It wasn’t news. Over the past several months of economic H-E-Double Hockey Sticks, as I’ve struggled to gig enough to keep a roof over me and my cat’s collective head, I’ve found a fulfilling–if ultimately humiliating–way to deal with the stress of an unknown financial future.

I’ve rediscovered my childhood comfort food (again), and taken advantage of it at every affordable opportunity. Butterfingers? Mallowmars? Hormel corned beef hash? Pop Tarts straight out of the box? How I’ve missed you so. I can’t tell you how much relinquishing myself into carb and sugar whore-dom over you have brought me peace of mind these past few months.

Sure, with each passing plate I was becoming progressively winded walking up the ‘L’ stairs at State/Lake and tugging a little tighter on my $19 Old Navy allegedly leather belt. But I’ve been here before. I figured as soon as warm weather hit I’d be walking everywhere anyway and it would all even out, so why worry?

It’s not like it was going to impact my love life. Dumped or not, for the past 24 years, I’ve happily dated one type of guy and they’ve gravitated towards me: husky ones. I’ve never been a card-carrying member of the so-called gay bear community, but I’ve certainly dated my way through its ranks.

So imagine my surprise surfing through Bear411 last Sunday when one of them said to me, “Dude, change your picture. You’re fatter than that!”

Truth be told, I am about five pounds fatter than my headshot, but it’s not the rotund picture this guy was painting.

“When we met you had three chins! I thought you were more honest than that on here.”

I didn’t bother to fight the urge not to tell him that when we had met in person a few weeks before I found it hard to believe he was sober or had recently bathed, and he didn’t respond back after that. But considering the source or not, the exchange was instructive.

I don’t think of myself as any larger or smaller than the average Chicagoan. Chicago locals reading this may think that was my first mistake. Still, hearing those words was enough to make me get on my scale again–and that was enough to make me realize that it’s time to get on Marina City’s treadmills again.

Not because I think crackhead-boy is correct in his appraisal of my waistline. But I’d like to get things in check before the sober among my dating pool start snickering. After all, I’m still groping towards economic solvency. Right now, I’d prefer my dates buy me dinner.

Not offer me a free day at their health club.

This content originally appeared on my former Chicagosphere online-media blog, hosted on the Chicago Tribune’s ChicagoNow network.

Jenni Prokopy is not to be underestimated. Founder and “editirix” of ChronicBabe.com, a Chicago-based blog about young women experiencing chronic health issues, since June 2005 she has chronicled her personal journey with persistent illness. Along the way, she’s provided messages of hope for young women suffering in a similar way. Her mantra in the midst of it all? Never forget the babe that you are.

Prokopy’s daily battle includes (deep breath, folks) fibromyalgia, asthma, anxiety, Raynaud’s phenomenon, and GERD. Surprisingly, her biggest peeve about facing these challenges is not the challenges, themselves, but the doubt she encounters from people who have a hard time believing a sprightly young woman could be the one facing them.

“Yes, I am young, ” she writes. “Yes, I look fine. And yes, it is sad. But as time passes, I choose more often to focus on the positive: I am creative, and I have choices. And even when I’m cramping and blubbering and whining, I’m still a hottie.”

In four years, Prokopy’s blog has grown into a mini-media empire, employing a staff of 12 and gaining national media attention. The site’s success is due to the wealth of information and motivation offered to its community of readers.

Take, for example, these entries on careers (see working with chronic illness and managing a mean manager), coping (how to embrace optimism and self-care tips), inspiration (try the be here now experiment), relationships and sex (see discussion on healthy boundaries, getting playful, or the mind-blowing sex toys for the allergic), or the “Ask the Babe” reader-response column (see Prokopy’s answers regarding illness disclosure during a job interview and finding a non-judgmental physician.)

ChronicBabe also offers a comprehensive Help Desk with links to health-related online resources including information on chronic conditions, alternative medicine, exercise & fitness, pregnancy, nutrition, and medication assistance.

Beyond her blog, Prokopy is a full-time writer on women’s health issues. She currently serves as a staff health reporter at Gapers Block, writes magazine articles on women’s health issues, and speaks nationally on the topic (you can find her on twitter at @chronicbabe.) The successful motivational blogger shows no sign of slowing down.

“I am not my chronic stuff,” she writes. “I am a young, creative, passionate, generous, driven woman. I’m a Babe. I’m here to share what I know with you, and to create a space for others to share their successes, so that you can be a Babe too.”

With Prokopy leading the way, I wouldn’t doubt it.

(Graphic: Never forget to visit your dressing room when you wake up in Marina City. Credit: Marina City Online.)

I held onto Ben Helpinghand’s beans for as long as I could. But what’s a boy with a balcony to do with a bag of bean seeds in search of a backyard? Pawn them off on Muir Woods, the accommodating owner of Marina Management, the independent apartment broker on the lobby level of the corncobs.

“They need a bean pole,” I told him yesterday as I handed him the little envelope of seeds. “Where would I have found one of those?”

Muir smirked as he responded. “I’ll do my best to find one for you up in Lakeview.”

“Say, when are you gonna ask me to blog for you?” I nudged. “You know, I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this morning.”
___

I was lucky to wake up in time to respond to the email when it arrived mid-morning from a media reporter at the Journal. I’d been throwing myself pretty heavily into my new ChicagoNow citywide byline, CHICAGOSPHERE, and felt like I had slept for seconds when the always-unexpected banging from my upstairs neighbor, Mr. Shnozzle (suitably pseudonymed as a portmanteau of douche and nozzle), jarred me awake.

Sun streaming through my floor-to-ceiling windows, there was no further point in sleeping. I opened my laptop and immediately saw the new message:

“Hi Mike, I write about media here at the Wall Street Journal…”

There was more to the email, but I work in public relations. I know when your email has a first sentence like that, your phone better be in your hand before you reach the second one. Twenty minutes later and still not out of bed, I completed my first-ever interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The biggest questions were why I decided to write for ChicagoNow and whether there’s been any backlash from local bloggers to the Chicago Tribune’s group blogging project. Both questions came down to a single answer: trust.

The Trib’s longstanding outreach into the Windy City’s online community meant I knew the team members asking me to participate. Probably more importantly, it also meant I knew they were sincere. Besides, I’m a shameless self-promoter anyway (if you’re not going to have faith in yourself, why should anyone else?), so I know a good thing when one hits me over the head.

And some of traditional media types sniffed at @ColonelTribune…
___

Pastry Chef Chris would call to sniff at me later in the day, in between bouts of coughing. My old beau’s new beau spent the weekend in the hospital with a high fever. The test results arrived back yesterday afternoon.

“Yep,” Chris said. “He’s got swine flu.”

“You don’t sound too good yourself,” I observed. “You’re not, like, growing a snout right now or anything, right?”

“No, but I just left the doctor’s office with ten days of meds,” Chris moaned. “And work said stay home for the ten days I’m taking them.”

“I hope you’re gonna be OK,” I told him.

“Don’t worry…” his words trailed off into a doubt-inspiring coughing fit.

“Hmm…I love you, don’t die,” I said half in jest.

“Anyway, I guess I have my answer now,” said Chris. “Since we shared enough spit for me to catch a virus, I guess he’s my boyfriend now.”

“Hey!” I brightened. “Can I live blog your illness?”

I heard his response in my head before I finished asking the question. “Don’t even think about it.”
___

I got a similar response the night before when I banged on my ceiling after Shnozzle’s nightly, 1:00 a.m. round of furniture assembly. He picked up what sounded like a miniature bookshelf and banged back.

“Listen, you fucker, we can do this all night if you want!” I yelled in vain through the five inches of concrete that separated us, realizing the use of fucker in a sentence meant that I’m now probably a Chicago lifer.

The next morning, after the Journal interview, I got dressed and headed out onto aforementioned balcony to make sense of my unexpected good media fortune. I was telling my regular railing pigeon, Greenie, all about it when my next-door neighbor, Mitchum Man, came out for a chat.

“That asshole is driving me crazy, too,” said Mitchum, disclosing his non-Chicago birth through his expletive of choice. “The next time he acts up, let’s you and me both go listen through his door and call the guards together.”

“I’m all for that,” I replied. “‘Cause the next step is fastening a subwoofer to my ceiling pointed up.”

“I hear you,” Mitchum said, as he made his way back inside his unit. The poor old guy must have been even more riled about Shnozzle than I was yesterday morning.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him he carried on our conversation naked from the waist down.

(Photo: The things your doctor doesn’t warn you about….)

There are many words that your doctor can probably go ahead and edit out of an oral report on your CT scan results. “Most likely benign” are not among them. Given the rigamarole and drang I went through that led up to the words being written, I felt I had earned hearing them.

When my doctor sent me for said scan after weeks of abdo-medical hell, I had high hopes it would find some reason for my month of mid-section madness that my doctor was missing. His words to me as I left his office on one of my recent visits: “Now don’t go Googling liver disease or anything. Let me figure out what the problem is.”

Any 1980s Designing Women fan worth their salt can see exactly where this story is heading. (Think Julia Sugarbaker reaming Charlene Frazer’s alleged oncologist.)

Medical paternalism has no place in a world that rides an information superhighway, and although upon the above words a suspicion began to sneak into my head that my internist was one of those physicians–one who, like any good mid-century throwback, doesn’t think the patient needs to have substantive input into the care of their own life–I was too enthralled by my impending magic x-ray adventure to pay much mind.

Silly me. Half an hour into my early morning visit to the Feinberg Pavilion, I knew the error of my anticipation. Good thing the Northwestern Memorial campus is a ten-minute walk from my Marina City high-rise home. My dignity probably wouldn’t have endured any longer a public promenade after the two-hour invasive throttling it took through the breakfast hour.

My bionic-kneed pal Val and pastry-chef Chris, both radiology-department veterans, prepped me on what to expect. Unfortunately for me, neither was off the mark. Good-bye to my possessions now stowed in a locker, hello to an impossible-to-close hospital gown, floppy pants, and slipper socks. Not so bad so far. Neither was the quart of barium sulfate milkshake contrast I was made to drink over the next ninety minutes.

Being plopped in a room full of similarly gown-clad strangers with nothing to divert my attention from the maniacal whirring of nearby MRI machines but the equally maniacal rambling of Kelly Ripa on WGN, a few dog-eared copies of Red Eye, and a disembowled Wall Street Journal however had me strategizing a way to sneak my iPhone out of ensconcement.

They came to put the IV in before I managed to tiptoe back to my locker and that’s when all hell broke lose. At least it felt that way.

“Sir, we have to do a blood test to make sure your kidneys are fine before we put in the IV tube for the iodine drip they’ll give you on the gantry.”

“Luckily, I brought my kidneys with me today.”

IV? Iodine? Gantry? I began to tense muscles I didn’t even know I had.

“Sir, calm down. You don’t faint when you get an IV put in, do you?”

“I’ve never had an IV in my life, so we’re about to find out.”

I can’t even watch as my blood is taken. Sticking a little plastic tube in me an hour before there is any use for it to be there, however, hit me right in the queasy bone.

“I can’t do this,” were the words I spat over my shoulder as I launched myself out of my chair and back to the gown room at the barium bar to continue downing my contrast cocktail. Faintly heard from down the hall as I retreated, “Don’t worry sir, we’ll stick you on the table.”

Safely back in the waiting room, I tried to cover my veinous woosiness by guzzling the chalky soup, clinging to my waned masculinity with the observation that most of the already IV-wearing men in the waiting room were nimbly sipping the stuff and trying not to barf it back up. I guess we all meet our edge in our own ways.

An hour later, I met the life-size horizontal tongue depresser I was meant to lie on while it rolled me in and out of the rotating, radioactive donut that together comprise a CT scanner.

“Okay, sir, squeeze your fist.”

Looking away from my arm didn’t help. I counted to a zillion, meditatively breathed, examined the ceiling, and altogether trembled for the five minutes between IV insertion and machine whir-up.

The actual scan was a breeze. Eyes closed, rolling slowly back and forth, with a warmish, recently peed-part-of-the-pool feeling from the iodine, the two-minute process was like a dementendly soothing ride at an alternate-reality Disneyland.

Two days and a small skin tear from an over-zealous IV bandage later, my doctor’s assistant called to tell me “everything’s normal” and nothing more, except to ask if I had made an appointment with a GI specialist recommended to me earlier.  (I did, for Monday).

Yesterday, the printed test results came in the mail. For a husky homo who hadn’t seen a doctor in years, I seem to be freakishly healthy. Pick an internal organ, they’re all in perfect working order.

Except for the “most likely benign one-centimeter hypodense lesion on left lobe of liver” and “calcifications found in right adrenal gland.”

Where is Julia Sugarbaker when you need her?

And I wasn’t referred to an oncologist or back to Radiology for an MRI with contrast for what reason? And my doctor’s assistant did not disclose this information to me for what reason? And my Northwestern Internists doctor did not even get on the phone with me after a finding like this for what reason?

I should say, my fired doctor. But I’m sure I’ll have a lot to discuss with that specialist on Monday, and likely with my insurance company, too.

Just as soon as I finish talking with God.

(Photo: Intestinal health is nothing to sniff it.)

They say that with age comes wisdom. As a somewhat newly minted 38-year-old, I’d rather that someone had warned me about the constipation. It’s an open secret rarely considered by the young and guarded with glee by the over-40 set as they watch their age-advancing junior compatriots suffer through this startling realization: eventually, you’re only as young as your body lets you feel.

Having always prided myself on aging gracefully, I too have been surprised at how much harder it gets to attain said grace in the face of an increasingly uncooperative corpus. I may never choose contacts over glasses or Grecian formula over natural gray, but in the past year my pesky prostate has had me wondering whether in my always upcoming home renovation plans I might want to start with the bathroom first. Perhaps a modest flat-screen above the toilet bowl or at least a better pair of slippers to keep my feet warm on unexpected nightly runs.

Said prostate pest is probably why I discounted more frequent urges that arose a few weeks ago. No one my age adopts a food beat and gets away with it, much less a Cincinnati chili food fetish. By the time I put two and two together, I was already stuck with my problem. That is, I was already stuck, and good. Or bad, if you count the half-hourly, constipation-caused pee breaks and three-day-long, unrequited desire to successfully, um, bear down.

Thus began a desperate quest to find some way to exercise my right of passage. There’s nothing like the feeling that you’re eternally just about to pass a frozen chicken to light a fire under your butt. Under those circumstances, however, home remedies can only go so far. Their effectiveness tends to run out much the same time that your dignity does, too.

In my case, both limits were reached while lying prone on my hallway rug, attempting to squeeze an enema bag with one hand while shooing my cat away with the other, neither endeavor ending up a success.

I knew the humbling vignette would end up on the blog–if my mind could only relax long enough to actually concentrate on blogging. Or anything other than spending hours at a time Googling my symptoms, wishing my individual health insurance would kick in, and begging the universe for a speculum home kit.

And then I turned on BBC America, and in one unexpected episode of AbFab, the long-forgotten memory of a potential solution to my problem came flooding back to me. As Edina Monsoon once said:

“It’s colonic irrigation, sweetie. It’s nothing to sniff at.”

One pleading early morning email later, and off I went for a same-day appointment at a respected wellness center on Chicago’s northwest side. Yelp reviews had told of a practitioner skilled at her job but short on patience. She turned out to be a fellow expatriate New Yorker, which instantly put me at ease. A guiding commentary, a massaging hand, and that much-hoped-for speculum made the hour’s 15 flushes of water go by quickly. If not entirely painlessly. There’s nothing like the discomfort of an unwanted metal device thrust up your rump to make a gay man wish he had bottomed more often.

On the ride home with Cincinnati Jamie, with the floodgates finally opened I happily purred into the car seat and imagined a future finally free of fecal hardship. This is the point in the story at which the over-40s reading this are mouthing the words, “Yeah, right.”

Losing three-and-a-half pounds of unpoopularity from your large intestine may be a big relief for you, but it can be like losing a smelly, beloved security blanket for your colon. The dawning of my new abdominal day would quickly come to resemble a lower-GI version of the fall of the Berlin Wall: with any sudden sweeping change cannot help but come a major measure of turmoil as things try to find their balance once again.

So out with constipation, in with irritation and bloating after eating. And maybe longstanding problems, heretofore hidden, now firmly flushed out into the open. Google searches brought up results like ‘diverticulitis’, ‘kidney disease’, and ‘appendicitis’. It was fear of that last one that sent me on an out-of-pocket doctor’s appointment at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Wednesday. (My local hospital–a nice perq of living in downtown Chicago).

I spent the first half of the day calling Unicare, my incipient insurer, being repeatedly told that their computers were down, shopping for hospital slippers, and visualizing post-operative liquid meals. To no avail all, as a particularly fatherly internist told me in no uncertain terms, “If it was your appendix, you’d jump off the table if I pressed you there.”

So give us some blood, pee in a cup, and call me in two days. Oh, and if the pain gets really bad, go to the emergency room. And wait.

The next day I learned the technology-challenged Unicare had covered me days earlier (Boo! Hiss!), balanced with the assurance that the doctor’s office would send them a claim and eventually reimburse me (Hurray!).

And the day after that, after the customary, agonizing eight-hour wait for the doctor’s office to call me back, I learned that my test results were all normal. Which leaves me with a murky non-ending to an all-around rocky problem. What, then, is bugging my pushing-40 frame? IBS? Colitis? Gastroenteritis? Google is a dangerous tool for the long uninsured.

At least now I have the coverage to follow up. Note to my new Northwestern doctor: next week, feel free to CT scan me. At long last, I’m finally good for it.

And anyone who tells you differently is full of shit.