That summer was pretty uneventful. In fact, the timeline here speeds up a little. I went through a few years of relatively good health (well, if you can call it good health), but a few crucial things happened in this time.
As I said, the summer went by without much happening. At least, nothing that sticks out in my memory. I went to some friend's houses a couple of times, but that was all. My main worry was school. I had to finish off Physics 30 and Math 31 in order to get into University, and I decided to also take Math 30 online to boost my grade, and Chem 30 again because I wasn't pleased with how I'd done on the diploma when I took it previously. I had a couple of options: I could go back to Queen E (my high school) and take a 13th year, or go to Chinook college. I took the Chinook route, because I never wanted to be in that school again.
When September rolled around, I was bumped from my receptionist job at Metro Ford because my boyfriend was back in school and needed to work at the desk again. I took this opportunity to move to the Parts department as the Parts Girl. Basically I was setting up for inventory, and also helping the shipper/receiver that was there. I got to wear a metro shirt that was about a league too big for me, and I was supposed to wear steel toed boots (as I found out when I dropped an F-350 rotor on my foot), but I opted to switch from my normal heels to running shoes instead.
I was working in the Parts department part time, so I decided to take only one class at chinook that first term. I took Chem 30. I don't remember all too much about this class, except that there was a girl in it that had gotten a tumour in her chest taken out. I wasn't doing that well in it because I was more concerned about working, and my energy level from my hip surgery hadn't come back yet. I ended up raising my mark by ten percent, so that was a pretty good achievement.
One thing I should mention about this time. Around when I started school, I started getting pains in my abdomen every so often. It was confusing, but I figured it was because I was pigging out like I'd never seen junk food before. Until one day I realized that actually, I was getting kidney stones. I was still getting infusions at this time, and I had to take a bunch of calcium and vitamin D because of it. For some reason, my body decided it hated me and didn't want to put calcium in my bones. Instead, it wanted to inflict the most pain possible on me.
One night it got really bad. Up to this point I had just waited it out, because it was painful but not as bad as other pain I'd gone through (or was going through). However, Mom and I decided that I should go to emerg to try to get help passing this thing, as per the instructions from my rheumatologist. While I was in emerg waiting to be put into a bed, I passed the stupid thing. Have you ever seen a kidney stone? They're tiny! The size of them definitely does not make you feel triumph over passing them. They actually make you feel like you're a giant wuss. So, once I passed it, Mom and I discussed going home, even though we'd gotten a bed. One doctor came in and insisted doing an exam, which we refused (considering how the exam when when my bones were hurting), and we demanded to be allowed to go home. We won.
From then on, I got a ton of kidney stones. I worked with kidney stones, I went to Chinook with kidney stones, and so on and so on. It was great times (it really wasn't great times). I got so good at passing them that I could just pop a Tylenol 3 and just deal with it. Some other stuff happened with this, but to be honest, I'm not super comfortable talking about it, so it's getting cut out. I'll maybe put it in if I get to make this into a book.
Another great thing that happened around this time was that I found out about my low blood pressure. When you have low blood pressure, you body all of a sudden decides its going to feel like it has no muscles and is going to try to shut down. I had the pleasure of having this happen while I was driving. Good times! I was told that, to deal with this, I was going to have to eat things like chips more often. Num num num.
