3 Weeks and a day

It’s so nice not to be in chronic pain! I slept through the night, woken to gas gurgles playing around my ilium. Got up to go to the bathroom, and it started with a little liquid, as usual, then finished in a solid clump, without blood or mucus on top, dark, formed, almost normal.

And it doesn’t hurt! It doesn’t hurt! I feel like dancing a jig.

The negatives are: increased acne around my mouth (though it might have been the peanut butter cake I ate in two days), and my skin seems to have lost last week’s rosiness. Little fleeting joint pains, like butterflies landing momentarily on my ankles. And I’m tired, always tired. My next round of iron shots should raise my stored iron to a low normal rate, if I can ever get through the maze of my insurance company’s injectable meds division. (Why is it always so hard?)

Could the hookworms be changing things so rapidly this time? Improvement by week 2.5? If I could get the hookworm high to remain constant, I’d be a very happy woman. If that feeling could be sold, we’d have a nation of worm addicts. I wonder if part of the reason some very poor people in the third world seem so happy is that they are infected often by worms, getting “hookworm highs” every few weeks. Not to triviliaze devastating poverty, but I believe that the Old Friends’ Hypothesis covers depression too, and having experienced the hookworm high, I can attest that it brings you out of depression and into a state of casual nirvana.

How come I feel like the only woman alive trying this? I am writing to an empty box.

Oh, I hesitate to hope, but if I keep improving like this, I’d say the experiment has been wholeheartedly worth it.

But I wait…