Every little thing the reflux does is an answer with a question mark

So now I've got the chest pains back. Pretty sure it's acid reflux, which is pretty sweet considering a couple of weeks ago I thought I was about to stroke out. But it's also uncomfortable enough to prevent me from making an oh-so witty "stroke out" joke.

I just finished up my two week course of Protonix, and almost immediately the whole deal came back. Honestly they should just put Prontonix in the water, it would solve so many problems. Except I don't drink tap water. Well then maybe they could put it in pill form for people who don't drink tap water. Wait a second...those forward-thinking bastards cut me off at the pass!

When I say immediately, I mean 9am today. About an hour after I would have normally taken the pill. Now, granted, I drank a big hot cup of strong coffee right before it really started up, and that was probably a mistake. I think the only worse mistake I could have made would have been to chase the coffee with an ice cold habanero milkshake.

I took some Prilosec around lunchtime and let me tell you, that stuff is pretty weak. It's like the Webster to Protonix's Diff'rent Strokes. Hey, strokes! It's all coming full circle.

Fucking Boddington's. Sorry, I was opening a beer and it foamed up all out of the can. Only with Boddington's, though. Their little widget whatever thing must be Soviet engineering. It works, but you don't exactly trust it.

I made an appointment to see a Gastroenterologist next week, so that should be pretty fun. My mom works in a gastroenterologist's office so I asked her what to expect. I got two vital pieces of information:

1. They won't do anything the first visit except talk to you
2. You have a right to refuse the rectal exam

I'm no logician (well okay I am) but I can spot a slight error between propositions 1 and 2. I won't write out the whole proof here, but I will say it concludes with the line "rectal exams != won't do anything".

At least I have the right of refusal. I'd hate to think that by walking into the doctor's office I've given explicit consent to a rectal exam. Maybe that's how they used to do things back in the Old Country (by that I mean Busch Gardens), but that won't fly in my world.

No sir, up top problems get up top treatment. That's my uninformed wishful thinking, and I'm sticking to it.

Sorry, Life and all that Balderdash

I was playing the board game Sorry! the other night and realized, after a few beers, that the game is a lot like life.

You have this board you share with all these other people, and you all have what appears to be a pretty straightforward path from where you start to where you need to be. You pick up your card, you move your little dudes around and everybody goes home happy, right? No! This is life, man, and it's never what it seems.

For one thing, it takes forever to even get started. It always seems like everybody else is so far ahead of you before you even get one foot out the door. And then as soon as you're on your way, boom!, "Sorry!" you get sent right back where you started from.

This is the "childhood" stage of the game, where certain people have enormous advantages over others for no particular reason, just the luck of the draw.

After this comes the "young adult" stage where eventually someone begins to look like they're doing really well, setting themselves apart, and what happens? Everyone else goes out of their way, even to their own detriment, to hold that other person back. Anybody who's different gets their ass handed to them.

While it is the most outright brutal stage of the game, it is also the most exciting. This is the part you talk about when the game is over.

This building up and knocking down from all sides goes on for a bit and results in "middle age", the longest stage of the game, where everyone ends up fairly even experience-wise, trudging along repeatedly down the same paths, playing the same cards, until by luck or guile they are able to send a few pieces Home to some kind of safety.

There's no real ganging-up in middle age, you just kind of dislike everyone and more and more work for your own safety over gleefully sending others willy-nilly back to Start. This is also where the most shit-talking takes place as you try to make your case to the other players for why it should be somebody, anybody, else, and not you, who should be punished.

But this gets tiring after a while and, upon seeing how everybody else who you started with is beginning to slow down, you too begin looking for that final push home. But boy, is that end game frustrating.

There you are on the threshold of ending it all, just one more piece three steps from relief, and you have to wait until that perfect, exact card comes up. Could be one turn, could be ten, and you never know when it'll happen. Oh! There goes ol' Joe, he's all out. All of his pieces are in a better place, I guess. But it doesn't end there for you, not in Sorry!, no, and not in life.

Everybody has to grind out their own ending, alone, cut off from the other players. There's no more switching places, sending others back. Nothing.

Sometimes you see that one person who still has a piece out. It's running around like some lost child; stopping, starting, sliding and basically making a fool of itself. So sad at that age. But you can't help them now; you're only hoping with each turn of the deck that your number is finally up.

I'm a medicine-taker

This past Monday, around 11am or so, I started having chest pains. That kinda freaked me out, you know, a pain in that area isn't something to mess around with. So, being a dude, I waited until around 9 Tuesday night to head out and go to the PatientFirst. If you're not familiar with what that is, it's one of those minor injury mini-hospital type places. A clinic, but not the free kind with all those poor people.

At 9 on a Tuesday you actually get pretty good service. I wasn't waiting around for more than five minutes at any one time; in and out in an hour. Also, I (very luckily) have insurance so the whole thing, which included an EKG, only cost me $25.

In the end it turns out the pain was just heartburn/reflux and not a real big deal. Unless it's an ulcer which, I found out, is treated pretty much exactly the same as reflux. So either way I'm in the clear!

But, and this is what sucks, they gave me medication. Nothing crazy, just some Protonix, but it has completely blown my set of standard medical answers. I'm in a whole new phase of life.

Before
Doctor: Any allergies?
Me: Nope.
Doctor: Any existing conditions?
Me: No siree.
Doctor: On any medications?
Me: Thank god no.

Now
Doctor: On any medications?
Me: ...
Doctor: Any, uh, medications?
Me: Yes.

You see?! Now I'm the "on medications" guy! You don't go back from that. You just go from medication to medication until one day you wake up and instead of making some tea and checking your email you're flipping open the little plastic "Tu" tab because it's Tuesday and you have to take that horse pill for your gout. Jesus.

Now I know lots of people are on medication, why not, people have medical problems, no big deal. But now it affects me. I have to take this shit every morning or else I feel like I'm on 24-hour heart attack watch. Believe me, people notice the constant left arm grabbing. You can't do that subtle-like.

But I'll deal with it, like I always do, with humor and understanding and sarcastic complaints. It's just like, man, there you are. Old.