Not my week

Wow. Lately it seems as though I never write a positive entry and I just complain about what is going wrong. Maybe it has just been with my few last posts but I regretfully admit that this post will have a tuff time being any different. I've decided July just hasn't been my month.

There were a few things in July that I had been really looking forward to: my trials bike competition and my Yellowstone fishing trip with Trent. It didn't look like the competition was going to work out because my fan was busted and the new fan that I ordered would have to be spliced in to the mess of wires under my gas tank and I didn't know how to do it. I was able to get a guy from Colorado to send me an electrical diagram, which was good, and I was able to get the new fan working. I spent so much time and effort during the week trying to get the bike ready and it still didn't work out. Here is why.

Thursday night as I was eating a chicken nugget I stretched out my neck to take a bite and felt something pop in my neck where my lymph nodes are. Immediately I felt tenderness and pain in my lymph nodes, and immediately they became a bit swollen. I went home and slept only to find in the morning that they had become more swollen, about the size of ping pong balls, and you could tell they were swollen just by looking at me. That night, Friday night, I went to a few parties and was self conscious about them and was joking around with a few girls I met about me having a goiter. It was a funny topic of conversation and an ice breaker but it was pretty difficult to explain why they were there in the first place.

That night I sweated all through the night and ran a fever. When I woke up to head out to the trial bike competition I was having a tough time swallowing but not a sore throat.. I looked in the mirror and saw that my neck, chin, and cheeks had double or tripled in size from what they were the night before and it scared me to death. I thought about just going up to the competition anyways but was worried that the swelling would worsen to the point that it would close up my airway.

I went to the insta-care and was waiting outside when they opened up at 8:30. The doctor had no idea what would be causing it and had me do blood work, cultures, and x rays. The x rays showed that I still had room in my airway to breath, the cultures said I didn't have mono or strep, and the blood work indicated that my body was fighting some sort of infection. He said that the x rays did not show any abscesses, but that I would need a ct scan. I asked him how much that would cost and he said 1200 dollars. Since my deductible is like 3000 dollars and I haven't been able to save that much in my health savings account as of yet, I told him I wanted to hold off on the ct scan unless I absolutely had to have it. He said that if I didn't see improvement by Monday, he would recommend I have it for sure.

I came to my parents house and have been here resting up, drinking lots of fluids, and sucking soup out of a straw because I can't open my mouth. I don't even look like the same person. I look like I'm 100 pounds overweight in the face. You can't see my jawbone at all and my outside jaw and cheeks come out so far you can't see my ears. Today is Sunday, and this morning I have noticed the swelling besides becoming bigger, is moving down into my upper chest. This is really freaking me out and everything I read online, which I don't want to believe and probably shouldn't pay attention to, points straight to cancer. I have never been so worried sick; the suspense of this all is really killing me.

I'm supposed to leave for Yellowstone on Wednesday. Ha. Yeah right.