Hi everyone - it's time again to pull out your red shoes (or, if you're like me, share the news about rocking red shoes because you don't own any) and use fashion to raise awareness for how much HIV/AIDS is still disproportionately affecting women of color. (And women in general, but really, really affecting women of color.)

Some Facts

• There are approximately 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and almost 280,000 are women.
• 1 in 139 women will be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS at some point within their lives.
• Among those who are HIV positive, 35% of women were tested for HIV late in their illness (diagnosed with AIDS within one year of testing positive).
• HIV/AIDS is the 5th leading cause of death in women in the United States, ages 25-44.
• High-risk heterosexual contact is the source of 80% of these newly diagnosed infections in women.
• HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects minority women in the United States. According to the 2005 census, black and Latina women represent 24% of all US women combined, but accounted for 82% of the estimated total of AIDS diagnoses for women in 2005.
• HIV is the leading cause of death for black women aged 25–34 years. The only diseases causing more deaths of women are cancer and heart disease.
• The rate of AIDS diagnosis for black women was approximately 23 times the rate for white women and 4 times the rate for Latina women.
• Teen girls represent 39% of AIDS cases reported among 13–19-year-olds. Black teens represented 69% of cases reported among 13–19 year-olds; Latino teens represented 19%.

How to Rock The Red Pump

• Share the hotness by uploading your pics on March 10 to your favorite spot (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, etc.) and tag them with #RockTheRedPump.
• Sign up to blog about #RockTheRedPump.
• Read 5 Easy Ways to Rock the Red Pump
• Get tested. Here's a tool to help you find a testing center in your area.
• Educate yourself and your extended family about sexual health and disease transmission.
• Retweet, share and support your red-pump-wearing friends.

Collapsing on the stairs after finishing a jog. In the humidity, the sweat forms like an internal dropper is pushing it out of my arms, my legs, even my hands, before it slides away to plunk in perfect circles on the cement. In the first few minutes after I plop down, all I can do is breathe and sweat and regulate my heartbeat back down to normal. 

I seldom think of sweating as an action, but in the thickness of Missouri's August, it is. Cicadas strike up the band and then stop as quickly as they started while I sit and sweat. Drink some water. Sweat some more. I become aware of a breeze I swear did not exist on the hills, but here it is, lifting just the edges of the leaves, sweeping across my skin until slowly, the bubbles stop forming and the rivulets slow. I can feel my heart slowing, too: crisis averted, she's not moving so fast any more.

My daughter is sick to death of summer and excited about school. She's tired of the pool, tired of barbecues, tired of the back deck, tired of the top down. I find myself clinging to these things and my favorite time of year and even the sweating, because sweating means I could be outside without a jacket, all day long if I wanted.

My breathing normal, the sweat dried enough to allow me back to the keyboard and the chair and the work, I reluctantly haul myself off the front step and walk back into my life, instantly forgetting the feeling of my skin touched by air.

---

I thought this post in my head the other day, and then I forgot all about it, and then I realized I really should write it down before I forget it again.

Since the last time I wrote, I've had acupuncture twice for my back. I really meant to write about this earlier, but man, this week just keeps slipping away from me. I did write a little ditty about what acupuncture feels like today on BlogHer. Hopefully tomorrow will last longer and I can write more.

Yesterday, I found myself in the gastro doc's office for two and a half hours. We went through in detail my history of eating disorders, veganism, vegetarianism, surgeries, childhood afflictions and allergies, family history. The nurse practioner who spent so much time with me reviewed the results from my last colonoscopy. She told me all the things that could be causing my distress. She told me that the last gastro doc eyeballed my gut but didn't actually do a biopsy for celiac disease. She told me sometimes part of my stomach gets stuck in my esophogus. (!) She said they needed to start over. I began trying to hide my anxiety attack.

She ordered labs to look at my kidneys, thyroid, liver. She ordered an upper scope and colonoscopy for next week. She asked for all sorts of things too gross to list. She gave me a sheet on colitis. She told me a list of other drugs that might help, one of which was steroids. 

I started to cry.

I told her one of the ways I manage my eating disorder history is to try very hard to stay in a ten-pound window that is healthy and realistic. I told her I knew it's possible my mother is right and my ED contributed to my current suffering, but that talking about it like that makes me feel like I somehow did this to myself on purpose, which brings back memories of people thinking I did anorexia to myself on purpose, that I am to blame for everything bad that happens to my health. I told her I'm scared of steroids.

She dropped her papers and rolled herself over and touched my arm. She told me she understood and that would be a last resort.

I understand how stupid it sounds to be so afraid of weight gain. Welcome to the wonderful world of ED recovery. I write this here not because I want to scare my family into thinking I'll relapse, but because I work so very hard not to relapse, and I'm always actively managing what I put in my body with that in mind. It's important my doctors understand that if they have choices about which medication to give me, they should not give me the one with a side effect of weight gain. I've been shocked at how willy nilly doctors can be about not telling their patients this pill or that pill could make you gain forty pounds, by the way. It's true that everyone's body responds to things differently -- something I am learning more and more as I get older -- but still. If I were a doctor, I would tell people things like that.

And she said since I'm getting a colonoscopy next week, it won't make too much a difference to eat gluten. She suspects it's not gluten because the situation is so severe, but only a biopsy can tell for sure.

I went a week without eating any gluten at all. It was actually not as hard as I thought it would be. Eating at home was a snap. Eating out was a giant pain in the ass, but we only ate out one meal in that week I was off gluten. More and more, that's the case for us, especially in the summer. It's so expensive. I didn't realize how expensive eating out was until my husband lost his job last fall and we drastically cut our food budget. However, sometimes it's really fun and necessary and being gluten-free while eating out sucks eggs. 

She also bumped up my Welchol to three giant horse pills in the morning and evening to see if that would have any effect. She said at this point, it's just a process of elimination until we figure out what is causing my problems. As I stared at the chart listing all the things that can be wrong with my digestive system, I was pretty overwhelmed. And I felt pretty old. 

She asked me, though, to please let her keep trying to find the problem, since I admitted I'd only gone to two gastro docs once each because what they gave me didn't help. I asked her if she thought that was weird because clearly I had a problem, and she said, "You'd be surprised what people will tolerate until it becomes their normal."

Isn't that an interesting sentence? I am so stealing it.

So now that I have absolute, positive verification that no, what's happening with me is clinically significant, otherwise known as ZOMG YOU ARE A FREAK OF NATURE, I'm promising myself I'm going to figure out, at least, what is causing these issues and see what I can do to bring it down to a low roar. Even though the doctor's office called me in a panic this morning because my insurance is changing again and I don't know the new number and won't until July 1. And my colonoscopy is on July 3. 

Last night I ate a huge plate of broccoli and mac & cheese. Hello, gluten, my long-lost love.

I am so sick of my gut.

I have already been diagnosed with bile acid malabsorption and take medicine for it, two huge pills twice a day. However, those pills can't be taken within four hours of any other medicine or it won't be absorbed properly, either. Since I value my mental health more than my bowel health, I put the priority on taking my antidepressants at the same time every day, but whether I remember to take the other pills twice a day within four hours is another question. Some days, I am great. Other days, particularly at certain times in my cycle, I'm a train wreck. 

I asked my doctor whether I should eliminate gluten, both the regular doctor and the gastroentologist. I don't remember exactly what either one said, but I know neither of them instructed me to give up gluten, or I would've tried it. Without being directed by a doctor to do it, I've been totally dragging my feet, because the thought of someone saying, "Is there something here you can eat?" and worrying about making special meals so I can eat or worrying every time I go to a restaurant about what I will eat -- well, that feels a lot like the years I spent as a vegan and vegetarian to disguise my disordered eating. 

I really, really don't want have "bad" foods again.

But I'm so, so sick of feeling sick. 

I've asked people about it before, maybe even written about it here, I don't remember. I've heard you have to go for a month before you can even tell and you have to replace your toaster and there might be gluten in your medicine and your lotion and HOLY FUCKING SHIT YOU ARE JUST SCREWED SO EMBRACE GOOD TOILET PAPER.

I could cry. Seriously. This is how much I hate thinking about regulating my diet like this. It's not that I'm so in love with bread. It's that I really despise thinking about food that much. It's a very short path for me from reading labels to counting calories and all the rest of it. 

Of course, I decided to try this experiment of eliminating gluten for at least two weeks right after eating a whole wheat tortilla for breakfast. I am going to try it anyway, as best as I can, then go back to see my doctor and discuss the situation with her again. She's moved to a new practice and my insurance is changing in July and hopefully that will all synch up so as not to cause weird insurance nightmares.

I HATE THIS. But I guess I have to try. I've been tested for celiac disease and Crohn's and lactose intolerance, and I don't have any of those. At one point in my life, I was told I had IBS, but ha ha! That was actually endometriosis. I know I'm getting older and having your body go all whack is just part of that, but I am having a big, fat pity party today, anyway. 

WHINE WHINE WHINE WHINE WHINE

(sob)

My sister has pulsatile tinnitus. You can read more about it here. She's had it for years and has spent thousands of dollars trying to not hear her heart in her ear every single day of her life. Imagine the Tell-Tale Heart. That's her. And there are other whooshers, but because there's no diagnostic code for it, pulsatile tinnitus gets lumped in with regular tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and thus is harder to get treated.

Sign this petition to get it a new diagnostic code? They need 1,500 signatures and are so close.

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

It's returned, yes it has, the neck and upper back pain. This is slightly different than the constant I-work-a-desk-job-and-always-mouse-with-the-same-hand upper back/pinchy nerve sort of pain that I've had for years. This is the I've-been-cowering-like-a-dog-with-my-shoulders-around-my-ears pain I get when I'm holding my stress in my shoulders. You could bounce a quarter off any part of my upper back right now.

I work at home. I have an actual desk. On the actual desk is my work laptop, and behind that is our home desktop computer, which is one of those crazy-huge Macs that we got refurbished (side note: refurbished is the way to go) about five years ago. Unfortunately for me, I can see my reflection in the Mac. It's unfortunate because since I work from home, I usually don't shower and get ready until after I've worked out over my lunch hour, so I'm looking all nasty most of the time in that reflection. But I can also see where my shoulders are, and it's like I push them down and then five seconds later, they're floating back up to my ears without me even knowing it.

There are things that help, and I know this. One of them is stretching. Once when it got really bad, I ended up in physical therapy, and so I went looking for PT stretches online and I found this list of stretches for the neck and upper back. It takes a ridiculously long amount of time to do these stretches properly, which is why I don't wanna. But they help, they really do; it's totally worth it. So I thought I'd share them here in case you, too, have a major pain in your neck, or will because you have to spend a few days straight with your extended families next week.

You're welcome.

One thing about social media: It teaches you you're not the only person with problems. My connection to hundreds if not thousands of other human beings each day has made me more grateful for the good things in my life and more tolerant for the bad. No, everyone else is not sitting around on unicorn-fur couches sipping ambrosia -- they have cancer and bankruptcy and also new babies and cute puppies and lottery winnings. We are all in it together, for good and for bad.

As Beloved's job situation stretches on, I've found myself in several doctor's offices making sure the thing I have now -- my health -- is intact. Last week I went to a dermatologist to get my first-ever full-body skin cancer check. Basal skin cancer seems to be all the rage in my hometown for the farming crew, and I let my fair-skinned self turn lobster red way more times than I should have in my youth. I also tanned before prom, just sayin'. Luckily this time I came out clean, and I made an appointment to get checked again around my birthday every year.

Today I'm going in for a well-woman appointment. I haven't had one in years. Unfortunately, I was inspired to do so after a dear friend lost her cousin to sudden and unexpected girl cancer. Like two weeks unexpected. Though I don't even know this woman, I'm taken aback by the speed in which she was taken down, and it scared me enough to immediately book a Pap smear. I tell you this so if you are a woman, you will be sure to get one, too. So many girl cancers can be treated if caught early.

I'm not perfect with my health -- none of us are. And I try not to think too hard about my health, because I have anxiety disorder and if I think too hard about all the crazy-ass things that could give me cancer or brain damage or whatever, I'll freak out. It's so much easier to avoid breaking a bone than getting a terminal disease. I have a close relative who is dying of something completely awful right now that scares the shit out of me.

I try not to think about that.

But there are some easy things that I can think about, and one of them is skin cancer checks and another is well woman checks.

And then I'll go back to my job and hope everything else in my life works out just fine.

I'm not going to go into details, people, don't worry. But many commenters mentioned having tummy problems often amped by anxiety, and I've had really bad tummy problems for the past several years. Two years ago, I got a colonoscopy and we never quite solved them (but at least I know I don't have Crohn's or celiac disease or colon cancer, at least I didn't two years ago). 

Around the time I told my primary care doctor about The Lump (cue DJ Nibbles!), I told her about my tummy problems and she sent me to another gastro doc. The man was wearing a full-on, two-piece, blue-and-white pinstriped seersucker suit. With a bright blue tie. He reminded me of Bert Cooper on Mad Men.

His suit looked like this, only imagine it on a man of about 50 with little round glasses.

The suit was so distracting I nearly couldn't describe my symptoms.

So as I told him, yes, this problem is worst in the morning and it happens right after I eat anything and yes, it's really interfering with my life. He listened and started spouting something I totally didn't understand about bile malabsorption, which is a totally nonthreatening and mostly annoying problem that happens when some bile doesn't get absorbed in the small intestine (natch) and goes shooting into the large intestine, where it is the equivalent of Mentos in Diet Coke.

Guess how they treat it? CHOLESTEROL PILLS! Of course!

Don't ask me. SCIENCE.

So I have these four huge horse pills that I take each day, and I can't take them at the same time as my other meds because of ABSORPTION, so now I have to go buy a BIGGER daily pill pack thing because I swear I can never remember if I took the blasted things or not and I don't want to be the writer who dies from cholesterol pill overdose. I haven't even published my damn novel yet.

But ... so far it's working. It's not a perfect solve yet, but I just went jogging without fear. And that, my friends, is worth seersucker any day. So if you're having chronic tummy problems, don't give up. It might be as simple as ABSORPTION.