I don't know if I've mentioned it here or not but Ari (my daughter) is sick. It's been over two weeks that she has been vomiting without any other symptoms. It's usually something that occurs every other day, sometimes two days in a row and sometimes it is three days in between vomiting episodes. She has no other symptoms.  At first I assumed that she had caught some kind of stomach bug or something because she woke up at 4am saying she had a stomach ache. She let out a huge burp and was like "oh, never mind, I feel better" and went back to bed. She got up a few minutes later saying her stomach hurt again. I told her to sit on the toilet and drink some warm water because she might just need to go to the bathroom. She said she thought she may just be hungry so we went downstairs to make a bagel. While she was sitting at the kitchen table, she said "I think I'm going to throw up" and before I could get the mop bucket from the pantry, she had thrown up dinner. She probably spent about 10 minutes throwing up until everything was out of her stomach.

She felt suddenly better and ate the bagel. She stayed home from school, obviously, even though she didn't have a fever or any other symptoms. Around noon she threw up the bagel that she'd eaten but she felt and acted fine. She did end up going to school the next day because she didn't want to miss school again. She went to bed around 6pm Friday night and slept until 9am-10am, which is the longest she had slept since she was a toddler. My girl gets up early and definitely doesn't take after her mom when it comes to her ability to sleep. She threw up when she woke up that morning but was generally "normal". We played outside, went for a walk and did the usual stuff we do on the weekends. She proceeded to throw up a couple of other times during that week, missing a couple more days of school. On this past Monday morning she said she had a stomach ache but when I asked her about it, she was a bit too smiley about it and I figured that she had picked up on the fact that she didn't have to go to school if she had a stomach ache or was going to throw up. She kind of laughed it up when I asked her about it again and said "yeah, you're right, I'm probably fine!" so I took her to the bus. She got on the bus at 7:20am and just after 8am I received a text from the bus driver saying the school would probably be calling me to pick her up since she'd thrown up on the bus. 

I drove the hour to get her from school and she bounded down the hall with the nurse, feeling fine and acting normal. Her doctor was really busy so we couldn't get in until Tuesday at 1pm. She had thrown up again around midnight so she didn't go to school on Tuesday. We ended up spending 3-4 hours at the doctor's office while they did a full exam. The one thing that became clear was that she was generally throwing up around 4am-10am and it was usually fully undigested food. We have dinner around 6:30pm-7:30pm depending on what we've been doing and she will throw up anywhere from 10-12 hours afterwards. The doctor said that her food shouldn't be coming up undigested that long after eating. I've never thrown up as much food as she does. It's chewed up but it looks like it's been freshly swallowed. Sorry if that's too graphic!

They needed a urine sample and I had to help her with that. She's really shy when it comes to the bathroom so this wasn't an easy task! I tried to get her to hold the cup and pee into it but she couldn't do it so I ended up having to hold it for her and she peed all over me. I suddenly had flash backs to her being in a diaper and peeing mid diaper change. At least we had a huge laugh! For some reason when the nurse brought the fecal sample kit, she was like, "oh! I have these toilet hats which are used for urine collection, they'll make it so much easier to catch the fecal sample!" Really?! Where was she when I was getting peed on 5 minutes prior! :) We laughed so hard about it and I definitely think that lightened up our moods!

They took blood which I think is the first time that Ari has had blood drawn. After the way she flipped out and had to have 5 people holding her still for her immunizations, I wasn't looking forward to that but she sat still like a champ and the nurse was great! I was so thankful for that because I'm sure we're all used to the idiot who can't draw our blood properly because of our tattoos! They also did a strep test just in case and that came back negative. The doctor probably spent 30 minutes pushing and prodding on her belly. I really didn't like the faces that the doctor was making while he was poking around her belly.He kept saying "hmmm" and kind of biting his lip like he felt something or didn't or was confused. Either way, he really needs to work on his poker face!

We're going to the hospital today for more tests. One of which is an Upper GI X-Ray with Small Bowel follow through. Basically she can't eat or drink anything after midnight and we need to drive an hour to the hospital where she'll get an x-ray of her upper body and then drink barium and have x-rays every few minutes to watch the progress.This has been her biggest "fear". She keeps asking me how she's supposed to go without eating or drinking anything for 10 whole hours! I have reminded her repeatedly that she'll be asleep for 7.5 of the hours that she's not allowed food or water and that she won't die even if she's "starving" for the last bit of it. I'm just hoping we get started really quickly once we get to the hospital. I'm hopeful they won't make a kid sit and wait who hasn't been allowed to eat or drink all morning.

The one thing that I really hate when it comes to the internet is the ability to scare the crap out of yourself when googling symptoms. The one thing that I kept seeing were various pancreas related illnesses which matched her symptoms. I'm hoping that it's nothing serious and perhaps it is just some stomach bug that she's having a hard time kicking. She loves sharing her water glass with the dog. It's like two kids sharing a milk shake. They just go back and forth swapping drinking from the glass. I had told her not to do it a million times but I honestly can't see that being the reason why she is sick. Part of me hopes it's something simple like that.

She's lost about 4-6lbs and it definitely seems like whatever is causing it is getting worse because she's been throwing up more often. It just didn't seem like a big deal at first because she didn't have any other symptoms and the episodes of vomiting were so spread apart.

The other thing that sucks is that Ari doesn't have health insurance in the US. I'd been trying to get her insured but because of my lack of insurance, that kept posing a problem getting a policy for her. Now that I've just become insured she isn't eligible to be added to my insurance because it's for pre-existing condition coverage only. Ari's doctor appointment on Monday alone cost $700 and I haven't received the bills for the urine/blood tests or the fecal tests which I haven't turned in yet because I have to collect samples over three days. I am not looking forward to those bills trickling in over the next few weeks.

Later today I'll have to fork out $3800 plus whatever the radiologist charges to read the x-rays. It's going to be more than $5k just to diagnose what could either be something serious or nothing at all. Obviously I'd sell everything I own before skimping on her medical care, this is yet another time where it drives me nuts that the majority of Americans are against affordable health insurance. Thankfully Obama fought and got some kind of affordable health coverage available for us but it's still a long way from what it needs to be. As much as Canadians complain about "wait times" and the issues with their own insurance, they have no idea what it's like to have nothing. If it wasn't for Shannon helping me out, I have no idea how I'd be paying for tomorrow's tests.

As I just said, Shannon is helping out because I really cannot afford this on my own. The link to Shannon's page is a link to his post about helping me with Ari's medical costs as well as a new update of jewelery that he's posted. If you're a fan of his art, I am and have always been, please consider helping out by getting some cool rings, key chains and other items that he has available for sale on his etsy shop. He's got a very cool sliding scale set up where you can decide what you're able to pay. You can get a discount of up to 50% off of the prices that he has set.

I know that we've all got our own problems but now is as great a time as any to buy some cool stuff for yourself while helping out a very kick ass kid who may one day be following in her parents footsteps and running BME herself! Either that or she'll have sworn off the internet and technology and she'll be living in the woods writing crazy manifestos. 

I completely forgot to mention that the subdomain IAM URLs have been back online for a while. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, on the old IAM, instead of having to give out "iam.BMEzine.com/?Rachel", you could use rachel.BMEzine.com. Now that we've migrated to BME.com, this is what your new IAM URL looks like (switching your username in the place of mine, of course!):

Rachel.BME.COM

The subdomain will automatically redirect to your IAM profile. You can use either username.BMEzine.com or username.BME.com but obviously it makes more sense to use username.BME.com! Don't forget that if you've got links to the old IAM format, (iam.bmezine.com/?rachel), those aren't currently working properly so you'll need to update to the new URLs! We're working on getting those redirecting properly as well but please update them otherwise they'll just redirect to the main page of IAM.

Don't forget to update your security settings as well on your profile & settings page.

You have the option to use your page as publicly or privately as you'd like. IAM is still BME's gated community but now that bandwidth concerns aren't what they used to be, I'm happy to give you access to utilize your page in whatever way you'd like. All of the security options still keep users who aren't logged in from accessing your forums or zooming in on photos, they just determine the access to your journal entries from not being able to view your page at all, to seeing the first page only or allowing users to view your entire journal entry. It's completely up to you!

BME fully respects your privacy, so it's up to you how much information you want to share with both BME and the outside world. This is a major reason why we don't currently have any kind of Facebook tie in. We're still trying to figure out how to best protect your personal information and privacy. I know that most users don't have concerns about posting anything and everything to Facebook but both BME and myself want to protect your privacy. Call me paranoid but I still believe in privacy when it comes to the internet!

We're currently working on ways to make it easier to feed certain aspects of your online activity into BME/IAM but we don't want the information that you want kept on BME going out on the web. If you have ideas of what you'd like to share from other sites to your IAM page, please post in the comment forum for this post. I have a plan on how to integrate other sites (like FB, tumblr, twitter etc) with your IAM page, while being able to keep whatever you want on BME/IAM only, safely behind our locked doors but I'd love to hear input from you!

My day started off at 5:45am this morning. Ari came into my room with breakfast in bed. It consisted of half cooked turkey bacon, Cheetos, sliced bananas and pears covered in chocolate sauce. I almost forgot that she microwaved some white castle burgers as well for me.  It was.. an awesome thought!

She thought today was Monday so she had set her alarm for 5:10am in order to make sure she was awake before I was. She wanted to have plenty of time to make breakfast. When I told her to get in bed and go back to sleep, she was all "WTF?! Seriously! It's only Sunday?!" and we went back to bed for a couple of hours.

We went on a walk to go see our ducks which have taken it upon themselves to move into the neighbors pond. The neighbor loves them and they still come home for meals so I get to see plenty of them but don't have to worry that they're not getting enough splash time, which is a win win for all of us!

I'm dropping the sticker envelopes off at the post office tomorrow. I packed about 2600 stickers and I'm not excited about the shipping costs! I didn't have the right kind of labels to be able to print stamps on letter sized envelopes so I'm going to do it at the post office instead. I also packed up and shipped around 50+ orders from the past two days. It was incredibly awesome to see people ordering stickers from around the world although I felt bad for the couple of people who ordered 1 or 2 stickers and are having them shipped to Hong Kong or other far away places so I threw in a ton of extras.

On another note, I am single. Again! My ex is a great guy, we're just in two very different points in our lives. We had a bit of an age difference and while I didn't know how old he was when I first got to know him (he was a friend of a friend and we'd been hanging out for about 6 months before we started dating) it was a nice year and a couple of months together. I miss him a lot because I love him and we were really good friends before we started dating. That's the risk you take when you date someone who is a friend but he was really hot and into me so that didn't hurt! :) 

You'll notice some new changes coming into effect soon on the site.

Email submissions to BME are going straight to moderation now. Email submissions@BME.com and you'll be able to submit just like you did in the old days.We'll set up an alternate email address to be able to upload to your IAM page.

The message inbox is now converted to a conversation instead of single messages. It was like that when we first launched but for some reason it got converted back to the old style. You will no longer have a separate outbox/sent folder but you can still archive messages in order to save them in a special spot.

Verified Pro applications will now start activating a FREE IAM account once your application has been approved. For some reason it wasn't activating the IAM page, it was just setting it to FREE thinking you'd already had an IAM page. So that's fixed.

There were a ton of other behind the scenes fixes and upgrades but they're not really something I need to list out because there have been too many of them to count.

We've got a ton of stuff we're working on and I'll update you as the come available.

I don't think I mentioned it but I've also added 3 months of free IAM time to accounts, bringing expired accounts active and adding 3 months to already active accounts.

The next things we'll be working on are integration with other sites so you can import/export as desired to make it easier to update all of your various homes around the web.

I hope all you mothers out there have a great day with your kids. I know I'm about to crawl back into bed with mine and watch a movie before passing out. After she finishes dinner and I finish braiding her hair, of course!

I just noticed that some people don’t have their names in their account. I didn’t think to specify adding that because for some reason I assumed that people would put their name in since I’m sending them stuff in the mail.

Please add your first and last name so that your mail gets delivered! I think the postal workers will get confused when they try to deliver mail addressed to various user names, especially the “weirder” ones!

I have some amazing news. It's been more than 12 years since I have had health insurance. When I moved to Canada, I never got any kind of immigration status (due to reasons that i won't get into) but i was fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay for Canadian Healthcare. It's affordable and accessible in Canada even without insurance, despite the many complaints that I've heard about their socialized healthcare.

A while back I'm sure that you all remember hearing all the fuss about "Obamacare" and how people thought it was going to be terrible. As someone with a serious medical condition and absolutely no way to get healthcare due to my pre-existing conditions, I was all for it. The only issue was that even though it had been passed, it was going to take years for it to actually become available.

The point of my post? Thanks to Obama, I am now no longer one of the uninsured. I have health coverage and it's affordable!!!!!! Everyone was claiming that the US healthcare system would change. Everything would go down the shitter and we'd be out in the cold waiting in line to see a scourge of unqualified doctors. What's changed? People like me have health insurance now! I'm still able to go to all of the doctors that currently manage my health. The only difference is that I have the option to get precriptions via a mail order pharmacy automatically every 90 days.

The last healthcare plan that I was offered cost almost a thousand dollars a month. The coverage was limited and would not cover anything related to any pre-existing conditions for 18 months. At that point, I had to reach an out of pocket deductible of $7k until it would kick in and nothing related to a pre-existing condition would apply towards the out of pocket expenses. So I'd have to get hit by the aforementioned bus before my MS related issues could be covered/treated.

There was also no prescription coverage. My prescriptions cost over $10k a month, which needless to say, I don't take my medication. I basically have been going from month to month deciding what aspects of my illness were bothering me the most and treating those. My injections alone cost $4800/month so I have never actually continued to take them aside from the one 90 day prescription that I did fill. I had read research that said you could take it 3 times a week instead of 5 times a week so I did that and made it so that the prescription lasted a lot longer than it should have. I basically do that with all of my medications as well. I take half of what I'm supposed to most of the time. I figure it's better to take half than nothing.

Now that has changed dramatically! I've got a premium of $188 dollars which is for the extended option plan. The deductible is $500 bucks and anything that I spend money on for medical purposes counts towards that deductible. I've got full prescription benefits and the co-pays are amazing.All of my current doctors are "in-network" and it works just like the insurance you'd get from your employer. It's simple to use and it's worth it. The cost of a normal doctors appointment for me would be $150-$500 depending on the doctor that I have to go and see. That's more than my premium is! My co-pay for my appointments is now either covered making the co-pay $0 or it's $20. I can't tell you how happy this makes me and how it's potentially going to change my life.

Since I always have to mention the shitty side to things, I really wish I could have been posting this same thing before I had to go and get over $100k in medical debt from a huge medical complication that I had last year, but never posted about.

It was very simple to apply. For this specific plan, you need to have a pre-existing condition. This can be any kind of condition. You either need a rejection letter from an insurance company or a letter from your doctor indicating what your medical condition is and you fill out the application. It can all be done online. I applied in February and there was a bit of a mix up in my original application so I was denied because I accidentally missed a check box on one of the questions. I corrected the application and as of April 1, 2012, I have health coverage!

http://www.pciplan.com/

I'm serious! If you need health insurance, please take the time to look into the government provided plans. They're definitely worth it. $188/month might seem like a lot but if you've got a serious or costly medical condition, the insurance is definitely worth it. You never know when you may have some kind of serious medical event and suddenly you've got a day in the hospital that costs $50k!

I wish I could find the link to this woman who was trying to sue the obama administration because she claimed it was unconstitutional to "force" people to have health insurance, which is what some anti-"obamacare" pundits are claiming. She recently filed bankruptcy due to her medical bills.