Oh ya, well, you’re weird!
In all honesty, learning more about men was a strong motivator for me when I came in. My body was fine. It got better after I incorporated real weights, but that wasn’t what kept me here long enough to make the social connections. Reading around the threads felt like being a fly on the wall of a locker room. I was working in an inner city high school at the time, and it was apparent to me that my education was overly feminized. TN was like crack to me and I read it voraciously. Like, I actually remember seeing the list of sections on the lefthand side of the screen and spotting “Sex and the Male Animal” among them. ~CLICK~
I’m just really curious. And I guess this post probably qualifies as a confession, lol.
I will say that the people who come through my office looking for help in understanding themselves and their relationships are the richer for my having stumbled onto TNation when I was looking for the name of a piece of gym equipment, as I am.
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So I know someone will think I’ve mistaken this website for my personal diary but there are some things I cannot talk to my friends about because, quite frankly, they are too silly, and when I need to talk about something even mildly serious, my mother is usually the only person irl that I can do that with. And, unfortunately (but I believe the word unfortunately isn’t close to conveying what I mean here), this is about her.
So, my mother had been having a weird pain in her bladder, and she was worried it could be something serious after a while. She did blood and urine tests and everything turned out to be normal apparently. However she took antibiotics and the pain didn’t go away. It’s been about two months now. She’s been prescribed a urine culture test (I’m not sure that’s what it’s called in English) and she did it a few days ago, will have the results handed this Monday. For a while we thought that’d be a cystitis.
However, she just called me and asked me to come to her house because she had something to tell me. When I arrived, she was crying and trembling and told me she didn’t want to scare me but had to tell me something. So she told me she’d had diarrhea yesterday, out of the blue, and that’s unusual because she’s been on a very strict diet for weight loss usually and nothing she’d been eating would reasonably cause diarrhea.
What’s more, she’d just been to the bathroom, after feeling a very urgent need to defecate, and told me that she’d found some kinda pinky, somewhat blood-ey mucous in her feces. She told me that’d made her realize we thought it had to do with the bladder could indeed be bowel related.
And those are symptoms of bowel cancer. It doesn’t even feel real to type this. And it’s Friday, meaning that her doctor isn’t working today and she’ll have to wait until Monday to see her. My mother said she’s sure the doctor will prescribe her a colonoscopy, so that will take a few more days. Honestly I don’t even know what I’m feeling inside, there’s so much worry, fear that I don’t know how to put this into words.
I’m praying God it’s not what we think it is. I can’t even say this, but I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t even come to thinking of losing my mom.
It’s very premature to go there. Even if your fears are realized, cancer is increasingly curable. There could be all kinds of explanations besides cancer, and again, most cancer responds to treatment. Ask a room full of adults your mom’s age, whatever it is, if they’ve had cancer, and more than half will raise their hands, I would imagine.
Just breathe. It’s not time yet to freak out.
I know but it’s been a couple of months almost. If it’s the case, I fear too much time could have passed by.
And I just can’t think of how she could be having those symptoms otherwise, she’s been eating so little and so “clean…”
But then again, the bloodwork seemed okay. How the hell can something serious even slip by so easily?!
I think the blood work would show something unusual. As Emily said, take a breath and back away from the panic button.
When I applied for my current job I had to have a physical and stress test. I got a letter with my blood work and it said to follow up with my doctor about a couple out of range numbers.
I scheduled an appointment and did what I always do - Google searched what those numbers meant. Well, the information I found pointed to cancer. My white blood cell counts were off and it freaked me out for a bit.
I went to the doctor and she told me it was perfectly normal. My body was probably fighting an infection I didn’t even know I had.
My point is that the internet is full of information but it isn’t always correct.
If you suffer from anxiety or you tend to overthink this type of stuff, the internet is the last place you should go for information on what’s wrong.
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I don’t have anxiety. I’m just curious and like to self diagnose myself 
It’s not uncommon for me to have some lab readings that are outside of the recommended range and my doctor always tells me I’m fine.
High creatinine is due to lifting and being a larger than average human. High cholesterol (220) is fine if the HDL:LDL ratoo is good. You know, the usual stuff (cholesterol is lower now).
For that blood work I didn’t know what the words even meant so I had to search for that to determine if I should even care. It’s only natural to go down the rabbit hole once you find the entrance.
Lol, I meant that comment to be for the general audience not specifically you.
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Sometimes when I can’t get on here for a couple of days, I actually hope there aren’t too many threads to catch up on,… I’m not as young as I used to be.
S
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I have stopped reading threads that get too far ahead of me.
I still feel some guilt, but admittedly I do skim some people’s replies more than others 
S
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I spend like 30 minutes a day reading random articles so I run out of material very fast. Whenever I see a new thread I get excited.
Don’t worry. You don’t need friends. I can guarantee that you will do more for you than your friends will.
So I was driving to the gym, trying to collect myself and have some resemblance of focus to train, when she called me to tell me it’s just happened again.
I’ve headed to her house and I’m now waiting for her to get in the car so we can go to the emergency room. That’s literally the only thing we can do now.
I told myself I would never go to the lounge section of my gym. Yet here I am, sitting on this rather questionable leather couch, eating peppermints like candy.
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I…how else would one eat a peppermint?
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I think this qualifies you to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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On the farm subthread, I can only say YES. For me the worst was bananas. The bunches weigh way more than you think and they are incredibly awkward. And they are full of beasts that crawl down into your face with their poison fangs. There are more, hanging out in huge webs between trees, but you don’t even care, because bananas.
Maybe it would have been better if I was routinely squatting lots of iron, but back then I was as strong as I would be until well into lifting. The problem wasn’t so much the load as the hard unripe na-nas grinding right down against the clavicle, anyway.
That and the huge bugs and spiders and land lobsters or whatever.
Cattle are more fun, but for every moment sweeping across the landscape on a motorcycle or a horse being a goddamn cowboy there are ten with them up close in a yard and you’re never going to be bigger or stronger than they are. Oh yeah, here’s a three foot length of polyethylene pipe, now make that half tonne beast behave.
That was routinely dangerous but it wasn’t as much straight out labour, or as many face-crawling poison bugs, as bananas.
I did gain a ton of muscle. I was eating a steak for breakfast and another for dinner, and throwing bunches and digging holes in between. Stupidly I didn’t just roll straight into lifting after jacking it in though
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With no context, I thought you were tripping balls while writing that post.
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