Haha he sounds like a typical "nothing can stop me" man :)
Pulled muscles are no fun! Since you were up late anyhow, hopefully you slept in today.
Babies are okay. The boy is driving us up the wall. He's got a neurologist appointment in about an hour here so hopefully we get some useful information there.

Well, good luck with the doc appointment. Let us know what you learn!

Well as it turns out, I won't be getting iodine via IV for the CT scan after all. Just got my pre-scan blood test results back and they show elevated serological creatinine, elevated eGFR, and elevated bilirubin. The imaging place won't give me iodine in light of this and indicates that it's highly suggestive of a kidney problem. I'm going ahead with the barium ingestion and CT scan tomorrow anyhow, but they may need to do a MRI instead if the CT scan results are inconclusive given the lack of IV contrast material.
Dating as far back as March of this year, I've also noticed slightly foamy urine and have felt dizziness along with occasional bouts of itchiness all over my body. And lately I've had acne on my face and back despite not having had any acne since adolescence. My primary physician dismissed these complaints as anxiety, which I always felt was BS from the start. I even saw a second physician for another opinion and she also dismissed it as anxiety. I tried to make myself believe that it was only anxiety, but now it looks like I may have been right all along. Widespread itchiness and acne can indicate that waste products are not being properly excreted from the body, which is the role of the kidneys.
I'll take it as a lesson learned: if your physician wants to take the easy way out and dismiss your complaints, keep on digging until you get to the truth!!! Only you know your body, screw what anybody else says. I'm just hoping now that any issue I do have is isolated to the kidney (since bilirubin is normally a measure of liver rather than kidney function) and that the opinions of so-called medical experts hasn't cost me too dearly in the long run. I'm a bit bummed right now, but am trying not to get too ahead of myself, and am happy that we at least seem to be zeroing in on some kind of diagnosis!

Good luck, NG, and try not to worry or fret!!

Thanks Cheryl, I appreciate it. I'm not too worried at the moment, more angry. I asked my doctor point blank half a year ago if my symptoms could be a kidney problem and the ******* kept telling me it was just anxiety without doing any further workup. Anxiety apparently is how doctors say "I have no clue what your illness is but am too full of my arrogant self to say otherwise." If it turns out to be something serious he's going to get a nasty earful.

Try not to get too upset, NG, your former doc might be having the best day of his life while you fume!! I found out the town where my BIL lived in China. He did learn Mandarin Chinese. I'll look up the Chinese town later--he wrote it down for me because I didn't know how to spell it. Good luck for your test tomorrow. This way you won't have to worry about the iodine and a possible reaction to it!!!!

Good point :) My doc was having a great day when I came in with a super painful fissure, so I'm pretty sure some kidney failure won't dampen his spirits either!
I'm just hoping now that the kidney problem is a primary condition rather than secondary to something more sinister. All these last few weeks, I was worried about inflammatory bowel diseases, colon problems, etc., and it turns out to be something wrong with the kidneys, go figure.
Yeah let me know where your brother in law lived while he was over there -- the countryside areas are real nice, but the cities are pretty crazy. I'm guessing he must've been in or at least very near one of the big cities, either Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. If you don't recall the name though then I'm guessing Beijing or Shanghai aren't it.

i had a barium xray over a year ago, with an active fissure. it wasn't too bad, i had a BM as soon as i got home from the dr...solid white chalky liquid. YUCK. i made sure to overcompensate with water and at the time i was using MOM. you should be ok! good luck with everything

It was Qing Dao, on the Yellow Sea. One of my supervisors at Cat left me to run our excavator plant over there at Shuzau (pronounced Shujo) (I'll have to look that one up on my atlas as I don't think I spelled it correctly.) My last supervisor and I kept the atlas I bought for work at the ready because we were continually needing to look up various Chinese cities! I had to get visas for him to travel to China and India--I do remember that!!

Nice, I've never been to Qingdao but it's famous for Tsingtao Beer, one of the few Chinese beers regularly imported to the US:
http://www.tsingtaobeer.com/
Can't say I care much for the taste of Tsingtao compared to European brews, but it's nowhere near as nasty as most Chinese beers :)
I think the place your supervisor went might be Suzhou, it (and its neighbor Hangzhou) is a real famous place in Chinese history. My paternal grandmother is from there, and my dad was there until he was 5, until they fled the mainland following the Japanese invasion during the war.