Softshock.

Blurggg.

I'm blogging. Why you may ask? When I was in elementary school I knew I was going to be a writer. I wrote amazing stories-generally about unicorns. I wrote all through high school and fell away from it in college during a short stint in writing my own songs. They sucked.

Why the blog sphere? I was recently informed that I have a recurring menigioma. As many of you know; I was diagnosed with a brain tumor in November 2007 and had a craniotomy to remove my golf ball size "Manny" (as my loving sister likes to call it) that was nesting on my right olfactory nerve. A menigioma is a slow growing non-cancerous brain tumor that is most often found in middle aged women. It was a shitty year to say the least. I began to have day long migraines, violent puke sessions, blurry vision, giant blind spots, weight gain due to lethargy, and loss of my sense of smell-oh yeah, and the cross eye-which ironically I always found cute in kids I knew growing up...on me...not so cute.

Three years later and I am graduated and have a sweet baby girl. I was back to my bubble of life being a breeze. I actually began making up drama due to my lack of drama.

My mother and I have a theory that the growth may coincide with the introduction of hormones in my body; which is backed by the fact that women with menigiomas can experience growth during pregnancy and that my life did a 360 directly following the introduction of the pill. This being my only theory it leads me to the obvious conclusion that I need to remove hormones, preservatives and MSG from my diet. Now, I know I have some more research to do, but now that I have my sweet baby girl, I am going to invest all my resources in making myself as healthy as possible.

I started this blog to document what I'm going through with my health--since I received a lot of flak for not letting people know what was going down the first time around, my dramatic extraction of my favorite foods (i.e. Baked Lays, Diet Coke), and the introduction of fruits and vegetables to my diet (which is also quite dramatic due to my dry heaving at the site of peas).

-Jo.