The Week of Bad Luck

This Wednesday at about 4:00 my stomach started hurting. At first I thought it was just because my pants were too tight and they were digging into my stomach. These jeans have absolutely no stretch in them and I did buy them a bit small so that they would still fit even after I lost more weight. So I unbuttoned them, but the pain persisted. Luckily we were off work soon, so I figured, I just need to go home and lay down and it’ll be fine. But when we got home, laying down didn’t work. We had a tutoring session that night and I couldn’t concentrate at all. About half way through, I had to go throw up, so we cut it short. From that point on, I was throwing up about every 10-20 minutes, with the stomach pain getting worse and worse. Nothing could calm my stomach, not even hot water or tea. I didn’t have a fever, in fact, my temperature was 94.7 at one point. So I didn’t think it was the flu or anything. Just some weird stomach bug. I managed to stop throwing up at about 1am, but I still couldn’t get any sleep because my stomach hurt in every position. The next day, Adam stayed home with me in case I needed to go to the doctor. He took very good care of me. :) I didn’t throw up all morning, but after taking a few sips of chicken broth, all hell broke loose again. So we called in reinforcements (Dreamer and Sophie). I had read online that peppermint tea and ginger were good for calming stomachs so I asked if they could bring me some. They did, along with some weird Chinese stomach medicine and a giant vase full of flowers. Now the weird Chinese stomach medicine looks like some kind of small animal droppings and smells really weird. (pictured below)

But MAN did it do the trick. I was feeling better in just minutes and by nightfall, the stomachache was gone. I couldn’t wait to sleep, it was glorious. I have NO IDEA what I had or how I got it. It’s a complete mystery because all I had eaten on Wednesday were 3 egg whites, a dragonfruit, some oatmeal, and an apple (and yes, I washed the apple). All I know is I never want to have that again. But in case I do, I’ve got some miracle meds.

Another story: The main circuit breaker switch in our apartment had been shutting off whenever we used the heat so we couldn’t keep the heat on. Our landlady met the repair guy at our apartment so that I could go to work. When we got home from work, the landlady knocked on our door and tried to tell us something about not keeping the heater on all the time or something. We didn’t understand so she eventually gestured “never mind”. But then she went into the bathroom and pointed at the toilet paper and then pointed at the toilet and shook her head. We were like, “No way….” I knew you couldn’t flush toilet paper down squat toilets because the plumbing can’t handle it but I thought regular toilets had newer plumbing. Plus we haven’t been having any problems. But somebody must have said something to her and of course she knows who to blame. Haha. Anyways, this was one cultural difference I really didn’t want to get on board with but now we have to.

Another crappy thing that happened this week was, we found out the tickets to New Zealand we thought we’d bought, didn’t actually get purchased. WHY? Because the flight was full, but kayak.com, orbitz.com, and cheaptickets.com were all still showing the flights and let us order them anyways. After many many tries using other websites, we discovered that ALL the flights to New Zealand on the dates we want are booked. So we’re not going. And I hear it’s a nightmare to try to travel within China during CNY so we’ve decided to stay put.

AND, just last night, Adam’s last remaining stainless steel crown popped off. The others he has have been converted to porcelain over the years but this one was still going strong so he hadn’t gotten it replaced yet. The original plan was to have Adam’s parents send over a repair kit, since I doubt they’d sell such a convenient thing here in China. But it turns out; Dreamer’s uncle is a dentist. Our first stroke of good luck all week! The procedure appears to be the same here as in the US so he’s going to go in on Monday. I’m sure ready for this week/year to be over.

Hopefully, this is just 2011’s way of getting all the bad luck out of the way so that next year can be super awesome!

Smudgie wearing a towel