*Warning* Long medical explanations and wordy information ahead:
Sorry for not being (actively) here for the last couple of months, life has been... interesting.

First off, we figured out why I havn't been able to run . For those of you who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, I started getting these really bad stomach/abdomen pains when I run around mid July. We thought they were gas pains (because I ran a couple of hours after I ate, we just figured my food hadn't digested enough), but it sure didn't feel like a gas pain. It was a combination of a stomach cramp, a stich, a hunger pain and the feeling you get when someone kicks you in the gut, but we weren't really worried about it that much. When Cross Country practice started up about a week after school, they started getting worse, a lot worse. I was kind of confused, but I didn't really think anything of it for a few weeks... until I could barely walk without triggering it. Up until that point, it was only when I ran or did really hard exersise, but now I had to force myself to just get from class to class, let alone run.
This went on for three or four days, so I told my parents. They were kind of concerned, so they scheduled a doctor's appointment.
Well, the doctor had no idea what it could be, so we did an x-ray of my stomach/bowel area. All they found was some minor colic; but other than that, nothing. The doctor gave me something to clean out the colic and said to come back to do some blood work in a couple of days. I had some annual blood work and my bilirubin was a bit high so they wanted to check up on that. In the meantime, I was excused from running for a week.
I came back in a few days and I got the bloodwork done; my bilirubin wasn't unusual, just Gilbert's syndrome. That means that if my circulatory system is ever taxed (think really bad car crash) it'll look like I've got jaundice (your skin/whites of your eyes turn yellow-ish). The doctor then gave me some anti-acid pills to see if those would help, then said to come back in a week. They didn't. After that, I went back to the doctor and she ordered a CAT scan. The imaging center wasn't busy, so I could go in immediately. We got there, I changed into a hospital gownish thing, and I got the scan. Picture a giant, white, whirling donut with a sliding table through the middle and you've got a pretty good idea of what a CAT scan machine looks like. Problem was, they didn't find anything.
The doctor then referred me to a GI (gastro-interologist), a stomach/bowel SPECIALIST. They sent him over the information, but the soonest I could get in was almost two weeks away. I went in, he asked me all sorts of awkward questions, and poked and prodded me for a little bit. He had absolutely no idea what was wrong, and explained that this had happened to another runner before, same gender and close to the same age. He decided to order an endoscopy. To dance around the bush a bit, you get anestesia and they run a tube with a camera down your throat. You couldn't have any food or water in your system for five or six hours beforehand, so we scheduled it in the morning on a day we had off from school.
We got to the hospital and a nurse put in an IV (her name was Kimberly) and wheeled me to the operating room. I pretty much blacked out after that, then woke up about 45 minutes later. I was really woozy, so we had to use a wheelchair to get to the car. We got the results back and, you guessed it, nothing was out of place. I went to the GI again, and he ordered blood and stool tests. Nothing was wrong there either. Then I got another CAT scan. We got to the hospital at 6:30 in the morning and they made me drink iodine-laced apple juice (I just chugged the stuff to get it over with), then we watied for an hour. I got another IV, which they put more iodine in (the feeling of iodine running through your system is... interesting), and they put me through the CAT scan. Nothing showed up, so I went to the doctor again. We had ruled everything out, so he proposed that it was probably IBS (Irrable bowel syndrom). He gave me some antidepressants (he said they do a cruddy job antidepressing, but do a good job calming your digestive/excretory track) and said that was all he could do.
I had attempted to keep in shape during all of this (coach refused to let me do anything), but I had a 5k I wanted to run coming up that weekend (The Gary Burn's Fun Run). I ran it, and I finished (I walked for 50 yards twice, but hey, I tried) in 31:29. That is certainly not shabby for someone who hasn't run more than a mile in over a month and a half.
I'm glad this whole thing is over, I was getting sick of missing class (that was why I was missing so much Biology and English for those of you in my classes).

Those of you who are probably thinking, "You're a Cross Country runner, they experience pain all the time. Stop being a wimp." are completely wrong. I have had tendonitis for the past two, almost three years, and it comes back occasionally when it gets really humid outside. I can run through that perfectly fine, albeit a little bit slower than normal, it doesn't affect my wind (breathing) at all. This did. It was totally unique in the fact that it moved around while I ran. It would start on the lower left part of my abs and move up to my ribcage, then shift to the other side and move around a little more. It never did the same thing twice, and when it got up to my ribcage, it started to hamper my wind. I simply refuse to let myself get slowed down by knee pain or a stitch in my side, but when something starts hindering my breathing, I Will Not let it continue. I know when something is seriously wrong, and this was it. I will be honest, I was scared silly. I'm not a, "Omigosh! My leg hurts real bad because I scraped it, I'm dying" kind of person, but when something hurts in a way that I can't breathe, I'm going to tell someone immediately.

Long story short: I've got Irrable Bowel syndrome and had to sit out for the ENTIRE SEASON of Cross Country (I didn't run in a single meet, but I had to attend all of them). I've got to take pills now, so I'm fine, but now I can run again.

A quick FYI for those of you who know about my little project (understatement lol). I'll be posting exerts and some of my charts when I finish those in the relatively near future. I'm kicking into high-gear now that we've got all this break so I can work on it. I hope I can start on the actual writing portion before the new year starts.