The blog train continues pony peoples... Welcome to the 4th installment of Random Ramblings of a Ponified Wing. It occurred to me a second ago that today is a really special day in my life. Aside from the obvious fact that it is Star Wars day, today marks the 2nd anniversary of my recovery from what could have been a very bad set of health issues.

Being a graduate student, I consumed a lot of caffeine -- typically in the form of Coke Zero -- as I was overworked and a Coke consumption whore. What I didn't realize at the time was that aspartame was killing me. My body metabolizes it into wood alcohol, and I spent years slowly killing my liver as well as my optic nerve.

In November of 2010, I developed vertically displaced double vision in both eyes for discernibly no reason. The eye docs were baffled and just wrote the damn thing off as sudden astigmatism that my brain was interpreting as doubles. A few months later, I was hospitalized twice for liver failure. It was a shitty experience to say the least. I don't wish that pain on the worst people on this planet. The last time it happened, I really did think I was going to die on the floor of my parents' house during what was otherwise a nice visit.

When I got back to Minnesota, I went to see a specialist who believed I was a closet alcoholic (hates booze) and told me that unless my tests improved by May 4, 2011, I'd have to go on a liver transplant list. I had a month to connect the dots that they didn't see, and eventually, I found the answer. Every attack, all of my health problems, were triggered by consuming a lot of products containing aspartame. I quit completely, and when I went to my appointment and got needled to piss for the final time, the results came back in the green.

The specialist couldn't really believe it. She had never seen it; she really believed I had been boozing it up and not caring. Now I know better, and I'm glad to say that I haven't experienced such utter bullshit since then.

The take away message is be careful with what you're putting in your bodies. Also, don't be afraid to look at shit yourselves. All the docs I went to see couldn't make that aspartame connection. I did, and it totally saved me from a load of crabapples.