The words “kidney infection” instantly conjures imagery of opulence and luxury; mounds of truffled caviar and matsutake served on platinum trays by statuesque gentlemen wearing only bow ties and white gloves. Don’t be fooled by what Hollywood tells you, though – all those TV shows and movies glamorizing the kidney infection, making it seem romantic and desirable – it’s all a lie cooked up by Corporate America to sell Taylor Swift CDs and Summer’s Eve “feminine wash”. I’m here to introduce you to the cold, hard truth: kidney infections suck. They suck a whole lot. Yeah, sure, I was excited when I heard the diagnosis: a kidney infection! It’s like getting the consumption, but in my kidneys! I’ll get to do a big musical number, and Ewan McGregor will feel really bad for slut shaming me before declaring his love in anachronistic song. AWESOME! Let’s go!

Reality is never as pretty as the glossy media take on “reality”, and this kidney infection is no different. Since the diagnosis on Tuesday, I’ve had very little to feel pretty about: I’m sore, cranky, uncomfortable, and not a single big group dance number has broken out anywhere near me. I keep reading up on symptoms and side effects, but my search has taken me to some dark, uninformed corners of the internet – there doesn’t seem to be any one source of definite answers, so I’ve taken to filing every single new and interesting body hiccup as being caused by my stupid kidneys. Some of these go back several weeks – I thought they were part of the London Stomach Flu or even the nasty cold/flu thing I had last week, but it’s likely that my kidneys have been rotting for some time now and all these weird things aren’t just hauntings of my humours but signs I should have picked up on before I found myself in the ER.

A lot of what I’m experiencing makes sense, even if it’s no fun – pain, for example. Infected organs hurt, and while I was told to take Advil to dull the pain, my repeated accidental ibuprofen overdoses likely had the opposite effect on my insides (I learned too late that 3 x 400mg = 1200mg, not the 600mg I was supposed to take). The medication I’m on is introducing my urine to fabulous new forms of self expression; every trip to the bathroom is a surprise and delight. My insides make much more noise than normal, which is awkward at times. I’m a little sensitive to sunlight at the moment, so I can’t enjoy the the gorgeous fall days as robustly as I might like. All of these are annoying, but I can live with them easily enough – in fact, I’d sign up for an extended tour of duty of strange pee and noisy tummy times if only I could make the single worst kidney infection bonus gift go the fuck away:

My mouth is gross.

I have got a perpetual horrible taste in my mouth, and it will. Not. Go. Away. I am terrified to have conversations with people in close quarters for fear that my breath is as bad as the taste in my mouth; so terrible are the conditions in the dank face cave I call a word hole. This is apparently an uncommon side effect of a kidney infection, and had I not known about my ongoing kidney fun, would have been a drastic indicator that I required immediate medical attention .. but as it stands, everything is just disgusting. I don’t know how to make it stop. Nothing I do makes the taste go away – no amount of water or Diet Coke; no extended bouts with my toothbrush or mouthwash. It’s starting to worry me in addition to completely grossing me out: everything tastes awful! I am sad in my mouth hole! I’m afraid I smell bad and people are tutting me behind my back! I hate this kidney infection. I’ve basically had Something Wrong since my second week in London, and I’m pretty fed up with it all. I miss things that taste good, and not being utterly horrified at the state of emergency in my mouth.

How do I make this stop? I have more than week’s worth of antibiotics to take, but if this yuck continues much longer I may just go mad from rage and gross times. Help! My jaw is tired from chewing gum!

not even this anthropomorphic hot dog stand selling its young can fully cheer me up

My kidneys are a seething, roiling cauldron of white blood cells and LIES!

I have long since been operating under the notion that my kidneys are fucking rockstars; shining examples of health and strong investment portfolios. I may be a homely specimen with ill tempers and a lack of morals that make the elders tut as I walk by, but my kidneys have long since been lauded as brilliant. It’s one of the Great Truths in all that is Kimli: I have fantastic tits, I’m smarter than the average bear, and MY KIDNEYS ARE AWESOME. Even on my worst days, the ones where Twitter has been reporting that Romney was ahead of Obama all afternoon, I could sit back and think “at least my kidneys are fine” .. but now? Now I don’t even have THAT.

I woke up at 3 this morning with a cat on my chest and a deep ache in my right side. I didn’t think much of either, but the ache wouldn’t go away and throughout the day, got worse – a throbbing twang that made me break out into a sweat with every radiating pulse. It was bad enough that I wasn’t satisfied with simply asking Twitter what for a diagnosis: I took myself to the walk-in clinic in my building mid-morning to check in for an appointment, then went back upstairs to research appendicitis and elliptical pregnancies and Flukeman lore. Eventually my appointment time came and I sweatily hobbled back downstairs to wait for a doctor; in an alarming amount of pain the entire time.

The doctor (who was completely awesome and in 5 minutes showed more concern for me than my current pill dealer ever has – I may be making a switch; he was wearing a bright orange Hawaiian shirt for crying out loud) asked me my symptoms, then told me to get my ass over the hospital ASAP for an ultrasound: I very likely had kidney stones, and shit was about to get real bad real fast. He wrote me a note excusing me from work, gave me directions to the hospital, and told me to follow up with him afterwards; wishing me luck and haste with a comforting hand on the back. I went back to the office worried but glad I had a plan I could put into action to make all this stupid pain go away.

.. eventually. See, I got back to the office at 12:59pm and I had a 1pm meeting that I had called. I knew I needed to go to the hospital NOW, but .. well, I had a meeting to go to. So I did. I was in a lot of pain and kind of out of it, but it was an important meeting. Shut up. I take my work seriously, damnit.

After the meeting, I gathered my things and fled the office. I somehow found myself a cab and directed it to the hospital (I had to give the cab driver directions to a hospital just outside of downtown – alarming), while coordinating a planned attack with Ed in which he went home to grab the car then meet me in the ER. Luckily, the ER was quiet save for one other patient and the hen-like chatter of the admitting staff (I learned a thousand things about them, including their financial statuses and susceptibility for investment schemes). It took a little longer to get me into see a doctor than I hoped, but simply because my health wasn’t the most pressing issue in the room: rather, it was “WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE FABULOUS BOOTS?!” My admitting lady dragged everyone in the ER out from behind the glass to look at my boots, then said I have an awesome sense of style and should open a boutique in which I import all the great things I wear and sell them to other people. All of this is true – I am totally a fashion icon like Audrey or Diana – but I was also practically WRITHING IN PAIN and did not want to have a conversation about my favourite online stores and how brave I am for buying my clothes on the internet.

Thankfully, a nurse saved me by telling me I needed to give her a sample of my precious pee so I was able to get away to make an utter mess of myself. If there is a graceful, hygenic way to provide urine that doesn’t involve a flesh tube sticking out of my boxers, then I don’t know about it – but I gave up some pee, and was ushered into the hospital proper to change into a fancy gown and await my fate. A doctor came in to ask about my symptoms and agreed that I most likely had kidney stones, and would send me in for a CAT scan. Someone whisked away my urine, someone came to steal my blood, and another jabbed me with something that he promised would make me feel real good (he may not have been a doctor, now that I think about it). Momentary hilarity arose when yet another doctor came in to put stickers all over me – he was there to check my heart for some reason. He got all the way through covering me in stickers (something I could have done myself because I usually do) before he thought to ask me my name – and lo, I wasn’t the droids patient he was looking for. Off came the stickers (I think he was just trying to feel my boobs and belly fat), and I wished him luck in finding the correct patient. More waiting, some whining on Twitter, and I was given some fashionable blue booties so I could shuffle off to my CAT scan in style.

The scan, which had nothing to do with cats, was kind of neat. I got to go into a gonad-frying hospital donut (with the bed raised to 169.0 from 500.0 on account of my being so short and coincidental) and hold my breath for a series of scans, and – get this – not a single person or group of tourists had to look at my vagina. It was glorious – I stayed fully covered and no one crowded around to peep a glimpse at my famous labia. Yay! But, back to my kidneys – after the scan, the clinician (who didn’t once look at my vulva) sent me back to my waiting room and told me the doctor would be with me as soon as my results were ready.

I hadn’t been in the room for long when Ed showed up, so I had some company and a witness to my diagnosis: as usual, the fancy and gold-standard of medical scans showed nothing at all. I don’t actually HAVE kidney stones .. but judging by the enormous number of white cells in my urine and blood, I have one hell of a raging kidney infection. The doctor prescribed me a whole lot of antibiotics and Advil, then sent me home with a dire warning that should I feel at all worse in the next 48 hours, I was to get myself back to the hospital IMMEDIATELY (meetings be damned). Ed drove me home, then filled my prescription for me while I slept until the mystery painkillers wore off – and that’s where we are now: a whole lot of pain but a clear plan for getting better, and the best news to come out of America in four years (YAY OBAMA!).

I don’t actually know where this infection came from, but I will be glad when it’s gone. In the meantime, I kind of hurt a lot – I’m in for an uncomfortable night, but at least I can stop having nightmares about rich white men starting WWIII from a seat of significant power.

I’ve fallen into an uncomfortable blog habit, and it’s causing me untold amounts of anxiety. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to update less – give myself a bit of a break, as it were. I had been writing almost daily for over 11 years, and I was a little worn out (not to mention running out of stories to tell), so instead of shutting things down entirely, I thought that I’d write fewer posts and relish the time off in between. For a while, it was going well: I’d blog something, then by the time I felt I should blog again, I’d have something to say. I get a break, you get a break, and we’ll meet up again afterward all refreshed and looking forward to reconnecting. It’s kind of like makeup sex, only without the angry orgasms.

Unfortunately, the time between posts is getting longer and longer, and every time I think “I really need to update” I find myself staring a huge blank wall. Things are going on; I just .. don’t feel like writing about them. And then I feel guilty, and then I start to wallow in anxiety, and no shit sometimes I actually can’t sleep at night because I can’t stop freaking out about the lack of writing I’m doing. It’s not a good headspace at all, and I feel guilty about feeling guilty and the whole goddamn thing starts all over again.

There’s a level of interaction I’ve grown used to with my blog, and that has dwindled away to nothing. The advent of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have spread people too thin, and no one comments anymore. I miss that; miss the feedback I used to get from people who read my words. It’s a selfish way to feel, because I’ve always been adamant that I write for me and not for comments or likes .. but now the comments are gone, I’ve forgotten why I’m sharing. Blogging has never before felt like I was speaking to an empty wall, but it’s what I’m experiencing now: a whole lot of “why bother?”. If I can’t muster up the effort required to care about the things I do on a daily basis, how can I expect others to care?

Of course, because I’m not clever enough to look at this ocean of ennui as a scientific experiment or anything, I’m worried that I’m falling into my standard depressive cycle again – but one so insidious that I’m not even fully aware of it. I really hate the “why bother” of it all, because to me that’s the worst possible emotion someone could feel about anything – it’s beyond upset and beyond giving up, it’s just .. why? It’s terrible; an endless nothing devoid of joy or anger or cookies. I’m pretty sure I’m practically pathologically afraid of feeling that way, and to feel it all over something so close to my heart? To not give a rat’s ass over something I’ve spent a third of my life cultivating? That can’t be real; it must be astral interference with my midichlorians. Makes perfect sense.

What if it’s not, though?

What if I’m just out of things to say?

The main thing keeping me from closing up shop is the loss of identity I’d feel. I still struggle over losing pieces of my past that I really loved, and the last thing I’d want to do is introduce another. I do wish I could shake this anxiety and get back to Ridiculous Inappropriate Adventure .. but even that’s changed now. All the people I used to Adventure with have moved on, but I’m still here. It’s hard to drag people outside to do things with me, so I either don’t do things or I do them by myself and grow too comfortable internalizing everything. I don’t know. There are a thousand things that could be playing a part in this terrible outfit of “MEH” I’m wearing. I don’t know if it’s worth additional therapy (hey Doc, I don’t want to write about my vagina: what’s wrong with me?), but I don’t feel much like myself and .. I miss me. Where you at, me? Come back.

And where you at, the rest of you? Are you still out there? I miss you, too.

well? is it?