Food, fun, and frak

Scicurious is hosting a grad student food carnival, and I have updated my recipe post from this summer to include a price breakdown for my pot roast recipe. It's actually a lot cheaper than I thought! The only big ticket item is the beef, really, but as that's the centerpiece of the dish, I suppose it is a justified expense.

I survived the first week of the term! My biggest issue right now seems to be fatigue, but I guess that's what you get when you stop eating solid food for two weeks. My body has a lot of catching up to do. Fortunately my advisor and CB (the prof of the class I TA) are being very understanding. CB told me I don't have to come to the 7am lectures until I start feeling better, which has been enormously helpful. I also had to drop one of my classes, which I am sad about because I was really looking forward to taking it. It was on the complete other side of campus, and I'm just not physically up to being able to walk that far. Oh well, maybe it'll be offered next quarter.

I have a HIDA scan scheduled for 3 weeks from today. The short of it is that they're going to inject me with a radioactive tracer that will be filtered out of the blood by my liver, then will travel to my gallbladder and into my intestines. After they inject me I have to lie under a gamma camera for 1-2 hours while they take pictures of the tracer as is goes through my body. The idea is to check for blockages in my hepatic and bile ducts, to see if that might be causing my elevated liver enzymes and urobilinogen. In a word, I am terrified. I get overly anxious about any medical procedure, it's just my nature, but I'm also terrified that the results of the scan will mean something awful. I wish I wasn't such a worrier. I mean, shit, my friend has cancer, and I've been reading her treatment blog and about the horrible crap she's going through with chemotherapy, so why am I getting this bent out of shape about some goddamn liver enzymes? Because it is happening to me, I guess.