u/BreastRodent

And lemme tell you, I was VERY proud of how well I held it together until they dumped me out of the wheel chair into the car before I burst into tears after having to do TWO preps, everything running 2 hours behind schedule while I was starving, having hope that was going to be the thing where the results didn't come back normal, and then for it to not only come back normal, but to feel so insulted and dismissed like I'm not a 35 year old, active, ambulatory adult who doesn't know what pulled muscles feel like and how they work. Because they definitely don't work by spontaneously pulling themselves while I'm sitting at a stop light and then resolving themselves 10 minutes later???? Lady even doubled down on my follow up appointment when I brought up that I still think something was wrong with my appendix by telling me to talk to my PCP for a physical therapist referral. Like, REALLY?!

Anyway, I just wanted to share that for anybody else reading who's been dealing with chronic/recurrent appendicitis and having trouble either being taken seriously or with the discouragement of getting normal result after normal result after normal result. You're not crazy! You're not dumb. You're not a hypochondriac. Your appendix is a huge jerk, and this stuff is just kind of a nightmare to get actionable, concrete evidence of since you can't make it hurt on demand. FINALLY got a non-normal result about two weeks ago when I was awoken by my worst ever appendix attack after it'd been relatively quiet for 6 months, and my abdomen was still so tender and my appendix itself swollen after the attack resolved that it finally showed up as abnormal on a CT scan at urgent care the next morning. The surgeon on call at the hospital who my scan was sent to for review was like, "ok, yeah, if this has been going on for two years, we're taking it out because it's safer and you having to go back and forth like this is ridiculous." Even gave me his personal cell phone number in case stuff hit the fan real bad before the scheduled yeeting so he could take it out immediately. It felt SO good to not just be believed and heard, but to no longer have it hanging over my head that this thing could just pop without warning and I'd be pretty screwed without having a chance to get a prescription med I'm on that makes opioid painkillers not work get out of my system first. Three days post op as I write this!

Even made myself a really dumb ugly cookie cake with "<my name>'s Appendix DEFEATED" written on it to celebrate getting it out the night before lol. Highly recommend especially if it's been a journey for you, like you're gonna feel crappy and sitting up isn't going to be fun for a few days, but at least you'll have a silly treat waiting for you when you get home and to snack on while you're healing. :]

Like, y'all already won't even accept the $2.5k spent and 6 weeks of testing I went through in ~2011 to get my disability documented the first time I went through college in order to receive accommodations for a chronic, lifelong disability I was diagnosed with as a 6 year old that is still EXACTLY the same as it ever was as a 36 year old because y'all won't accept documentation more than 3 years old, even though... that documentation is STILL perfectly fine and valid in the eyes of the US government for applying to federal jobs under Schedule A disability hiring where there's, y'know, like, crimes I could be charged with at stake if I try to apply under that fraudulently... and now THIS?!

Listen, literally one of the most exciting parts of first enrolling at UoPeople to me was I could finally, FINALLY, justify, after a decade of dreaming, buying my OWN comb-binding machine like I had access to in the mail/copy room of my old brick-and-mortar university physics department that became SUCH an essential part of my my learning style, the ONE time I couldn't find a pdf online of an assigned textbook for an upper level math class, I bought a hardcopy and then spent 4 hours scanning EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE. of it that we would be covering in the course just so I could still print it off at 70% scale and comb-bind it into volumes I could fold back on themselves for rewriting everything in my own words in all that extra margin room because this shit became THAT essential to my learning process. Like, I truly can't function without it for, y'know, disability reasons bc I CANNOT process information on a screen the same way I can on a physical page. Bro, wtf?!

But all that said, I also really want to acknowledge my privilege that I CAN afford in the first place to print off tons of stuff and comb-bind it into individual volumes knowing that SO many of my classmates can't as easily afford to do something to assist in their educations like that... and that said, one of the other reasons I'm already H A T I N G Brightspace is I'd made it something of a personal first-day-of-class tradition with myself (that I SUPER sincerely look forward to since my day one at UoPeople) is to go through the class roster on Moodle and compile a list of alllllllll the countries my classmates are from. I can't do that any more, and it makes me SO SO SO sad because I LOVE knowing where everybody is from, it brings me SO much joy and makes me SO proud to see the full global scope of who all I'm down in the trenches with trying to make this stuff make sense, and losing THAT makes me feel even more disconnected from them than I already did just going to school online in the first place. :[ Just... damn. Real slap in the face, y'all took THAT little bit of joy away from me, too.

Lmao lowkey like burn it down. Though, ok, to be clear, I ain't gonna quit, I'm here in the first place because $5k for a whole-ass new bachelor's degree was an offer I couldn't refuse out of sheer nerdiness, but this is an ADDITIONAL level of enshittification that makes me EXTRA go "...yeah, compared to the two other hard STEM bachelors degrees I got at a flagship public state university with big connections to a major national lab, sometimes the $5k-ness of THIS hard STEM bachelor's degree I'm now pursuing REALLY shows."