HD Village Idiot #3: yours truly
It’s amazing how bright the colors are on the streets - the red-roofed gas station, the stark sienna branches of bare trees, the skylight pouring down 30 feet of bright white sun inside a clinic. And the sounds are so incredible, too - roadhog diesel trucks going by, Latino children laughing and shouting in Spanish, angry cars honking, “MOVE!”… These things aren’t nearly so poignant on a daily basis, but there are times when you get a heightened sense of them.
Like when you are faced with your own death.
This morning I woke up to a horrible pain cramping up my left calf, so bad I was screaming. I reached down to massage it and I felt this small balloon in the calf swell and swell and swell - and then just as quickly disappear.
And now, I can’t walk.
I have all the symptoms of DVT, which means if there is a clot and it gets dislodged, it’s bye bye bloggie. After hobbling to the clinic and then to an imaging center for an ultrasound, the test proved negative. This does not totally rule out the presence of a clot; it just means the ultrasound couldn’t find one. Will I be alive in 48 hours? Will I suffer a pulmonary embolism? A stroke? Or will I be fine?
Some people have had cramping while on HCG, and potassium caps relieved it for them. That was one of the things I forgot to get while shopping for this diet, so I rifled through my cabinets and found some Emergen-C with 200mg of potassium per packet. I gulped down some of that, followed by a chaser of a magnesium drink. Yet I still can’t walk.
Oddly enough, the ultrasound waves helped give me a tiny bit more mobility in my leg, so it may well be just a big ass muscle spasm. But the swelling thing - that is mystifying, and terrifying as hell.
I’m stopping the HCG protocol for now. There are too many variables to know what exactly caused this - poorly administered injections? Forgetting to aspirate? Injecting an air bubble into my leg? The Mexican HCG? The European HCG? The 500-calorie diet? No fats or oils after gorging on them for two days straight? Heck, it could even be that I was feeling really good last night and was lightly tap dancing around my apartment. On the HCG diet, you’re not supposed to do exercise if you haven’t been doing it regularly before. And I profess to being a computer potato, so exercise is not something I’ve done much of lately. I used to dance, several years ago, and maybe routinely straining my calves had something to do with this. I do not know, and neither do any of the physicians I saw today.
Thankfully none of them copped an attitude about the HCG or the diet, at least not to my face. I was afraid of going to any doctor at all, because I didn’t want to see a ”HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID???” look in their eyes. Because I know this was risky; I just saw so many other people who’d had difficulty losing weight - losing weight. And I want that more than anything.
And now, I can’t walk.
HCG, HD Village Idiots, Pain Dammit
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.