Update on the Head

Well… Monday night was partially spent spewing the contents of my stomach thanks to the lovely painkillers over the last week that tore it up and Tuesday was spent in bed with the exception of the 90 minutes I spent WAITING for a doctor and the 5 minutes he saw me before telling me that my PCP (who is only in the office tomorrow and has a b*tchy nurse) had to deal with the side effect problem and then having his (quite awesome) nurse give me a shot of Zofran in (where else?) my hip.Â? At least he and his nurse put a massive note for my doctor and her nurse so something MIGHT get done about it tomorrow.

Other than that, the pain is gone and the muscle weakness is too as well as the fatigue.Â? (The fatigue was probably remedied by sleeping for 18 hours on Tuesday.)

Bad News/Good News

The Bad News: I woke up with a headache this morning that prevented me from going to church.

The Good News:Â? I’m pretty sure I know why I’m getting these freaking headaches — it’s a side effect of Zetia, which my doctor put me on about 2 weeks ago.Â? About 2 days after starting it, I started to get hit with headaches that felt like migraines.

So… I’m stopping the Zetia until Friday when I can see her and we’ll see if the headaches go away.

C’mon… it’s free and it will help people

The Breast Cancer Site is donating an ultrasound machine to a hospital in South Africa if they can fund more than 500 mammograms this month.Â? Click here to help.Â? It doesn’t cost you a penny, put you on any mailing lists, and it will help women half a world away to receive the basic medical care that we take for granted here in the USA.

GO. AWAY.

To the crud in my face/throat/lungs,

GO AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!Â? I’ve been miserably sick (but not sick enough to ditch work) for three days now and I’d like to actually be able to breathe, talk, and taste food again.

Albertsons is EEEEEVVVVIIILLLLLL!!!

When I was shopping today, the lane I was in for checking out had the fresh French bread next to it… and the bakery people were inviting people to feeeeeel the warm bread not to mention the smell wafting about.

Evil carb dealers!!!

(And of course, I had to get some and have a couple pieces when I got home because it was still warm.Â? And I missed the call from the nurse regarding my bloodwork which was probably not good and means that I’ll get a “get your butt down here” summons tomorrow.Â? Well… that or yelled at for eating the French bread.)

This Is Getting So Old…

I woke up this morning wanting to die due to my lungs being so irritated.Â? I was in respiratory distress during church so I told Jon after the service that I was headed to town to the ER.Â? (For new readers, we live 25 miles from the town where we do errands so there wasn’t much I could really do.)Â? Several people offered to take me in but I insisted that I could drive myself.

Well… I get there and the nurses aren’t sure what to do with me.Â? I guess they called the on-call physician and before he got there, he told them to nebulize me.Â? So… they come in brandishing a peakflow meter and the nebulizer tubing and tell me that they need to do some baseline peakflows.Â? I grabbed my nice peakflow meter (which is marked with the correct numbers for ME as my peakflows tend to run 100 points higher than normal), gave them a lovely one showing that I was in my respiratory distress zone, and watched the nurse fumbling to put together the neb tubing.

I wasn’t more than 2 minutes into my breathing treatment (and quite enjoying the fact that my lungs weren’t hurting when Dr. Idiot walks in and starts asking me questions.Â? OK… I have something in my mouth giving me something to open my lungs — do you really think that this is the time to inquisition me???Â? (I ended up giving him hand motions.)Â? He ended up asking more questions about my blood sugar at which point I reminded him that I was there for my ASTHMA.Â? Verdict: my lungs are irritated (no joke!) and I’m on Robitussin DM to try and get the small amount of crap in my chest out as well as Aleve to kill the pain.Â? I need to check in with a doctor at the clinic in the middle of this week (I’m hieing it to my mafioso doc on Tuesday as he saw me in the ER on Friday and knows what’s up) and meanwhile, I have a lovely portable nebulizer and solution on loan from the respiratory therapy department at the hospital.Â? Dr. Idiot thinks that the irritation is due to all the smoke from the fires (ya think?) and I’m sure that it being harvest time (and thus having dust and junk) in the air isn’t helping.

So… I’ll go give myself a treatment in a bit and I currently have the windows open upstairs to try and get the nasty old air out of my treehouse (the third floor where my study is) as it’s a nice day outside and the Skyland fire doesn’t seem to be belching smoke our way.Â?Â? Let me just say though… I’m getting sick of having my asthma irritated by all this.

Update on Yesterday’s Prayer Request

About 8:00 last night (after going upstairs to get a Harry Potter book and choking for 5 minutes), I told Jon that I wanted to go to the E.R. NOW.Â? We went in and thankfully the doc that knows me best was on call.Â? All I had to do was have him examine me and tell him that my peak flow was 300 (about 60% of what my norm is) and he got me hooked up to a nebulizer.Â? 10-15 minutes of nebulizer treatment opened everything up again and we were out of there by 9:30.

Right now, I’m doing fairly well — still not able to do a lot physically but that’s due more to the &^%$#%$ smoke from the forest fires west and south of us (ah… summer in Montana) that’s blowing this direction.Â? They gave me some surgical masks to wear for those times when I have to go outside and I have a feeling that I’m going to get some stares while walking to church tomorrow.Â? 😛