to give you a break from this bleak story, but to give myself a break, too. Reliving it has its good and bad. Thinking about this illness and dealing with it constantly is exhausting, draining, and overwhelming. However, writing about it and getting stuff off my chest can be therapeutic, too. I have to balance those two.
The past few months have been insanely intense with my illness for a number of reasons, and I put all my energy into dealing with that. Therefore, writing about it and reliving it is usually just too much. I am still very much in the thick of major stress with a bunch of crap with disability that is just not going my way (and probably in the top 3 most stressful things I have ever dealt with in my life), lots of doctor’s appointments (most of which have been useless and have not only not helped me, but some have made my life worse), and basically feeling like shit most of the time. However, I am determined to get back on track with these installments, and to write the next one today.
We left off in the last installment with me telling you I was going to talk about the beyond terrible medical care I received before leaving Chicago in this article. So, here we go!
In Summer of 2021, when I realized that not only was everything not getting better, but it was actually getting progressively worse, I decided it was time to try to find a doctor who could help me. This was before I had decided I needed to move home. My previous primary doctor had moved away a couple of years prior, and they doctor I had been transferred to, well, I was not a fan. He had a really weird and creepy vibe, and all he really ever wanted to talk to me about was my weight, and was always trying to push keto on me (which my therapist who coached me in nutrition and my eating disorders said I should not be doing). As such, I didn’t want to continue seeing him, and especially not for this.
I set out to find a primary who specialized in HAES (health at every size). A doctor who understands that people’s weight is not the sole reason for everything that every happens to them, and that larger people can actually be healthy, too. I knew I was “overweight”. But I also knew that I was working to be as healthy as I could, and that I had a good therapist helping me with this.
Also, I knew that not everything could be explained away just by saying someone is overweight. I had diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety when I was skinny. Stop blaming my weight for that. I had allergies when I was skinny. Stop blaming my weight for that. That is just lazy doctoring.
Doctors know almost nothing about why some people can’t lose weight even when they are trying. Yet they use it as a crutch to blame all of your problems on. Plenty of skinny people have long-haul Covid, so I didn’t want to go to a doctor who would just dismiss me because I didn’t fit the gold standard of the antiquated BMI system.
I found a list online of doctors in Chicago who were supposedly practicing HAES. There weren’t many. Then, I looked into each one, and tried to figure out if any of them were also seeing long-haul patients. This list was even smaller. I called every single one of them. None of them were taking on new patients. Keep in mind, that even doing this task during this period of time, when I was so sick, was beyond exhausting. By the time I got to the very last name on the list, I was praying so hard she could take me.
Upon calling, I was told she was also not taking on new patients. However, I was desperate. I begged the receptionist to please talk to the doctor and see if she would consider seeing me. I explained my situation with long-haul Covid, and how no one I had called could take me, and that I was at the end of my rope. The receptionist took pity on me, and scheduled me to see the doctor (let’s call her Dr. Poop Face). I could’t get in until mid-September, but at least I had an appointment.
At this point I think it may have been early July, maybe?? That’s fuzzy. So I had at least a couple of months before I could see her. By the time my first appointment came around, I was so much worse than when I originally called. This was around the time that I wrote in previous installments that I was considering leaving Chicago and moving home to get help. It was also the same time as when things had gotten really bad at work with the new boss, and not being able to keep up with my job due to all my symptoms.
The first appointment with Dr. Poop Face was a telehealth visit. I explained everything that you have read about in the previous installments as best I could in the allotted time. She retroactively diagnosed me with having had Covid in Feb 2020. (Well, I don’t know if it can be called a “diagnosis” since there weren’t any tests at that time and it was impossible to say with 100% certainty, but she said she was almost certain what I’d had was Covid.) She also said from everything I was telling her now that it definitely sounded like I had long-haul Covid, and she did list that as a diagnosis. “YES! Finally! Someone to validate this!” I thought I was finally on the path to getting the help I needed.
Then she proceeded to tell me that since there was no cure for this illness, and that very little was known about it, they were currently just treating each individual symptom as they would under any other circumstances. Ok, that was fine with me. Whatever. But then Dr. Poop Face dropped the bomb that their clinic was backed up for 6 months and I would not be able to get any of the testing or help I needed there, so that I should work to find specialists and random providers on my own for a laundry list of different appointments she was recommending. She had no one to refer me to. It was up to me to find them. When I was struggling to work, cook, shower, clean, or do anything at all for myself. I was now supposed to find all of this on my own.
During the visit, she asked me about my lifestyle. She asked if I drank caffeine. I told her I very rarely drank it. I never drank coffee, rarely drank soda, and sometimes would just have a cup of tea in the morning. She asked about diet and exercise. I told her I saw a therapist that specialized in nutrition and that I worked very hard on my diet with her. And then I explained that I had been exercising several days a week prior to getting this sick, but that with the insane fatigue I had been having for the past few months, I could barely get out of bed, let alone exercise. I told her that even showering wore me out, and that anytime I attempted exercise, it would cause me to be bed ridden for several days. Rather than showing concern for this fact, Dr. Poop Face chastised me for not exercising during this period of time, and told me I needed to exercise regardless of all that. Ummmmmm… ok…
Then she sent me on my way with a list of tests I was supposed to try to piece together on my own. My follow-up appointment was set for the following month, and this one would be in-person.
Later that week, upon reading her visit notes, almost everything we discussed in the appointment was twisted and even inaccurate. Her visit notes were geared heavily towards blaming my weight and lifestyle, which was not an issue brought up in the appointment. She claimed she gave me all kinds of information and advice on a healthier lifestyle and losing weight, which was not the case. (Wait! Wasn’t she supposed to be HAES?)
In the notes, Dr. Poop Face claimed she told me to stop drinking caffeine, even though I had told her I almost never drink caffeine. The notes said a lot about how I wasn’t exercising, and nothing about how I used to exercise and literally couldn’t at all anymore because of my fatigue. She was much more hesitant in the notes to state anything we had discussed about Covid and long-haul. The straightforward statements she made in the visit where she validated this being the case, were very vague in the notes. I felt totally gaslit and completely helpless.
Regardless, I went ahead and started trying to find the testing she wanted me to get, on my own. And vowed that I would do a better job articulating and clearing things up for her at the next appointment, so that I could get proper notes.
For the migraines, Dr. Poop Face’s recommendation was to get my eyesight tested. I explained it had been tested a couple of years prior and was 20/15 (better than perfect), and that I didn’t struggle with eyesight issues at all. Regardless, I was told I must do this to “rule it out” as a possible reason for the migraines. So, instead of trying to figure out what was causing my problems, we were trying to figure out what wasn’t causing my problems? Sounds like a brilliant use of my time and energy.
I found a place to go, and made an appointment to get my eyesight tested. This time, it came back as 20/20. So, now it was just perfect rather than better than perfect. Ok, guess we can cross that off the list. Why listen to your patient when you can send them on a useless wild goose chase? And then she never did anything else to address my migraines. Other than her constant lectures about the caffeine that she didn’t believe I didn’t drink.
She also wanted me to get my blood pressure tested for the dizziness and lightheadedness. She told me to go to a Walgreens or CVS and use one of the BP machines that sit near the pharmacy desk that you can just sit at on your own. I explained to her that every time I had been to my previous primary, my blood pressure was always excellent. Nevertheless, I wasn’t as bothered to do this task. It sounded easy enough. However, it was actually the hardest one.
Due to Covid, every single place that had one of those blood pressure machines had taken them out because of Covid. Additionally, no clinic or doctor’s office would let me make an appointment just to get my blood pressure taken. I spent almost the whole month in between appointments with her trying to get a damn BP cuff on my fucking arm. I never did find a place.
I also didn’t want to order my own, because I had heard from several sources that those ones were never accurate, and usually read much higher than it actually was. And I didn’t really want to spend money on this when I only needed it for one time, and I knew I didn’t have BP problems.
As such, I waited until my next appointment with her, and when my blood pressure was taken, it was well within the normal range. Ok, guess we can take that off the list of things to “rule out.” After that, she never made any other attempts to help me with the dizziness.
Dr. Poop Face also wanted me to get a heart monitor for my heart palpitations, fast heartbeat, and heaving pounding. But she told me we could get that set up when I came in to see her the following month, as there wouldn’t be a waitlist for that. As such, I was able to take this one off my to-do list and wait a bit on that.
She didn’t suggest anything at this point for testing the chronic fatigue and insomnia. However, she did request that I get a neurological test done for the brain fog and memory issues. Again, she had no one she could refer me to, I had to do this on my own. She told me that usually psychiatrists give these tests, and that it would test the issues I was having with memory and concentration. Since I already had a long-standing psychiatrist for my depression and anxiety meds, I called her office to see if she did this testing. It turns out she did not, but knew a place that did. So she referred me to them, and my new doctor sent the orders over for what she wanted done.
It took forever to hear back from the neuro test people. I kept reaching out and getting the run-around. After a lot of time and effort, I finally got an appointment scheduled. But, they couldn’t see me until mid-November. While this was going to be about a month after my next appointment with Dr. Poop Face, I figured it was better than nothing, and the best I could do. My neuro testing appointment was scheduled with a doctor that I will refer to as “Dr. Stupid Bitch.” (I literally just let out a huge sigh of relief after I typed that. Man does it feel good to get this off my chest, tell my story, and give names to these doctors that they deserve.)
By the time my October in-person appointment with Dr. Poop Face came around I was already in the process of leaving my job and moving home, as you know from a previous installment. During the period of time from when I first saw Dr. PF until this appointment, I had tried to look into a medical leave assistance at work, and we had discussed the idea of moving home with my parents and working remotely. As you know from the previous installment, that did not work out. However, while I was trying to work out different scenarios, I needed letters from this doctor that were requested by HR, and I also needed one for my landlord for breaking my lease.
I can’t tell you how many unanswered MyChart messages there were from Dr. Poop Face. She literally would not get back to me about almost anything. I lucked out by finally getting the letter I needed from her to include in breaking my lease. But I could not get the documentation that HR was requesting. No amount of calls or emails over that period of a month made a difference. She would not respond. Well, I take that back. She did respond to that HR request at the end of November when I’d just had to leave my job, and was getting ready to move out of my apartment. So, yeah, super helpful Dr. PF.
I know doctors are overworked and understaffed and these administrative tasks are very hard. I can be incredibly understanding, up to a certain point. This is a criticism of our whole freaking medical system. However, combined with her other bullshit, I am going to hold this against her, too. In the end, was it the right thing to do to leave that job, and move home? Yes. However, had that not been a possibility for me, I would have been completely screwed because of Dr. Poop Face and her office’s negligence.
When I saw Dr. PF in October, it wasn’t much different than our first visit. I had to reiterate to her that I did not drink coffee and soda, etc. I assured her that I was doing my best to manage my diet with my therapist. I tried my best to explain how dire my fatigue situation was and how much worse I felt after trying to get any type of exercise. My blood pressure was fine. My eyesight was fine. But, I was not fine. Everything was worse. She pretty much said the same things she said in previous appointment. She said we would see what happened with the neuro test. And she sent me upstairs to get a heart monitor.
At this point, since I knew I was leaving at the end of October, I told her I would be moving 5 hours away and would try to find a new doctor when I moved, but that I wouldn’t be able to follow-up with her. She seemed pretty ok with that.
A couple of days later, her notes were exactly the same as last time. Nothing like what we discussed in the appointment, and blaming my lifestyle. Not giving much credit to long-haul Covid, even though that is what she strongly stated in the appointment. “Oh well,” I thought, “in a few months, I will try to find someone better when I’ve been home for a little bit, and when more research has been done about long-haul.” (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)
The heart monitor results came back, and the message I received from Dr. Poop Face about them was basically “yeah, we see where you are having palpitations, fast beating, and pounding. However, they aren’t outside of the normal range. So, nothing we can do about that.” Ummm, ok… You see where it is happening, but it is normal? Ok, but it isn’t normal for me. I have literally never experienced this in my life until after having Covid. And, it’s not like my heart is doing this while I am jogging or something. It is doing this while I am laying down. Sometimes, it is beating so hard I literally can’t fall asleep at night because of it. But, ok, whatever. With everything else going on (leaving work, the move, breaking my lease, etc), I just didn’t have the energy to keep pushing, especially since I would never see her again.
Oh well, at least I was forever done with Dr. Poop Face. The one good thing I got from her was a letter to break my lease. Even though, as you know from the last article, my landlord still made my life a living hell when it came to that.
I want to take a moment here to really stress how difficult this all was. You are in your late 30’s. You have spent the last decade putting your life back together after divorce and bankruptcy. You finally live in a nice place, have a good job, actually have some money and have paid off debt. You are just finally starting to get your head above water and are able to really start enjoying the fruits of your labor.
Then Covid hits. Then you get sick. Imagine the way you feel when you are incredibly sick and have no energy to do anything. Imagine you have felt that way every day for several months. You live by yourself and have no one to help you cook, clean, do laundry, grocery shop, or anything. You are spending a lot of extra money, on a single income in an expensive city, to hire people to do some of the above for you. The litter box smells awful cause you can’t keep up with it.
You are working full-time for a new boss who not only has zero sympathy for your condition, but is actively making your life a living hell and trying to get rid of you. You are using every ounce of energy you have to try to keep this job and keep your life in tact.
Then, you are supposed to muster more energy to find a doctor, that doctor then tells you that you need to find all the other doctors she wants you to see. You are calling everywhere. Trying to get someone to help you. Then this doctor tells you one thing to your face, and says something completely different in the notes. They gaslight you and make you feel crazy. They ignore your requests for help.
Then, you get pushed out of the job you have had for 6.5 years, that you once loved. You are left with no income, and no energy to find another job. You are forced to leave your beautiful apartment and this city life that you have painstakingly built for yourself—to go live with your PARENTS at 37 years old.
You might be a tad stressed under those circumstances.
So, mid-November comes around. I am a couple weeks away from my last day at work and moving out of Chicago. I still decide to go through with the neuro tests because I genuinely want to know what’s going on and to try to get better. As such, I head out to a 5 hour appointment with Dr. Stupid Bitch.
Upon first meeting Dr. Stupid Bitch, she actually seems really nice and comforting. To my face she is validating everything I am saying and how it sounds like long-haul. Acknowledging that 5 hours of brain testing may end up being too much in my condition. Therefore, if I can’t complete the full 5 hours in one sitting, then it is perfectly ok to come back another time to finish the tests. And she assured me that I could do that within a few days, to get it all finished before I moved.
The testing was scheduled from 3-8pm, so I had to leave work a little early for this, and my boss was well aware of where I was and the testing I was receiving. Around 5:30, which is after work hours and during the time he knew I was having neurological tests, my boss called me several times and left rude messages blaming me for cancelling his flight. (Which I didn’t, he actually did. I confirmed this with the travel agents the next day). Thankfully, my phone was off. But it was certainly a stressful thing to come back to after the arduous and taxing brain testing.
At the beginning of the appointment, she started out by asking me a whole bunch of questions about what was going on in my life at that time. I now know those were for the sake of seeing if she thought I had mental health issues. I was honest about the stress I was facing with all of the previously mentioned endeavors, but that I was under excellent care with my therapist. Additionally, I had been on really good meds for the past several years under the psychiatrist that recommended me to her. I made it pretty clear that all of these symptoms had come along several months before this recent stress had, and that I had been very happy and thriving prior to all of this. I thought we were testing my brain fog, not doing a psych evaluation?
She seemed really kind and understanding about everything. I felt like she understood what I was saying. Then we got into a large assortment of various brain tests. I was excelling at some, and failing miserably at others. I was scoring off the charts on a lot of the verbal tests, but wasn’t even able to complete many of the visual ones. Puzzles and tests that I know for a fact I would have nailed a few years prior, were now as complicated as trying to learn Chinese in 5 mins. My mind would just go completely blank, and I couldn’t even finish them. This was what I had been experiencing for several months now. All of a sudden, my brain will just cloud over. I hit a wall and can no longer focus or move forward with the task at hand. I had never in my life dealt with anything like this. And, within a matter of a couple of months, this sort of thing started happening all the time.
I made it through about 3 hours of the 5 hour test, and then I had to call it quits. My brain was completely fried and I could not do any more. The testing totally depleted and overwhelmed me. Dr. Stupid Bitch totally understood, and scheduled me to come finish it the following week.
I went the next week and finished the tests. They went pretty much the same as the first tests. Then, I went home and spent the next couple of weeks wrapping up my life in Chicago. *In the next installment, I will pick back up at this spot to continue the story chronologically. I will talk about the week I moved, moving day, and getting home. But for now, I am going to jump ahead in the timeline of the story, to wrap up Dr. Stupid Bitch’s arc.*
Flash forward, I have been home a few weeks and it was now mid-December 2021, and Dr. SB finally calls me with her results. She tells me that she saw evidence of a lot of fatigue in these tests, but that she is just attributing it to “stress”. I re-explain that all of this started a year before this stress started, and that my stress and mental health were under control. I had been stressed many times in my life, and never ever had it caused me to forget my parent’s address, forget the name of a pet I’d had for 5 years, break down in the middle of puzzles and not be able to complete them, be incapable of learning new tasks at work, and have the concentration of a goldfish. She dismissed all of this and just said I was stressed. (Here I am, writing this 2.5 years later, and am absolutely no better off with any of this brain fog business.)
Then she continued on by saying that while I scored high on the verbal tests, I had scored very low on the visual tests. (Yup, already knew that. I remember my brain completely shutting down in the middle of them and not being able to finish a lot of them.) Ok, so here is the kicker guys. She then attributed this to having a low IQ. I was told I had a very low visual IQ. Instead of running neurological tests for my brain fog and memory issues, she had done a psych evaluation and decided I was just “stressed”, and she had given me an IQ test and decided I was below average. Talk about kicking me while I was down.
Now I need to state here that IQs are not something we have control over, and there is nothing wrong about anyone having a low one. It’s just that I knew my IQ. I was tested when I was in high school, and your IQ doesn’t really change. My score from when I tested as a teenager was a world apart from what she was saying it was.
Now, I am no doctor, but don’t you think if you have someone who was incredibly high-functioning at work and previously had a higher IQ, and was now unable to finish simple puzzles, that maybe something was wrong beyond stress? And that maybe giving me an IQ test when I am in the midst of having severe impairments in my health isn’t really necessary, relevant, or accurate? What was the point of this? I was told I was being tested for memory and concentration. Not my psychiatric state and IQ. And didn’t the fact that I couldn’t complete several of these simple tests, and had to break the appointment up into two sessions show that my concentration was poor? Wasn’t the fact that she noted that I was being very impaired by fatigue relevant? Didn’t it have any bearing whatsoever that I had been experiencing all of this for over a year, and that the “stress” I was having over everything I was going through only started a couple of months prior to this?
I asked her if she had treated or seen anyone with long-haul and how could she be sure what I was experiencing wasn’t long-haul. (At this point, this illness was so new, that very few doctors had seen anyone for it. And absolutely zero doctors knew much, if anything at all, about it. I know this because as of Feb. 2024 doctors still have relatively few answers for it and know so very little about it.) She didn’t really have a straightforward answer for this. She couldn’t confirm she had treated or tested anyone with long-haul, or that she knew anything about it. And she dug in her heels that it was stress, and assured me I “would be fine in a few weeks after I’d had a chance to rest at home.” At the end of the call, she promised she would send over all the notes in the next couple of weeks. I wasn’t that concerned because I didn’t feel like I needed them for anything, but I just said, “ok”. A few months went by, and those notes never came.
Skip ahead to early September 2022. I have just applied for disability (which I will get to in the coming installments). It is imperative that I collect every single medical record on file about my illness. I am obligated to turn them all in to Social Security, whether I want to or not. I was not keen on sending in the notes from Dr. Stupid Bitch, because all she did was gaslight me and tell me I had a low IQ. I knew this was not going to help my case But, I wasn’t going to be dishonest and try to hide it.
As such, I had to reach out to Dr. SB and ask her to please send me the notes she had never sent me. I explained that I had been diagnosed with long-haul Covid after all, that I was still no better than when I had seen her, and that I was now having to apply for disability. I had to email her a few times before I got a response. When I finally did get a response, she told me she “still hadn’t finished my notes and was very behind on getting notes finished.” Let me check my calendar here. I had these tests in November 2021. She called me with her offensive results in December 2021. And as of September 2022 she had not finished my notes?
After that, I spent 2 entire months following up with her to get these records for my disability claim. When she would bother to respond to me, it was always, “I will have them to you by the end of this week.” And that was never the case. Eventually, my caseworker started emailing her, too. We finally received these notes in late November 2022. A whole year after I did the test.
Now, I don’t know about you, but even when I am at my sharpest I am not going to be able to write a several page document of specific medical notes for a patient a year after I saw them, when I have seen at least a hundred patients since I saw them. As you might expect, the notes were utter garbage. She spent the whole time attributing everything to anxiety and suggesting I check into medication and therapy. Hmmmmm, she didn’t seem to remember that a year prior I told her that I had been taking anxiety medicine for years and had been in therapy for even more years. And that I had explained those things were doing a fine job of keeping it under control.
On top of that, I was asking her for these notes because I was still sick a whole year after I had seen her. Clearly “resting for a few weeks,” as she had originally suggested, had not worked. Couldn’t she now see that this wasn’t just going away and maybe it wasn’t because of “stress” and “anxiety” after all? I guess not. Her notes were full of mistakes and pathetic attempts at remembering our appointment a year earlier.
As such, I emailed her and sent her a list of corrections to make on the notes, with explanations for each one. Reminding her of things we had discussed that she mis-noted. Now, how did I remember these things if I have these memory problems? Well, because I knew that my memory sucked I had been keeping notes. I also had been sharing everything with my parents as it happened and using their memory to help me with mine. Plus, when you are sick, it is easier to remember things that relate to your sickness than it is to remember lock your car door, where you left your phone, or what today’s date is, etc.
Her response was that she was not going to make any of those corrections. She would not concede that doing these notes a year after our appointment could have possibly led to making any mistakes in them, even though she sees several patients every week. She couldn’t admit that she had said things in the results phone call that were now not in the notes at all or were incorrect. These were the notes I was stuck with.
When I have mentioned this testing to various professionals in the time since I’ve had it done, every last one of them was stunned that I was even asked to do this type of testing. None of it was relevant to long-haul. So, Dr. Poop Face was wrong to even order this type of test. And Dr. Stupid Bitch had no business acting like she had any authority on whether or not I had long-haul. She is a psychologist, not an infectious disease specialist. She can tell me I am “stressed” and “of below average intelligence” til the cows come home. But that ain’t got shit to do with long-haul Covid, and she should be ashamed of herself for even acting like she had any authority in that situation. And that isn’t just my opinion. I have had multiple professionals tell me that after seeing those notes.
Begrudgingly, I still had to mail those notes to Social Security Disability. And I am sure they helped aid in the first denial I received in April 2023. But, that story is for another time.
This will conclude this installment of my long-haul story. Next time I will pick up with the move home, the craziest story you have ever heard about trying to move a couch, the best Sonic burger in the world, the sunset that said goodbye to me, and the growing pains of living with my parents again.
Now, I started this installment on a positive note about receiving a lovely gift from an anonymous reader, and I want to end this installment on a positive note, too. Because I do not want this series to be so depressing that everyone is just bummed out every time they read it. I don’t want to be someone who just complains all the time. My honest and genuine goal here is to just share the absolute authentic truth with you. Admittedly, it is my truth. All the other characters in my story would write their part in my life differently, according to their truth. You are just getting my side. But, I feel it is really important to put this information out there. To bring awareness to this illness and how people with my condition are treated. To give a voice to how we feel. I hope I am accomplishing that.
So, to end on a good note, I want to say that I am so grateful for my readers and the lovely messages and comments I get. I appreciate everyone who reaches out with support and encouragement.
I am grateful for my fake nails from Ulta that look super cute. I am grateful for my morning drink that is a mixture of Brew Dr. kombucha and a variety of veggie juices. I am grateful for the senior citizen water aerobics class that I take twice a week. I am grateful for my current long-haul doctor at Barnes and my new primary doctor at Shawnee. I am grateful for the yellow tutu that is currently serving as a lampshade in my room. I am grateful for sushi.
And do you wanna hear a funny story about my mom? She can’t pronounce kombucha or sriracha. Every time she has to say them, she calls them “kombuchee” and “srirachee”. It is adorable.
Also, Happy Valentines Day! Me and mom are going to go to Fazoli’s and split an Italian sub sandwich, get some ice cream, and the come home and watch the Book Club sequel movie. We joked that this is so romantic that we may go “parking” and do some “necking” and “booby honking.” But don’t worry, we are just kidding. We are aware that actually doing that would be really gross. We both just have really stupid senses of humor. Ok, BYEEEEE! xo K