Sawblade's speeches

And so the school year has finally ended. I spent a week in Duck, NC with Wesley friends at a beach house to celebrate the end of the year. My health has continued to get worse, or so it feels, and I spent a good part of the week in bed. Still, it was a lot of fun, and certainly a much less stressful beach week than last year. Nice to see old friends and spend a couple of days with new ones. Keelah brought DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) down and a lot of us were pretty obessed with that game for most of the week! I'll hopefully write more in a later post about the beach but right now I'm trying to pack to get ready to head home.

And last night was the baccalaureate service for the grads that are being sent off into the real world. Wow, it's hard to believe that I'm a year away from that... I felt very ill and tired during the service but it was one of those times where if I'm not in the hospital I was gonna be there to say goodbye to everyone. Well, I guess it's not goodbye for most people since a fair number of them are staying in Charlottesville for a while :P. Once again, DV got up on that podium and made a brilliant speech, and humbling himself about how he couldn't really find the words to make a great speech. Lol, one last speech from the English major. I don't really have to say goodbye to DV and April, they'll be staying in town. I'm not sure about Joel and Rachel if they're staying...

Now it's time to go back to DE for a while. I'm not really sure what my plans are for this summer but I know the first order of business is these medical tests. I have an endoscopy (scoping your esophagus and stomach) planned for Thursday. For a while I was afraid that these tests would find something that I might need surgery for... now I'm hoping they do find something... at least if they can find something in my throat then maybe it'll be treatable. I'm tired of the way I feel (which ironically, one of the symptoms is just being really tired). Whatever it is, I've tried various oral therapies for 2 1/2 months and everything has failed. The only thing the proton-pump inhibitors do is prevent my "belching" from being accompanied by acidic stinging; it doesn't curb the belching itself, nor does it really curb the nauseousness, the difficulty breathing, the fumes that irritate my throat, etc. And the Reglan causes me to get a sore throat and makes it painful when I swallow... and I'm not sure why because I've heard of various side effects of this drug and dry mouth/sore throat and pain swallowing are not listed as common side effects. I've said this so many times over the past few months, but I hope this first visit is the first step towards healing... Last night I had another really rough night... woke up around 2 AM with nasty heartburn/reflux. Antacids didn't really do much, as usual. I'm trying really hard to stay optimistic... I talked to J-Dub a lot while at the beach about the illness and my plans for next year; he just said to assume that I'll heal. I'm still hopeful that I'll eventually heal but "assuming" it'll heal has gone out the window. I'm glad I didn't drop out this semester, despite that my grades were lower than they usually are. I say that because if this illness is untreatable then I may need some time off. I only need to take three more math classes to get my degree, if I need to take a semester off I could come back second semester, take three classes and still graduate on time. Well, that's pretty far in advance. For now, I'll just focus on the endoscopy. Well, back to packing....

My pics from the tri-choral formal

God, if you're listening, this is the time of year when all students really need your help the most....