27 June 2003 ~ I'm sorry I've been drunk...

I HAVE SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME!!!

Woo-hoo!

And now I know what it is!!!

AND, it's curable, and it's not going to kill me!!!

Check this shit out...

Normally, a person has a lot of little itty-bitty creatures in their body. Right? Now, one of those things is called Candida. Another of those things is called... well, I don't know. But it's some bacteria that lives inside you and eats Candida. Candida is sort of bad. It lives in all the dark, wet places in a person's body.

Now, back in February, I had to have surgery... And, just to make sure I wasn't going to catch anything awful from the surgery, the doctor gave me a massive IV dose of antibiotics. Antibiotics kill off bacteria. THIS antibiotic apparently killed off this good bacteria that eats the Candida.

So, the Candida thrived... It started growing, and growing, and growing... It's probably growing in my stomach and intestines right now...

Candida is alive, see... It's a kind of fungus. Therefore, it's sort of like a parasite. It lives in your body and eats sugar. So, it's been eating all of the sugar in my body, and transforming it into something else...

Candida is, as my high school biology teacher would say, a "Yeasty-Beasty."

Think of places where you'd find yeast...

Right. So, this shit has been taking sugar out of the food I've been eating, and then shitting it out...

...in the form of ethanol.

For those of you failed high school biology, let me define ethanol for you:

ethanol. n : the intoxicating agent in fermented and distilled liquors; used pure or denatured as a solvent or in medicines and colognes and cleaning solutions and rocket fuel [syn: ethyl alcohol, fermentation alcohol, grain alcohol]

So... all those times my stomach has hurt over the past few months? All of the times my guts have been churning? That's because I've had some uninvited guests staying over in my guts... And... all the times my head has felt a little loopy? All the times I've felt anxious, or confused, or had crappy memory problems... It's because... I WAS DRUNK.

It's funny to go to a doctor and find out that, for the past three months, you've been drunk. Sort of.

Heh!

They prescribed me a pill. Just one sweet little pill. Supposedly, it will go throughout my body, killing off fungus.

Can you fucking believe that I've been miserable for three months over a body-wide YEAST INFECTION?

That is SO gross.

I gotta go to bed; I haven't taken this pill yet, and I'm still feeling like shit... But it's excellent to finally know, for real, that you really, really are sick. I had to find all the information myself, had to ask the right questions and find the right people, but I'm gonna be okay now... I just wanted to let you all know...

Thanks, guys, for the support -- mostly silent support, but support nonetheless -- for the past few months. I apologize for being drunk all this time...

Love,
~Helena*