The browns

This birthday was probably my worst birthday in memory.

My illness in September never quite went away. For over a month, I’ve had a stomach upset that’s just … there. I’ve been existing on the blandest, most basic food possible. Thankfully, Hong Kong knows how to do this food well.

Initially, I enjoyed the weight loss that came with this, but now I’m fed up. The idea of never eating anything spicy, or just so little food, for the the forseeable future, kills me. Not to mention the timing – I am scheduled for a trip to India, which means not only would I have to stay away from all the food that would otherwise have been the highlight of the trip, but I would be in mortal fear of coming down with diarrhea in India, as I am prone to at the best of times.

The most depressing thing was being told a day before my birthday that my test results came back negative for infections. You’d think that would be a good thing, but I was hoping something would be detected so it would be easy to prescribe something targeted to knock it off.

Now, it’s pretty much a guessing game of dealing with symptoms. I actually teared up at the doctors. Fortunately, he’s sympathetic and tried to give me something to help the symptoms.

I’m not a fan of a big shebang on my birthday but I was scared to even eat my own birthday cake. I allowed myself a can of coke because that actually calms my stomach, though it’s not something I want to live on because that would undo all the weight loss that is the only silver lining to this whole saga. Okay, and my facialist said my skin is much better. Obviously, on a diet a congee. Meh.

Oh, and I’m now an expert at dealing with shit. I mean literally. I have done a stool test once in my life as a child and have avoided one ever since. Just the logistics of collecting poo – a substance I should have made my peace with considering how much of my life is spent dealing with it – kill me. But just when you think you can only sink so low, you realise, there’s a bottom under the bottom and this one involves scooping excreta of the solid kind.

Because of course when you need to collect poo, your body goes into panic mode and it refuses to come. As if you hadn’t spent every second hour on the potty these past few weeks.

We had booked a body check – at which I discovered I have slightly low blood pressure (and I am now convinced it’s a PMS thing) – and I had been firmly said I was not going to do a stool test. But then I decided to do it, considering that is my main problem. Then my gastroentrologist asked me to do another one.

Meanwhile, Mimi has fallen ill with similar symptoms – three times in the past month – and we had to do a stool test for her to.

So I’ve basically been carrying shit in little bottles here and there. This is my life now.

So, yeah, I had not agenda on my birthday except to not spend it primarily on the pot, and for that I have the gastro to thank.

So what do I want for the coming year? For my gut to get it’s act together.

 

 

What we did – September

Basically, we fell sick.

First, Nene was a bit off colour, so I kept him home for a day. He bounced back.

Then Mimi suddenly came down with fever. The fever went, to be replaced by diarrhea.

She recovered. Then Nene caught the same bug.

He recovered. Then I caught it. Of course, mine was the worst. I stayed home for a record three days of work. The last day, I said I would work from home, and boss asked if I needed the day off and I said ok, because honestly I had been feeling faint that morning. But by afternoon, I felt relatively okay, so I logged in and asked if I could do anything, only to be told to go rest. I ended up doing some work for the next week, thus proving that I cannot just hang out at home.

This was the second time I’ve fallen sick in the space of a month. There is something wrong with me – my stomach mainly – so I’ve decided I need to eat very light food for… a week. And not forget to take vitamins. And not push myself to exercise till I’ve recovered my strength.

In between everyone falling sick, we did very little as a family. V and I started going on walks on the weekend – we asked the kids but they thought it was lame – but that was shortlived given my illness.

The kids started school and are doing fine. Mimi seems to have regular friends and likes going to school (fingers crossed). Nene is fine as usual.

The protests in Hong Kong show no signs of abating.

Things I ate on the first day of my period

1. Toast and tea (a good start!)
2. Quarter packet of chips (and downhill from there)
3. Maggi
4. Kaaju katli
5. A medium sized packet of chips*
6. Chocolate-chip cookie
7. Green tea Japanese sweet that was the sweetest Asian desert I’ve ever tasted.
8. Piece of chocolate
9. Banana
10. Lamb curry and rice/Thai curry and rice (clearly I am not over that time when my helper used very old Thai curry ingredients and I have the mother of all food poisoning. Thai curry still makes me queasy.)
11. Kaaju katli

Needless to say all the good work done in the aftermath of horrible stomach bug has dissipated. Face is like oil well and love handles spilleth over. Beyond caring though.

*I dragged myself into work after lunch. Co-worker spotted me eating chips and kept cross-questioning me about how I was eating chips if I was sick. Chinese people have a very strong idea about what should eat when one is unwell, but geez, could we just put something down to cultural differences and leave it? I didn’t want to tell her I took half-day off for my period. So I just stonewalled politely. Annoying though.

 

 

 

New fears, Old fears

The fear of dropping your book into the wrong library dropbox again, having already done so once and got the help of a kind colleague in calling the library and explaining the situation to them in Chinese, then going down to the library to collect it with a print-out of my library record as proof only to realise that the print-out I grabbed before leaving office doesn’t have my name on it. Anyway, they gave me the book which I carried back with me this morning to return to the right library. Only en route I had mini panic attacks about dropping it in the wrong library box again, something that as eminently possible for me to do. Thankfully, the panic attacks worked and I dropped the book in the right dropbox.

The fear that your illness is going to last forever. Considering I used to routinely fall ill as a kid, being sick should be run-of-the-mill for me, right? But maybe since the gaps between illnesses grew larger, especially after to moving to Hong Kong, I began to entertain the possibility that it was not my fate to be confined to bed in a shuddering mess every month. And then when I am indeed in such a state, if I don’t t bounce back after a couple of days, I begin to entertain dire fantasies of being forever stuck in this condition. You know what brought this one, yeah? The tummy upset that refuses to subside. Yes, as of yesterday, I was still on a mush diet. Today, I am better but there’s no telling what the pot might bring tomorrow. In the meantime, I will speculate on whether I am going to forever going to be eating congee and what that will do to my mood.

The fear of putting on the weight that you lost (however measly such loss was, sniff!) when you were eating only congee for more than a week. Self explanatory. Also, clearly I am not as disengaged from concerns about my weight as I like to tell myself. What can I say? Thighs rubbing together is a new sensation that I do not welcome.

Loosies and the World Cup

The two are not connected, except in the case of gripes (hee hee) about the World Cup.

So I have had an upset tummy (this is the most euphemistic way I have found of explaining to people what’s wrong with me) for the past week or so. It had its roots in the Hot Chips V brought back from Bangalore at my insistence and also the amazing mangoes from his dad’s farm (separate post on that maybe, it’s too tragic to talk about the two mangoes I could not eat at this point.) Then period came and threw system out of whack and I had to crown it with eating a really dodgy kebab roll, the kind where the meat had to be spat out it was so chewy.

Voila, a runny tummy. You know it’s bad when you voluntarily eat congee. Congee and Marie biscuits are the hallmarks of sad state of affairs. And I’ve been going on like this for five days. The silver lining could have been weight loss, but only two kilos maximum have been lost, and that seems too paltry for my pains because they can quite easily be gained back when I recover my appetite. I have also been hoping for flawless skin owing to lack of oil and spice (and frankly anything else) but that has not exactly happened, though there has been reduction of flare-ups for which I’m grateful. I guess I can’t expect to glow when I’m in the grey of unhealth.

The worst part is that I have been having really severe muscle pain starting from the butt to my calves, so much so that I wondered if I have arthritis (which runs in my family). But I’ve had this kind of muscle pain before on a lesser scale with infections so I think it’s connected but I’ve had a couple of nights of literally waking up in pain and this is too much penance for just a kebab roll really.

Now that I’ve decided to see the doctor again and booked an appointment, pain has lessened. But if I decide to cancel, it will definitely come back, so I’ve decided to just go to the doctor and describe symptoms as they existed at the beginning of the day.

Okay verbal diarrhea on this subject done.

***

Now the World Cup. Obviously I’m very excited seeing as I have been excited about football World Cups since 1994 when my sister got very into it, so obviously I had to. Since then we’ve supported Italy, primarily because she had a crush on Paolo Maldini, who I also thought was hot but was forced to change track by sister and crush on Roberto Baggio instead who then went on to dash Italy’s hope by fudging a penalty kick.

Apart from teenage hormones (which we haven’t really outgrown) we also were genuinely into the football. I never got into league football, though we did champion AC Milan due to Maldini again, but we watched a fair amount of football when we could. In fact, our house was the gathering place for my sis and her guy friends to watch the World Cup when she was in college.

This is the first time I was not super excited by the World Cup. I think all the bad press about how wasteful it was got to me. And also, Hong Kong has this stupid cable system where one provider will grab the rights and then you have to sign up for some uber-expensive year-long package just to be able to watch the event. Or you can watch the free games they deign to show on the free channels, which anyway are at weird times. So it seemed futile to drum up enthusiasm.

And I managed to actually stay unenthusiastic for the first match, which was unfortunate because it was a dinger. V asked me if I wanted to wake up for it, and I was tempted but I said no in order to be responsible adult and look after children the next day and not be bleary eyed, and I’m trying to stick to that…but now I’m fully into it. Especially after we caught the Italy-Englnad match and Italy won!

I’ve actually grown less fond of Italy since the Zidane-Materazzi incident. I generally think they do too much drama (which V thinks is ironic coming from me.) Now I’ve realised they just wear the opposing team down with their drama, and then out of the blue (literally) score. It’s all very confusing to watch because they’re not the best team, but they win . Also, there’s something endearing about Mario Balotelli.

Okay now to the gripes:

1. There was this extremely sexist Facebook feed doing the rounds in the form of a letter of a male football fan to his wyfe (sic). It contained such gems as “U dont just pass infront of the tv if am watching soccer, u better crawl on the floor.” Signed off by “Gentleman’s Association” if you please. And the lunkheads on my timeline were sharing it. Ugh. Breaking news, guys, women watch and play football too. We even know what offside is, and it’s not that complicated!
2. Now laddiz. Yes, we all have teams and players that we think are hot. But can we not only post such status updates on Facebook, or talk about how hot this or that person is incessantly? Once is enough. Then also talk about the football okay? Otherwise it is too boring. Kthanxbi.