How much of today was spent: lounging around and reading stuff on t'intarwebz that increase my relative smartitude. I now know a lot about dog trade in Iran.
A first Moleskine - I bought it for a friend's daughter to introduce her to the drug that is Moleskine. I hope she'll enjoy it - I still have my first Moleskine, and it's a treasured memory. (Sorry for the Results beard - not shaving till exam results come out!)
Spent my time after my exam yesterday messing around with this darling (a Lubitel 166 Universal with a Metrawatt LeicaMeter MC attached - they don't communicate as they would with a Leica attached, but it helps me do the manual light setting (believe it or not, f/9, 1/125 and be there isn't always a good rule :P).
I'm back to baby bottles. Somehow, my life ended up at this point. FFS.
I'm sip feeding a rather disgusting substance called Fresubin. It's a low fibre hi-carb liquid feed for people who cannot tolerate solid food. Sip-feeding means taking very small sips every few minutes, to allow the stomach to empty. It's a 'last resort' measure before parenteral feeding becomes necessary (that means sticking a tube down your nose or into your guts - in my case, sticking anything into the stomach wouldn't achieve anything). I have recently been having a rather nasty flare of a condition called gastroparesis, in which the stomach fails to empty and push the food into your duodenum (for humanities students, that's the start of your intestine) and onwards. It causes vomiting, not eating and ultimately your body going into starvation. It's incurable currently, and treatments are not particularly great, especially if you - like me - have built up a tolerance for most anti-nausea drugs (the only one that works for me is called Zofran, it's regarded as the last resort antiemetic), and while it won't kill you, reduce your lifespan or make you vote for George Galloway, it's a lifelong relapsing-remitting pain in the ass. We don't currently know what caused it, but it's really not fun, and spending most of the time before finals praying to the Big Porcelain God doesn't do wonders for exam prep. So anyway, this is my last-ditch attempt to keep myself from starvation. I really hope that over the last few days, I manage to keep some of this stuff down (and I tell ya, it's incredibly disgusting! It's billed as 'vanilla', but mainly it tastes like rotten ass, I'm not sure if I could keep it down if I were healthy! anyone want a taste of that shit, let me know.) - starvation is not fun at all! So, that's my story for the last couple of weeks. I didn't post this because I want sympathy or pity (you have no idea how I hate both of those - I don't do pity, and don't want to receive any), or to have a good old whine (if I want to do that, I pay someone - hooker, psychologist, whichever's cheaper - for it). I do, however, like to raise awareness to a pretty rare condition. Hope you've learned something interesting and new today, and if you have any questions, I'll of course try to answer them. Hope you're all well, vomit-free and going well with whatever you're doing (in particular, those fellow mentalists who've signed up for the B-C-Hell!).
