My holiday gifts:

• Intuos3 6×11 tablet — OMG, the best present I remember getting, ever
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on DVD — love it!!
• Animal Crossing: City Folk for Wii — really looking forward to giving this a go
• Personal Trainer: Cooking for Nintento DS — another one I'm eager to dig around in
• Eragon by Christopher Paolini (hardcover) — I'll be cracking this one open soon
• A 1GB USB thumb drive leather keychain that would be nice even if it was just a keychain!
• An IOU for Afrika on PS3, if/when it ever arrives in the US (I LOVED Endless Ocean on Wii, and this is along the same lines)

Hmm…did I miss anything?

The Ailments to Date – cue the ominous music!

• Ovarian cysts (15 years and counting)
  • I've had 2 laparoscopies to aspirate them as well as more combinations of birth control pills and hormone therapies to try to control them than I care to count. They're reasonably under control now, but I still have pain a couple times a month. The general concensus is that they're a result of endometriosis.
• Migraines (11 years and counting)
  • Took me forever to find a doctor that was even willing to treat them, but I'm on a cocktail of anti-depressants and blood pressure medications that keep them at bay –  mostly.
• Fibromyalgia (diagnosed August 2008)
  • One walk-in emergency clinic, two PCMs, two rheumatologists, a bone scan, several x-rays, and countless blood tests and physical exams later, it's official: fibro. The joint pain, overwhelming fatigue, body aches, over-sensitivity to certain stimuli (pain, heat, cold), and inability to focus on just about anything most days really isn't all in my head.
• Polycystic Kidney Disease (diagnosed October 2008)
  • All the blood work I'd had done on the way to my fibro diagnosis alerted my various doctors to an unexplained elevated creatinine level. After meeting with a nephrologist and discussing my family and personal medical histories, he ordered an ultrasound to look for cysts. (My dad and his mother both had one non-functioning kidney, probably congenital, and PKD in the remaining one, along with high blood pressure issues; I'd already passed a kidney stone by age 24, and had been in a car accident in '97 that banged them up pretty bad.) Nothing showed on the ultrasound, but he was sure something was going on, so in I went for a CT scan. Sure enough, cysts ahoy. I'm pretty asymptomatic at this point, but my dad's functioning kidney isn't doing so hot, and I remember my grandma living with dialysis for years, so I know what can happen to me down the line. Thankfully, it was caught pretty early, and with medication and diet management, I might never have symptoms. Then again, my kidneys could fail in 5 or 10 years. Good times! :p

I think I'm all listed out. Mmm, clam chowder time…

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