RANDOM ACTS OF BLOGGING

1) So, you know how I mentioned a couple of entries ago about the whole "Life ain't gonna work out the way I hoped/thought it would" thing? It's so much harder than I thought it would be to let that go.

Heh, I know that doing/thinking anything for 15 years is going to become a habit, but geez, I kind of figured that once the realization hit, it would be a lot easier.  Alas, no, I still hold on to some hope, mostly of the subconscious type, and somehow that makes me feel even more foolish than I did before.  UUUUUUUGH.  I think if the whole thing had been a bit more ridiculous (like my dream of fighting zombies with an aging black cat and saving the world as I bike across country to the west coast) this wouldn't be so hard.

I guess subconsciously, I don't really want to give it up.  I don't know.  I need to.  SIGH.  Anyway, I suppose this poster I found online says it more succinctly than I can:

It's inevitably going to fail, but I'll hang on for now I guess. Damnit.

Sometimes being an optimist suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

2) I've got an update on my brother, and thank all of you that sent up a prayer or vibes, or whatever you people out there do.  

My mom talked to the first surgeon and he refused to do the originally proposed surgery.  He said that it was way too risky, and with my brother's health being the way it is, there was a very high chance that he wouldn't survive.  However, he was going to need to have at least some kind of surgery, or he wouldn't survive anyway.  So...you know...that's great for a mom to hear, right?  However, the first surgeon referred them to a second doctor that specializes in robotic surgery, who figured out a way to do what needed to be done, but way less invasively and with a much shorter healing time.  As far as we know, his surgery will be at the end of this month, so please keep on praying or doing what you do, for both my brother and my mom, because it will still be a scary procedure with a certain amount of risk involved. 

Silver lining, though, is that it can be done and, if done successfully, will help him feel a lot better!

3)  Oh, y'all...

Last night, after I'd gone to bed, I was lying there reading something on my iPad (as one does) when I realized that I needed to charge the thing before going to sleep.  I sat up and reached for the remote for the overhead light so that I could turn it on and find the charging cable.  The remote is located on a shelf built into the headboard, and only required me to sit up and hit one button. Now, I know that I was solidly on the bed, and I know that I didn't intend to shift or turn or do anything other than sit up, but somehow I managed to move in such a way that the mattress compressed, gravity took over, and I lost my balance.  

That might seem like a minor bump in the road for most people, but you need to understand the geography of my little corner of the bedroom.  The bed is big.  Not wide, like a king sized bed, but quite high and built like a waterbed because it sits on top of a wooden platform containing drawers. My side of the bed is also about arms length from the wall on which hangs a television, and in-between is a squatty little table where I keep stuff.  So were I to fall, there are many things on my body that would get tangled, folded, banged up, and probably concussed.  

It being dark, my mind got doubly confused about the physics of the situation, because I didn't have any way to orient myself. Time suddenly slowed down, in the way that it does just before disaster, and I had time for some very clear thoughts.  As I started to go over the side this is what ran through my head:

I'm falling off the bed.

Wait, what? I'm FALLING OFF THE BED!

I'M A GROWN ASS WOMAN AND I'M FALLING OFF OF THE BED! I can't do that!  That's what little kids do!

If I fall off the bed I might die, because I know I'm going to fold in half and hit my head on something and things are going to get scraped.  It's imperative that I DO NOT FALL OFF OF THE BED LIKE A TODDLER!

Oh, God, everything is going to hurt so badly when I hit the ground! 

Now imagine all of this happening in slow motion while I am madly teetering on the edge of the mattress trying to regain my balance (and if it helps the visual, imagine the music from "Inception" playing in the background.)  I went over the edge, my iPad went flying, and I don't know what sound I made, but it brought Steve from the other end of the house.  I didn't actually hit the floor, because I threw out my arm just in the nick of time and caught myself against the wall and managed to pull every muscle on that side of my body, but I did manage NOT to end up in a Celtic knot underneath my nightstand!  There was some collateral damage, though.  When my iPad flew out of my hands, it slammed against the edge of my side table and now the screen is borked, but I got a good laugh out of the whole situation, and isn't that the important thing in the end?  Haha!

SILVER LINING: I DIDN'T DIE

Everyone knows what a bucket list is, right?  You know, the list of things you want to do before you kick the bucket?  I'm pretty sure everyone has one and we all get to do something on our list every once in a while.  I also believe that everyone has something called a F*uck That list.  Its the things you don't want to do, ever.  We all try to avoid doing those things. Unfortunately, I got to experience one of the things on my F*ck That list on Friday.

I was going to be SO productive on Friday, you guys, I really was.  I was going to do some shopping and then come home to do a much needed boxing up of stuff I've been wanting to send to goodwill.  Then, if I had some time, I was going to eat ice cream and watch a movie.  I even had the movie picked out so I could watch it when I had time. 

I started out my day going to one of my favorite stores, Hobby Lobby.  I didn't even really need anything, but that never mattered before.  I was just there to see what I could find and have a little fun. Everything was fine until I knelt down to look at something at the bottom of a shelf, and when I stood up I almost fainted.  You know how you'll stand up too quick and get a head rush?  It was like that, only really bad.  I had to steady myself and when I finally did, I couldn't take a deep breath.  I've been having some trouble with the deep breathing since we were in Ireland, so I did what I always do and puffed on my inhaler. Usually that helps, only it didn't this time.  My heart started beating so hard and fast that I thought I was going to pass out.  I didn't, thank goodness, and so I kept on shopping.  The feeling didn't go away.  My heart was going a mile a minute and I was dizzy and couldn't breathe, and as I happen to wear a Garmin Vivosmart HR now, I remembered that I was wearing a heart rate monitor on my arm and could see if I was just imagining it.  I don't know what my normal heart rate is, but I was walking slowly through a building, not running, and my heart rate was going crazy.  It was a 134 beats a minute when I first checked, it went down to 112, then went back up to 135 while I was watching it.  My chest wasn't hurting, and I wasn't having a panic attack, so I didn't understand what was happening.  I shopped for a bit longer, paid for my stuff, and went out to my car to go to the next place. On the walk to the car, my heart rate fell to 41, and then jumped back up to 120.  I almost, almost went to the walk-in clinic right then, because the last time I was feeling like this, it turned out to be walking pneumonia and easily taken care of.  By the time I had sat in the air conditioning for a minute, though, I felt a little better and decided to go to Target instead.  Just walking to the building from the car started my heart racing again.  I was dizzy and was still having trouble breathing, but I thought it would pass.  It didn't.  I went to the pharmacy and sat on the bench with my face in my hands and tried to take stock of what was going on.  I was dizzy, my heart was slamming inside my chest, I couldn't take a deep breath, but I wasn't in pain anywhere.  Physically, it felt exactly like one of those massive panic attacks I have had in the past, but my mind wasn't racing about anything.  I sat there wondering what I should do, when I broke out into a sweat and my skin flushed.  I was afraid someone from the pharmacy would see me and call an ambulance (I really didn't want that) and so I got up to leave.  I called Steve to get his advice on what I should do, go to the clinic, or go to an emergency room.  We both decided I should go to the walk in clinic after all, just in case this was walking pneumonia. I just hoped I could get seen quickly because I was feeling very wrong.

I got to the clinic and got called back within about 10 minutes.  When the nurse came in, I told her what was going on and she took my blood pressure.  She walked out of the room right away and grabbed the doctor and brought her in.  I kept my composure. The last time I was in that clinic with a similar story and didn't stay calm, that doc prescribed me an anti-depressant I didn't need.  I didn't want her to do that again.  She listened to my heart and listened to me breathe and told me to lie down.  Then she came back in and told me I needed to go to the emergency room.  I told her I could drive myself, but she said no, they'd call me an ambulance.  Well, crap.  So I said that was fine and I called Steve to tell him to meet me there.

You guys, I was literally handed to a couple of paramedics, strapped to a gurney, and wired to an EKG machine.  They were super calm, thank goodness, because if they'd been in a panic, I would have panicked.  I was wheeled out of the clinic in front of everyone in the waiting room and loaded into a waiting, lights flashing, ambulance in the parking lot.  I was actually embarrassed.  I've never had anything like that happen before and had hoped I never would!  The paramedic gave me baby aspirin, then nitroglycerin (which is so gross, BTW) and I was driven - sirens off, thank goodness - to the nearby hospital.  The medic kept me calm, trying to explain what could be wrong, and she said it didn't look like a heart attack, but they couldn't be sure.  She started an IV and called the hospital. She asked me questions the whole time. I tried to keep a good sense of humor about all of it and I felt oddly calm, but really, I was scared. 

I got wheeled into the emergency room (and I smiled at everyone I saw, mainly because I felt like such a tool for being wheeled into the emergency room) and they settled me into a bed and started hooking me up to things.  I had the IV, a bunch of ID bracelets (and one that said "FALL RISK" which I'm keeping to wear for other times because, really, I am one) blood was being drawn and I was being fitted with a blood pressure cuff and wired up (again) for a new EKG machine.  One of the nurses told me to get undressed from the waist up, and he covered me with a gown for privacy, and then I had to answer a million questions and swear on two sets of paper work that I wasn't pregnant.  Steve came in around that time and the nurses and stuff started leaving me.  Soon, we were in there alone.

I was still weirdly calm about everything. I hadn't panicked once, even though I was scared, and Steve being there to talk to helped a great deal in keeping that together.  People would come in and out, and I think I had to tell the story of what happened four or five times. One thing I had to admit to was taking too much of a certain kind of medication I was prescribed, just in case that was what was causing this.  I know, I know, I was being dumb, but I hadn't felt like the medicine was doing me any good at the strength I was given,  so I decided to take a half a pill more just to see what would happen.  It's such a tiny amount of medicine that I didn't think it would matter, and the Nurse Practitioners didn't think that would do it, but they did blood tests (again) to check on that.   The tests that they'd done on my heart had come back fine, and my blood tests came fine - even the one where they could check the levels of medication was normal.  No one seemed to know what was going on. During this time, the power kept going off in the hospital, which slowed everything down a lot.  It also turned off the air conditioning, which, as you understand, was no fun.  I told the NP that I had been in Ireland, and he said that because I'd been on a very long flight and because of my *ahem* age and because I have birth control pills, I could very possibly have a blood clot that had traveled to my lung, which could be why I was having trouble breathing.  So the sent me for a CAT scan, and I got as far as being wheeled into the room and rolled into the machine when the power went out again and caused the dye injector to malfunction.  So I was rolled back to my room and told that I would be taken back when they'd fixed it.  The power never came back on, so they did a different test that said I didn't have a blood clot. I think I was in that room for a total of 6 or 7 hours, mostly alone or with Steve, and the NP came back in and said I could leave.  They couldn't find anything wrong.

So my heart starts beating out of control, I can barely breathe, I almost pass out, another doctor sends me to the emergency room in an ambulance, and there isn't anything wrong.  Well, OK then.  I'm not complaining or anything, because I certainly didn't want to die or whatever, but still...that's weird, right?  Huh.

So I got unplugged from everything, and I had to pull off about a hundred sticky things from my chest and torso where leads had been attached (and they left sucker marks that look like I'd been hugged by an angry octopus) and I was discharged. I'm covered in needle pricks and bruises.  I was told to make an appointment to see the cardiologist that had done my stress test and that was that.  I guess I'll call him on Monday.

I still can't really do much without my heart beating really fast, and I still can't always take a very deep breath, but I guess I'll be OK for now.  Hopefully.

That was really not the kind of adventure I wanted, but at least I got my ice cream in the end! 

A QUICKY: A SILVER LINING

Last week I finished my physical therapy! 

I can definitely tell a difference in how I feel, so I know it helped.  My arm doesn't go numb nearly as often and I have learned some stretching exercises to help if my neck and shoulders start hurting again.   I still have some pain, but so far, it's not nearly as bad as it was before.  It's more annoying than anything, really.  It's like sitting in a chair that has a big button in the upholstery, right at the top of my back, and no matter where I turn I can't get away from the button.  But hey, it's better than not being able to feel my hands, so I'll take it! :)

The silver lining I spoke of isn't that I was done with therapy, though.  It's better!  As I mentioned, the doctor said I have bone spurs, degenerative disk disease (which sounds worse than I think it really is), and arthritis in my neck. Apparently, the arthritis has made it possible for me to tell when it's going to rain!  My neck knob (or the C7 vertebra prominens if you're nasty) now functions as a weather detecting device!  I never thought that was a real thing.  You always hear of old timers that say they can tell the weather by their knee or elbow or something like that. It's really a thing, though! I can attest!  Every time it gets ready to rain, my neck starts hurting.  How funny is that?

So if you ever see me rubbing my neck, don't plan any picnics!

James Spann wishes he was that accurate.  

(Also, just like Karen, my boobs can tell the weather, but that's a different process.)