The Castor Oil Conundrum

“Hey there Skinny! Looking all svelte today!”

See?! It’s not just me that’s confused about the disparity between the Nazi Scales’ judgment of my rapid re-blimping and all other available evidence. This was my pal Sally-Anne when I walked into the office this morning, dressed in the skinnyish jeans and a short-sleeved shirt (having been monstrously fooled by two days of gorgeous weather into thinking it might be Summery...And only to be made the butt of the Drizzle Imp’s jokes once a-bloody-gain).

I tried to get my Xenical prescription filled again on the weekend – no such luck. Pharmacists in Merthyr are still unable to give me a date when the stuff might be available. At this point, something needs to be done...

Did I ever tell you about my platinum-level kidneys?

No?

I have platinum-level kidneys, apparently. When the BUPA doctor first told me this during a ridiculously expensive check-up three months before I started this Disappearing lark, I thought I’d finally found my superpower.  Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it’s SuperPisser!

Yeah – platinum-level kidneys. Kidneys that function above and beyond the call of duty. Special Ops kidneys, if you like. For some reason, when d anthropomorphises them (and the fact that she does should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers we have a Cuddle of teddy bears at home...), she does their voices as sort of rock-hard Cockney Bouncers.

While I was particularly gratified to be told that my kidneys were the Green Berets of the organ world (especially as this was shortly after I’d had things inserted into me to find the cause of some bizarre and disturbing bleeding, and been told it was probably just a kink!), having Special Ops kidneys  does seem to have a downside. It tends to mean that I can ingest any amount of liquid, and the kidneys go “Leave it, fuck off, it’s mine!” And while I’m perfectly aware this is not how the body works, the rest of me does seem  rather liquid-impoverished in correlation. I’ve had dry skin for years, to the extent of what can only be described as beard-dandruff (or bearddruff if you really insist). Sometimes, of a morning, I have to squeeze a thumb white to persuade a single globule of thick, high-juice blood through my pores in order to rate its sugar-content. And...to pull no further punches, without a little oily orange assistance, I have an overwhelming tendency to shit carving knives that tear me up and bleed me and which, when produced, look (as d, once again displaying her gifts for description) like little more than Cuddle-turds.

I’m on the point of giving up and trying something in the way of what are called with depressing coyness “stool softeners”, simply to avoid the sensation of having been buggered from the inside out on a depressingly regular basis. In the old days of course, my gran would have simply threatened me with a big heaped tablespoon of raw and decidedly budget castor oil to “help you along. I’d take it now except I know my bloody metabolism, and putting a tablespoon of neat oil into my body is just giving it an excuse to find a protein molecule to glom onto and stick around, bulging out my belly and making the Nazi Scales laugh their thin, humourless laugh.

So am going back to see my Doctor at an unconscionable hour of the morning tomorrow, to get...freakin’ something. Something that is in stock, in this country, legal and effective.

And yes, for the record, this is me, officially pining for the evils of the Orange Dietary Truncheon. It was deeply, deeply inconvenient, but at least it didn’t feel like I had an navigationally incompetent alien inside me, taking a wrong turn when trying to burst out of my chest!

Tuesday tomorrow, results are gonna suck. But – my sugar walls (to horribly horribly misinterpret an 80s pop song by, I think, Sheena Easton), are back up. Back to healthy living, back to proper, sweaty exercise, back to only an occasional Aristotelian experiment. It’s Go Time, dammnit...

Or at least it will be once I can go...