I last wrote that I thought I had PCOS. I was incorrect. This year after nearly three years of constant bowel and stomach problems which my primary care doctor blamed on, essentially, my fatness, I went to see a GI doctor. After a round of antibiotics for SIBO did nothing (well, it did make me less flatulent, but yeah that wasn't the biggest problem), we decided to do some exploratory work. On June 5th I had a routine exploratory endoscopy and colonoscopy, which turned into the removal of a 22mm tubulovillous adenoma from my lower bowel. That's about the size of a quarter, for folks imagining this from home. Imagine that interrupting the flow of things. If it had been a few millimeters larger, it would've been considered cancerous.
June 29th was my last day at "work" - and we had one last round of ramen and that was the end of that. What a time to be facing health insurance stability questions, hey? They were kind enough to leave us on the books until July 2nd, so we got an extra month, so in the end I only needed one month of COBRA coverage before the new job's insurance kicked in.
(On December 5th I had a followup colonoscopy. They cut out a few straggling bits of leftover adenoma, but the fact there were more means I have to go back in another six months, which I do not relish at all. The prep for the procedure is horrible and the recovery period from sedation makes me feel like an impossible invalid.)
So... the new job started right before Burning Man. I literally had two weeks on, then two weeks out in the desert, then came back and threw myself back into startup land. And honestly, I'd missed it - the feeling that at this size of company you can really DO things and make change happen. My new team isn't an engineering one, and that's been really hard for me to adjust to - but at the same time they have the social skills that I'll need to keep climbing the ladder.
I should mention that I seem to have skipped "senior writer" titles entirely and gone on to something slightly above that? There was a pay bump that matched that title bump, and after a very spare few weeks commuting I found myself staying up in the City more and more, despite... Well, let's say there were some big changes in the life of one I hold dear, twenty days after my last post, and we've been helping each other through everything since.
The housing search that'd stalled out so fruitlessly kicked back into gear, and the end result was a terrifying move, and I now live in the Central Sunset, in San Francisco.
I have so many thoughts about the weirdness of finding myself here, after all those years protesting that I never would come here because I was from the suburbs for crying out loud and we don't do cities. What changed? I did. London changed me. I still own a car, but right now it's a luxury I wish I could do without. (The City is weirdly bifurcated between places of dense urban layout with transit and shops... and suburban deserts, still densely populated but poorly served by transit and things like grocery stores and pharmacies. I'm on the inner edge of one of those latter spots.)
Menlo Park, it turns out, is stupidly expensive. And my now-ex-landlord decided to make my leave taking as hard as possible - even after all the move was done, I had three days of hard graft cleaning and emptying and cleaning some more. (All unnecessary by law, as I found out - and then she tore out the entire bathroom after making me clean it. ) I hope she reaps the bitter fruit of the exploitative prices they've charged.
It's been a long day and it's nearly one in the morning so I should sleep. But I live in a 1945 duplex and have a surprisingly well furnished place. I just need to figure out better storage options and empty out some more boxes!
