Surgeon - Dr. Haruko Okada
Summer is soooo much better now. I can actually sit outside in the heat without feeling like im drowning in chest sweat, I can take off my shirt to cool off and feel the breeze(in the shade of course, still have to wait 1 year until full sun exposure), tank tops feel fantastic, and just clothing in general.
Just got my first set today (they are pretty intensive sets with biweekly changes as I have realllly crooked teeth from a combination of a bad overbite and all 4 wisdom teeth that grew in sideways bashing all the other teeth like dominoes) and I am supposed to wear them 24/7 besides eating/drinking(non-water) but I haven’t been able to keep them on for more than 3 hours straight before i genuinely feel like I might puke. I constantly can feel the top tray digging into the roof of my mouth and my tongue likes to sit at the roof of my mouth so it’s just this double whammy of feeling like something is stuck there and I’m choking or whatever, talking makes it 10x worse cuz then I’m moving my tongue and feeling EVERYTHING touch that damn retainer. Like how a tongue depressor at the doctor can make you gag if it pulls on your tongue too much or touches the roof of your mouth. I just feel so unbelievably nauseous while wearing them and it just gets worse and worse. I drool a lot more and so I also have to swallow more which doesn’t help.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this treatment. It’s been like 30 minutes since I took them out again, I had to take a zofran and I’m still nauseous. I’m hyper aware of my own tongue and the roof of my mouth and every time I swallow. Am I just doomed and will need to go for traditional braces? Or will this feeling pass? Because if it’s like this the whole time I won’t be able to do it, I can’t live 24/7 feeling like I’m gonna gag.
After 10 years of constant suffering, a steady decline in my quality of life, and being ignored by my doctors and gynecologists I have finally been able to see an endometriosis specialist and they looked at my symptoms and said point blank “I think you most definitely have endometriosis”. They’ve been doing research and surgery for decades, but now focus entirely on excision surgery so they’ve seen hundreds of cases over their career. I’m scheduled for an MRI to try and see if we can spot any deep infiltration endo because the doctor said they couldn’t rule it out from my latest TV ultrasound as it wasn’t done by a specialist and ultrasounds aren’t very reliable. Then I’ll be getting a laparoscopy to finally go in and see for sure, and the doctor assured me that they’ll excise any endo they find. Surgery will be around August or later as that’s when their booking opens up. We worked out that I’ll be doing the excision surgery to “clear out” any endo they can find, and then I go on medication to reduce my estrogen to help lower the recidivism rate for as long as possible, looking at 5-10% chance of recurrence within 7 years if I go on the medication, vs 50% chance if I don’t.
All in all, I’m feeling kind of just stunned. Like it was a little anti-climactic that after years and years of arguing with doctors and being dismissed that I just go in to talk with a specialist and they just… agree. Agree more than I do, like they’re SURE, because they’ve seen my symptoms and situation hundreds of times. I feel a bit relieved but I know that I still have that final hurdle to overcome to truly KNOW, and that hurdle includes surgery, but I’m so willing to do it if it means finally getting answers after literally a decade of waiting in pain.
UPDATE: surgery is scheduled for July 30th! I got lots to do the prepare, with pre surgical testing and insurance stuff and trying to get everything in my house, body, and mind as comfortable and calm as possible for recovery.
So I (24) will be finally seeing an endometriosis specialist in late June to hopefully pursue a diagnostic laparoscopy so I can finally find out what’s wrong with me because I’ve been in pain since my first period and my quality of life has drastically reduced in the last 5 years. I’m so nervous that I’ll just have my pain and concerns dismissed like they have my whole life from every OBGYN before. What can I do to try and make my appointment go well? The doctor is highly rated but I’d still like to know what I can say or do to help make my case.
I finally had the build and confidence to retry my attempts at Simon after i initially got my ass kicked when I first saw him. I think I finally beat him on my 7th? try in a row (I was determined this time). I utilized a smaller party of Verso/Monoco to get through his first phase, then had my heavy hitters Maelle/Lune/Sciel for the second phase. On my final attempt I narrowly avoided triggering phase 3 insta wipe, had a lucky final massive 15mill dmg from Lune that managed to take him out without activating phase 3. Bro Lune with Esquim weapon - Feint/Double Third/Frenzy - attack with Lightning dance full dark stains is fucking busted af. Like Maelle Stendhal build is crazy for one shots but Lune is my multi attack queen.
I was riding the high after just defeating Osquio (epic ending cinematic btw, made me wanna cry again) and so I thought I’d try and finally defeat the Duollistes in the Endless Tower. I’d attempted them once before only to realize I was severely under prepared. But now, now I felt ready with my Maelle nuke build. Turns out I was not. I instead realized I couldn’t afford to have Maelle hanging around at 1hp hoping she could do maybe 10% of the boss’s health bar in a single hit. I needed to pivot to the long game survival mode.
So I did. I slowly learned the attack patterns and made sure Maelle always had enough gradient charges to revive the team if shit went sideways (which it did a LOT during the first hour). Phase 1 wasn’t that bad, it was phase 2 that took so damn long because now I couldn’t have Maelle use Edigé to face tank hits for the team while lune cranked dmg and sciel buffed us.
It was such a slog and I’m sure if it redesigned my pictos/lumina points around a defense style build I could have a faster run time but i wasn’t gonna give up half way when I could simply power through and beat the boss through sheer will and memorizing the attack patterns. It took my nearly 2 hours, my longest fight yet but I did it.