When I am someday interesting enough to write a memoir, the working title is Baking Cookies is Better Than Lithium. Never mind that I haven’t been on lithium in many, many years – it’s practically the icon of bi-polar disorder, while no one knows what lamotrigine is who doesn’t have reason to. (It’s primary purpose is an anti-seizure medication, which also works as a mood stabilizer.)

This assumes I eventually get famous enough from making cookies to be worthy of having my story told, because there are plenty of people who beat me to writing books about being crazy alone. I used to have thoughts of writing some kind of humorous story about living with Ulcerative Colitis, since while it pretty much tops the list of unsexy diseases, there are the occasional funny moments (usually in retrospect) if you can look at it from the right mindset.

Unfortunately people have beaten me to that one as well.

The only uniqueness I’d have going for me then is writing as a woman. The couple books I’ve read were written by men, and while of course they’d be writing from their personal experience, something about the writing gave the impression that they assumed their audience would only be other men as well. Much like the assumption that everyone in an online game is a ‘he’ because “there are no girls on the internet” I wonder if these men fell to the the myth that “girls don’t poop” and therefore no women would have IBD.

My tentative remission lasted a little under two weeks. I’ve tried not to be discouraged by that, being that it’s much less likely to be a magic switch as a cycle where the window of ‘normal’ gets larger each time.

However I’ve decided to seek out a new gastroenterologist for a second opinion. At least I think that’s what it is – I’ve always thought a ‘second opinion’ is when you don’t trust the initial diagnosis.

Doctor 1: You have lung cancer.
Patient: I want a second opinion.
Doctor 2: It’s just a bad cold, get some rest and drink fluids.
Patient: Good thing I didn’t waste all that money on chemo!

I don’t have enough experience with doctors to want to distrust mine outright, but I have issues with her approach to treatment which has always been to escalate the medications without stopping to question if what I’m already on is doing more harm than good. Now that I’m down to two, as well as the Remicade, she’s wanting me to taper the benign maintenance medication down while continuing on the steroid indefinitely.

Due to all of this I don’t trust her to respect my desire to have a close to drug-free pregnancy as possible.

I got some really exciting news today on the bakery front – the soup place I eat at all the time is interested in my cookies, after I gave them some samples yesterday. The pure giddiness from this happening while I was at lunch, overlapping simultaneously with the day-to-day work stress of the day job, made my head feel like it was going to explode.

Now my excitement’s been tempered because it feels like this whole job thing is a mental roadblock I need to get past before I can focus on anything else. I’m wondering how Andrew isn’t visibly going crazy over waiting for news on his job search. I can’t cite anything horribly bad about my day but yet I’m having trouble dragging myself out of bed in the morning to face it lately. I’m hoping after dealing with Impatient Dog Guy again tomorrow, who I’m expected to give my cell phone number to so he can impatiently call me while I drive to Customs, I’ll be able to let work mentally stay at work again for a while. Or at least the weekend.