That was a Faulkner joke. Pat yourself on the back if you got it. I’ve never read any of his books (one short story, I think), but I do know the reference.
I turned off charges indefinitely for my Substack late Wednesday night when I was in what I believe to have been the worst pain of my life. Worse than when I cracked my head open after I slid on my dad’s recently-waxed hardwood floor in 1993 and needed stitches. Worse than when I cracked my head open (again) when I was bouncing on an exercise ball and slammed my head into a wooden food cabinet (also at my dad’s apartment) in 2000. Worse than when I was coughing for pretty much all of fourth grade before my tonsils and adenoids were removed. And I think worse than when I was freaking out about potentially having appendicitis a couple weeks after my colonoscopy in the summer of 2025.
While I’ve had numerous bowel issues for over a decade now, I usually haven’t felt much abdominal pain before, aside from last year’s post-colonoscopy ER visit. That changed on Wednesday night around 11:00 PM when I felt what I considered to be serious abdominal pain that felt like it was crushing down on my stomach. I didn’t really think it was appendicitis this time since it was around all four quadrants surrounding my belly button. I estimated the pain at an 8/10, and I did think it was the worst pain I’d felt to that point ever. I was equivocating about whether I wanted to go to the emergency room or not, since I really didn’t think I could leave Mom at home, and I’ve been trying not to as much as possible, but ultimately I decided to go to St. Joseph’s Hospital, and I called 911. I assumed it was just gas pains since I do have irritable bowel syndrome, and this was most reminiscent of the colonoscopy incident when my gastroenterologist told me the next day that was gas pain as well. I must have visited the restrooms in the hospital waiting rooms at least 12 times, the toilets flushed about 20, since every time you stand up, it immediately flushes, and I went about six times in the 1:00 and 2:00 hours. I was moaning more than anyone else there, even the many people who presumably had more serious issues. I fell asleep while covered up in one of the St. Joseph’s blankets for about an hour from 3:00 to 4:00 and by the time I woke up, my pain had dissipated to a 2/10. I finished reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (which my counselor assigned) before I was seen at about 8:00 AM, eight hours after I arrived. By that point, I already wanted to leave.
After Mom came home on September 30, I’d never left her home more than half an hour at a time and that was only once, but she had a lot scheduled for Thursday. She has people from PACE CNY coming to clean her at 10:00 AM on both Mondays and Thursdays, I have to give her all her pills also around 10:00, and she had a follow-up appointment with the doctors at PACE that was scheduled for 11:00. I felt like I needed to get back to her before all those events, so I didn’t end up having any tests done. I would have had to stay another 2-4 hours and not been there for any of those things if I chose to either have a blood test or an image scan done, so I decided not to. Because I’m no longer on Medicaid, St. Joseph’s couldn’t even arrange for me to take a cab back, and I had just $60 left in my bank account, so I walked a mile or so to the nearest bus stop on the North Syracuse bus route (I arrived five minutes late, but luckily, the bus arrived six minutes late) and got home just in time, only to find that Mom’s appointment with PACE is being delayed to next week because there was some confusion since Mom was originally assigned to always go to the PACE day center on Thursdays until she decided she hated all the people and the events and she’d rather than just stay home, which is very frustrating for me trying to arrange medical appointments.
Since I’m also no longer on Medicaid and had to buy health care through the marketplace for the first time, I was charged $476 for basically nothing but a referral plus however much the ambulance costs, which I think will be $150 or something. And my abdominal pain still didn’t go away. While it never got as bad as it was on Wednesday night, I’d say it got up to about a 5/10 yesterday and I’ve been debating about whether to throw more money away at urgent care to have those tests done. It’s usually bearable when I’m sitting down, but when turning, pivoting, or especially bending down, it feels like something is pressing down hard on my stomach.
My sleep has also been a major issue. After sleeping one hour in the ER waiting room, I slept two or three hours in two separate stints after I got home, then another ten hours nonconsecutive on Thursday night. Mom was getting on my case yesterday about not having gone to bed yet when it was 4:30 PM and I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. Even when I was a little boy and I would literally scream at her when she put me to bed even a minute after my scheduled bedtime of 7:00 PM, I never went to bed that early. But I figured after all that, I needed the rest so I compromised and tried to go to bed at 6:30 PM. In the weeks before Mom came home, I was usually going to bed between 3:00 and 5:00 AM, so that was a big adjustment. I didn’t think I could remotely fall asleep at that time, but I tried. And then I didn’t fall asleep the entire night and Mom pooped her pants worse than she ever had since she came home. I had to wash her in like 20 places, scrub the toilet, and launder everything. As I was wiping her off, she also peed on the rug so that created even more work after I had had zero sleep. I was really angry Mom tried to force me to go to bed that early because I’m convinced I probably would’ve been able to at least sleep some if I’d waited until I was tired. But I decided I had nothing better to do than try to sleep (especially since I canceled YouTube TV for at least a few days since I couldn’t make that payment until I was just paid today), and then I failed to sleep at all. The pain has dissipated some as I write this, so I don’t think I’ll be going to urgent care, but it hasn’t gone away completely.
This has been kind of a rougher month financially than I expected it to be. I thought my mom’s Social Security would automatically be returned to her, but I needed to schedule an appointment with the Social Security office to have the Van Duyn nursing home removed as her representative payee and that won’t be until next week and who knows when she’ll get access to her money again. Obviously with her being home, there is more in the way of grocery expenditures too. While she was in the nursing home, I was allowed to withdraw $50 a month by New York State law (because Medicaid takes the rest to pay for the nursing home) and I deposited that manually each month to (mostly) cover two of her three life insurance policies, which add up to over $60, but I had to cover those policies entirely myself this month. And there are still a lot of other issues, as there has been water pouring out of either our furnace or our hot water heater (I couldn’t tell, but I need to have it looked at). I did just get paid today, so I should be able to finally make some headway on that. And I need to try to get Mom’s mortgage back to what it was, which requires getting a new homeowner’s insurance policy so we no longer have to have emergency homeowner’s insurance bundled into the escrow for her taxes and insurance (which requires taking pictures of the roof when I’m not even sure I have a functional camer) and also getting her enhanced STAR tax exemption for her school tax back (which was removed once she was no longer living in the house, and raised our monthly mortgage payments $300 by itself). My bills for the medical services can wait.
Obviously, I’m trying to figure out what caused this specific stomach episode and maybe I’ll never know until I’m finally looked at. I did have a follow-up appointment scheduled with a gastroenterologist (which was basically the only thing they did for me in the ER before I left). However, there was a big paper chase and bureaucratic maelstrom I failed to resolve yesterday. I didn’t tell the St. Joseph’s ER about my new doctor’s office (where I went for the first time a few weeks ago) so they shared no information from them. My new doctor’s office has not yet obtained medical records from my old doctor’s office. The gastroenterologist told me they did not receive the referral from St. Joe’s so I would either have to go there somehow (and leave Mom at home for probably an hour) to hand them the information personally, mail it, or ask the St. Joe’s ER to fax it to the gastroenterologist and I was unable to get any of that mumbo-jumbo done. I think my preference is to still do this at the gastroenterologist rather than going to urgent care now, but don’t get me wrong. I’ve thought of the latter, too.
I know that no doubt all my IBS issues stem from my atrocious diet growing up. Let me quote my book on this:
“Even beyond anything mentioned so far, my biggest adverse eccentricity without a doubt was my eating habits. While I ate pretty much everything until I was one, I abruptly stopped eating all solid food and reverted to formula shortly thereafter. Still on formula and not potty-trained at almost age four, I was almost not allowed to enter preschool, but I did eventually move on to solid food. I must be the only person in the history of the world who learned to touch-type before being pottytrained. Unfortunately I ended up likely having one of the worst extended diets in human history. For basically my entire childhood, I ate practically the same diet with almost no variations. For breakfast, I ate Freihofer’s Canadian Oat Bread or Pepperidge Farm Cinnamon Bread with a Flintstones vitamin and a box of cherry Juicy Juice. For dinner on weekdays, I ate a Tony’s frozen pizza – either cheese or sausage and pepperoni. For lunch, I would eat school pizza, hash browns, French toast, or chicken nuggets when available (and chicken nuggets for dinner on the days I ate pizza for lunch), but other than that, I always ate 2 Pop-Tarts, a cracker and cheese pack and chocolate milk for lunch, or chicken nuggets in the summer. On weekends, I would have six slices of Domino’s sausage and pepperoni pizza at my dad’s apartment on Saturday and four on Sunday, eating either Kraft macaroni & cheese or nothing for Saturday night dinner and chicken tenders from Burger King on Sunday night on my way back home to my mom’s. I also ate two 1-pound boxes of Cheez-Its a week and drank two glasses of soda almost every night. Somehow I did not have a coronary as a teenager. I wasn’t even really unhealthy although there was no good reason for that to be the case. That basically was around 95% of what I ate in my entire childhood. This is now actually considered a legitimate eating disorder – Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) but wasn’t at the time. Whenever I tried to expand my diet, most of the time I gagged and was completely unable to swallow whatever foreign substance I was trying to eat – turkey, corn, soup, even unbreaded chicken. Perversely, I even seemed to take this extreme eccentricity as a source of pride as a child, introducing myself by saying ‘Hi, I’m Sean Wrona and I’m a picky eater.’”
I never changed this very much in my adulthood. I can’t do mac & cheese or Cheez-Its anymore as I think my bowels badly reacted to the annatto dye in them. I started drinking two meal replacements most days going back to 2018 or something: initially Soylent but now it’s impossible to get so I’ve switched to Huel. I do eat oatmeal and a banana each day now, I’m trying to integrate applesauce, but pizza, soda, and toast were still staples (although these days I’ve been having the pizzas delivered - I preferred to make them at home but I think our oven isn’t working properly either). While I was on the ambulance, the paramedic asked me what I last ate and I told him I had some saltine crackers. He then asked me what my last real meal was and I told him I ate almost entirely junk food and he was like “No wonder”.
I think I’ve mentioned this before here but back in the ‘90s, I was so proud to not be a drug user in the DARE era when drug users were perhaps most vilified while hypocritically failing to acknowledge that I was doing far more damage to myself than the average drug user. But the difference is that now people have sympathy for drug users, believing it is an addiction that the user can’t control. I’m fine with that, but nobody grants the same mercy to people who eat improperly. Tons of people believe ARFID doesn’t even exist and if you have the palate of a 12-year-old, the vast majority of people will still give you shit for it. While marijuana users are I think considered cool now, poor eaters remain the butt of jokes and people feel such schadenfreude whenever we suffer. Not that schadenfreude is ever okay, and I’ve complained about how that’s taken over Internet culture again and again and again and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself. I know the IBS is presumably a result of four decades of nutritional atrocities (but who knows - maybe it’s not since there does seem to be a connection between autism and bowel issues beyond just dietary differences, I think) but I don’t know how to not make myself gag most vegetables and meats and a lot of unprocessed foods in general. Cannot swallow them: just spit them out on the floor. I can probably integrate more fruits and nuts and that’s what I should be doing, but I don’t necessarily know 100% that that’s what caused this. But I can be pretty sure. And I’m sure any random who comes across this who’s not already subscribed to me will say, “Skill issue” - one of many, many insufferably smug catchphrases from this epoch that make me want to vomit.
It’s possible that it could have been any of a number of things that triggered this though: the stress of my mom coming home, the fact that I was walking all the time when I was visiting Mom at Van Duyn three days a week and was probably getting multiple miles of walking most days and now I’m suddenly not, the financial stress, Mom waking me up when I was asleep several times for me to walk her to the bathroom and me not being able to fall asleep again, etc… I don’t know which of these was the trigger. Probably a combination. I don’t know what really is going on. I think it’s still IBS because my colonoscopy last year said that it wasn’t colon cancer, Crohn’s, or ulcerative colitis, but I suppose it could be other things like SIBO or pancreatritis. I’ll need to get it seen whenever I finally schedule the gastroenterologist appointment, but who knows when that will be now that all these various doctor’s offices have a failure to communicate. And I still want to see a dietician to see if anyone can help me learn to swallow things that I currently gag.
Needless to say, I’m scared shitless. I knew after my doctor’s appointment a few weeks ago that I needed to schedule follow-ups with a gastroenterologist and a dietician, but I decided not to because I didn’t think I could really leave Mom at home when she has cataracts and is incontinent, but this was scary enough that I now think I need to. It doesn’t help that I’m really feeling signs of old age in a year when Kyle Busch, the first NASCAR superstar younger than me, died along with legendary NASCAR writers Steve Waid, Matt McLaughlin, and Monte Dutton. I already addressed Waid and McLaughlin here, but I suppose I need to discuss Dutton a little also. I read his Gaston Gazette columns off of Jayski links a lot in the ‘90s and 2000s. He sort of felt like the Bob Pockrass of that era in that his reporting was consistently solid but his prose style was a little boring. He was always worth reading, but he never seemed to have many memorable lines and to be honest, I kind of forgot about him until I heard about his death a few days ago. I was surprised to find out that Dutton and McLaughlin were only a couple years apart in age because Dutton felt way older to me when I was reading him, like he was already in his fifties in the ‘90s, but apparently not. In addition to all those guys, I also think about both my mom’s old age and also how Jonas Neubauer, who held essentially the same status in the world of Tetris tournaments that I did in competitive typing (even right down to the specific years we were both on top) died before he even reached 40 and I am really conscious about my own mortality at this point.
I’m not in too much pain now as I write this and I do want to keep making posts here. I think I’ll mostly stop driver posts for the rest of this year and just do my remaining bubble posts before my year-end wrap-ups, but I may at some point change my mind if I’m feeling better. My mom became stricken with multiple sclerosis in the ‘80s right before I was born. She was attempting to work full-time as the music secretary at Onondaga Community College, go to school full-time where she was double-majoring in music and computer science, helping manage a local Syracuse progressive rock band named Aire, which played Genesis, Rush, and Police covers along with their own similar material (she dated both the drummer and the keyboardist at different times), and writing an opera based on Rachel Maddox’s obscure fantasy novel The Green Kingdom. That was too much for one person to handle and it all came crashing down in 1983 when she caught the flu for six weeks and never really recovered as the MS got too bad for her to work again not long after that. She never finished the opera, and honestly one of the things I wanted for her if she ever came home would be to help her finish it. I was never a musician and I know even less about orchestral music, but there’s probably something I could do here and if she has the strength for this (which I don’t know, she probably doesn’t) I’d like to try to help her with this, and it seems like I’m more into this than she is at this point actually. But a lot of times I wonder whether this 1,000 greatest drivers list is going to be my opera and something similar is going to happen to me. Gee, I hope not. I don’t think I need to go to urgent care right now since the abdominal pain is almost entirely gone at this point, but I should probably go to sleep.