If you know me, even if we’ve only met for 5 minutes.. you’ll know that I am a ridiculously socially awkward person..
Not the kind of awkward where I stare at my feet and don’t talk..
Oh no, much worse.
I’m the kind of awkward where I get verbal diarrhoea and instead of trying to relate to people in a normal, civilised sense… I try to relate to people in the most obscure, embarrassing sense.
For instance, I was sitting down having dinner with a male friend the other day… I’m not very smooth, so instead of letting him buy me dinner, I told him I wasn’t hungry and then at the last minute decided to order my own food.
I then sat there for half an hour criticising his meal choice and continuously making fat jokes.
To try to recover from the fact that I’d just been calling someone fat, who obviously takes very good care of the body and slightly resembles Hercules, I told him my fat story.
Since I share almost every aspect of my personal life on this blog, here it goes…
When I was about 10, I went to Townsville for a week with my dad to visit my cousins. I came back and had put on quite a bit of weight. My mother is an on and off anorexic and loathes my father and his choice of lifestyle (this coming from a vegetarian, recovering anorexic, schizophrenic who forgot to feed her children on a regular basis, or if she remembered, waited until 11pm at night or worst case, 2am.. ).
Anyway, so my mother just thought I had gotten fat, this was understandable. Until a few weeks passed and I literally had trouble seeing out of my eyes because my eyelids were so fat they made me look like a fat Asian kid.
Me at Age 10
My dad was very worried way before this point, and using trusty Google (edit: I’ve been told it was Ulta Vista.. Google wasn’t around then) diagnosed my condition. He told my mother, in the first week of my sickness,, what he thought it was. She dismissed this and said I was simply taking after him because of my week away, had obviously just picked up on his bad lifestyle choices and was now a fatty boomba.
By about the fourth or fifth week, when I resembled a fat Asian kid, my mother finally decided to take me to a doctor. The doctors diagnosis… “She’s just growing… outwards… change her diet”
Ok – just going to spell it out for you Mr Edumacated Doctor Sir (incase you’re reading this), my mother was a vegetarian … with severe mental conditions… the most I ate in a day was maybe a peanut butter sandwich, fish fingers and eggs… Don’t tell me I’m getting FAT from my diet!
Anyway, three doctors agreed with this diagnosis, so I accepted my fate… I was going to be Fat Bastard’s female reincarnation and there was little I could do about it.
I accepted me soon to be fate
This is when Super Dad steps in and takes me to my original family doctor with his internet diagnosis. Turns out, he was right – I had a severe case of Nephrotic Syndrome which hadn’t been detected in my small home town for over 25 years! Basically, I was fat because I was retaining all the fluid in my body – my kidney’s had just chucked the shits and decided they didn’t really want to filter. (While I thank my Dad for his miracle diagnosis and timing, I also blame him because this condition is hereditary… from his side of the family)
So I was given a good dose of steroids to get my kidneys working triple time and I was also given a big 2 or 3 liter bottle to collect my pee in for a month (so they could test it or just for fun, not sure).
No one really explained to me how to put my pee in this container, so for the first week or so, it was fine to just kinda squat over this thing in the toilet and pee into it. But then it started getting heavy, so I alternated between using a cup and one of those water spout things for the iron. (I was a kid.. don’t judge me)
After a month of collecting my foul smelling urine, it was time to take it back to the hospital for medical analysis and testing.
My mother decided to park a good block and a half away from the hospital, which is super fun when you’re carrying a milk bottle shaped container with what is clearly urine through the busy streets to the hospital.
When we finally got inside, and my mother went to the counter to give them my details… I was super ashamed and all these patients in the waiting room were staring at me and my pee milk bottle. While I was trying to disguise it and keep it hidden to my side, I lost my grip on the bottle…
You know how they say time slows down when you meet the love of your life? Well.. it also slows down when you watch a 2 liter bottle of urine fall and drop onto the pristine white hospital floor. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the cap popped off and my urine just leaked out all over the place.. let me tell you, 2 litres is A LOT more than you think.. and a month of urine smells worse than rotten eggs combined with road kill.
So here I am… standing, just looking shocked at my pee all over the floor in front of me – my mother turns around and yells at me … firstly, to tell me how effing stupid I was and then secondly, to ‘scoop the pee up back into the container’. When you live with a psycotic mother, you don’t question anything she tells you to do… so yes, I did try my best to scoop up my pee with my hands, while bawling my eyes out.
Thank god for nurses though, because one of them was kind enough to tell me it was ok… She got me to stop, put a ‘Caution: Wet Surface’ sign up, showed me where to wash my hands and then she promptly handed me another 2 liter bottle.
The next month when I returned, I was prepared. I held that container so close to my body and so tight, you’d think it was a baby.
