Sleeping was an absolute nightmare last night. I had perhaps my worst night since I’ve had this weird stomach/esophagus issue.
I was in pain pretty much all night, and ended up waking up at whatever hour of the middle of the night and staying up for a couple hours doing research on the condition that I’m trying to figure out is what I have.
As I already mentioned, I think, one of the frustrations right now is wondering if the reason I didn’t have anything show up on the test was because I worked so hard to keep acid out of my esophagus when I felt it go up there, rinsing it off and whatnot, and if I had just let it be, then I’d be able to see evidence of the issues.
I don’t know.
The last night, it was pretty awful. In my research while I couldn’t sleep, I found that in addition to GERD, there’s something called NERD… Which stands for non-erosive reflux disease. All of the same symptoms as GERD, but no evidence of damage.
Could that be the issue? It’s the same treatment as GERD.
I guess we’ll see. I started taking meds, and we’ll see how it goes.
I ended up sleeping in quite a bit and missing my morning exercise because I was so exhausted.
I don’t remember much of what I did during the day. It’s a bit of a blur again. But there’s one part that I do remember quite vividly. Right about dusk, I started to mow the lawn, as with all the rain, it had grown a decent bit since the last time I mowed.
As I was trying to mow close to but not over the top of the surprise lilies that we have in our front yard, I felt a sharp pain on my left calf. I looked down and didn’t see anything. But within a second or two, I saw another little critter land on my left calf, and I smacked it dead.
Yellow jacket.
In my peripheral vision, as I was killing that second yellow jacket that landed on my calf, I saw a cloud of yellow jackets swarming around me.
This isn’t my first rodeo when it comes to dealing with yellow jackets swarming me, so I jumped off my lawn mower as quickly as I could, not even turning it off, and I booked it to the house as quickly as I could.
I knew from the last time this happened, that when they swarm, oftentimes they get underneath an inside of your clothes, so As soon as I got inside I started stripping off all of my clothes. I remember the last time it happened, I had one that had made its way even inside the folds of my underwear.
Brutal buggers.
Anyway, I knew I had been stung multiple times, but I didn’t know how many. My adrenaline was pumping, and as I was standing by the kitchen table peeling off my clothes, i got stung by another one that was hiding on my sock.
Bugger.
Fortunately, there weren’t any more of them in my clothes, and only one of them had made it into the house with me, I managed to kill that one with the flyswatter, shattering the flyswatter as it did its job.
Having been stung several times, I could feel the venom coursing through my body. If you haven’t felt that sensation before, it’s not quite like being high. It’s like… You just feel like you’re drugged. Woozy.
At one point, I counted nine stings. Not great, but not as bad as it could have been. Later, I could only account for seven, so I don’t know if I overcounted the first time, or if two of them just weren’t bad enough for the evidence to stick around.
🤷
After the adrenaline wore off, the pain of the stings just got worse and worse. It wasn’t crazy awful pain, but It was bad enough that I did have to focus on breathing sometimes. 😅
I don’t remember the ones from my previous yellow jacket experience being that painful.
But there was nothing I could do about it at that point, so I just greeted my teeth, took some Benadryl and some ibuprofen, and hope for the best. I was able to drown away some of the pain by watching psych on Amazon prime, but it was still pretty brutal.
I worked to be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, but gratefully, The pain subsided enough to where it was reasonable to think that I could fall asleep.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 