Suicide Cliff on Okinawa….

John, Dennis, Wayne and Tom in front, GI’s on Okinawa

Good morning world, woke early again, seems to be a pattern started and if it holds, It won’t change anymore… and I am okay with it… I am sleeping a few hours then hit the throne and out again till, I wake up… I’ll take it…

Waking up and not having pain in my gut or in my lower quadrants of my gut is so new to me, I had forgotten what semi normal was even like!!! It got me to thinking about Okinawa!!!

SSgt John Rastia, I hope I remembered his name correctly, had taken me to Suicide cliff and we did some swimming and I got caught in a rip tide where the submarine had run during the war, it was a trench dug into the area, to this day, that arm hurts and it had a bit of gravel entrenched in it… Took a while to get it all out…

Now I am 17 years old, near 18 and it wouldn’t have been too long after Don had knocked me across the living room in base housing at Naha…

I always thought I suffered a 2nd bleed on the brain after that blow to my head, now, after all these years, because we are talking 1971 or 72, not too sure of it being a stroke event and here is why…

Being on the beach, back in those days on Okinawa and going out with a GI in transit to Vietnam, you don’t have ice chests and all that junk, in fact, if you got your hands on a car, you were styling back in those days…

We had taken a big bottle of 2 liter coke with us to the beach and thought nothing of it… We only planned to be down there for a hour or two…

After our swim and I dug the gravel out of my arm and recovered from being in a rip tide… all of a sudden, my body started shutting down and it freaked the GI out…

Now we are at suicide cliff and the steps up to the top of the cliff where we parked are many and I can’t walk, in fact, I am out of it and nothing we did, helped, especially the sugar soda and now I know why…

I was having a pancreas flare up because of the physical trauma I went through with the violence at home…

Well Rastia gets me up those stairs by carrying my young ass up them and I only weighed maybe 110 pounds and at 5’7″, that’s light…

I always thought it was another brain bleed and I am reasonably sure I have had 2, we know for sure of one because it showed up on the MRI…

We get back to base housing and I go inside and tell Freda I had a heat stroke and drop on my bed and that’s all I remember till the next day…

The more I learn about the pancreas and how it impacts the human body and especially one like mine that has been beaten to a pulp more than once, it was a eureka moment…

So Okinawa, was likely a pancreas flare up because I was dehydrated and it’s not the first time that has happened, and I can go back and see the pattern over the decades and somehow, I always knew what to do to make it better and then I would slip back into my old routine and start the process all over again, not realizing, I was pissing off my pancreas…

The only way I am going to find out if I am correct??? Go see a gastro doctor and that appointment is the 24th of this month and I so hope they do the blood and stool test for the EPI deficiency and the cystic fibrosis condition… I am so ready for answers after 67 years…

Last night I got a text from our NP and he tells me take Homer to ER because his potassium level was 6.3, ridiculously high and I see that text and almost freak out and get back to him and say he had a banana just before the blood work and he texts back undecided and I text back, remember, my diet is high in potassium because of my pancreas and I think that’s what triggered his levels to be so high and it isn’t the first time my diet has done this to Homer, it happened in Washington too and they missed his 3rd stage kidney failure so we know he has CKD…

So the kid text back and agrees with me, I likely fed him to much and we need to go the weekend with as little intake as possible and do blood Monday to confirm my diagnosis… (Tells ya, the college educated are listening to me, I prove more times than I like how smart this brain I live with is)…

So I spent my evening researching foods we could eat this weekend and threw out my menu and we discussed what Homer could eat and see a normal blood draw… Yea, threw a wrench in my menu, I do plan ahead on cooking…

So I got the menu for the weekend solved with foods that will cause a very little amount of potassium to be consumed…

Did you know if you peel white potatoes, chop them small, boil them, drain the water immediately after the boil starts and re-boil them in fresh water, you can eliminate half or more of the potassium???

That’s good for me to know too, because mashed taters turn to glucose fast, boiling it away with a fresh wash reduces that… I think… Chemistry is so confusing without a education….

Well it is going on 5:30 AM and I need another cup of coffee to make my insides hate me even more… The acid is not my guts favorite, but I so enjoy it in the morning…

Pups are too quiet and Homer is still sleeping…

Figuring this all out, after 6 1/2 decades, when the degree’s couldn’t!!!

Yea, my frustration with American health care runneth over… But at least that light at the end of the tunnel is coming fast and I am looking forward to meeting this young female gastro doc and hope she has a sense of humor, that’s how I roll…

Have a wonderful day, we are finally cooling down, but rain is so little we are very dry… Also Scott Colom is beating Cydi Hyde Smith and that woman is KKK to the core…

I remember…