Health

An Update in the Key of White


Dead Snow Angel

Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr

Nagging health issues continue to plague me and keep me from focusing on writing in specific and general. I rouse myself for the occasional pet issue here and there about the web, but I haven’t written for the paying gig in about a month and am still mentally sorting through ideas for a longer offline project. Like winter, I guess, I am all about the hibernating and waiting.

Ruminating before leaping is not out of character for me. Really. When it appears as if I am pouncing like a rabid werewolf, it’s only because I’m unleashing on a subject that’s been throughly hashed out in my mind and is, in fact, an older than dirt topic for me.

New things? I window shop with glacial intent.

For example? I made a purchase via Old Navy last week. Yoga togs that I eyeballed near daily for over a month before committing to them.

So in matters of writing, I am more James Joyce than twit blogger.

Aches and pains and the fact that navigating a Canadian healthcare system designed more to befuddle and irritate than be helpful adds to my general lack of forward momentum.

Doctors don’t listen. Test results meander their way from one part of the labyrinth to another, and helpful insights like “it’s probably not cancer” add to the stress.

On the only bright side, today, an appointment with the physio went surprisingly well. As I go to each appointment with expectations one could sweep a floor with, finding a healthcare professional who makes eye contact in addition to being able to let a person finish a sentence or more without interrupting is positively soul cuddling.

My thoracic back, left shoulder and neck are totally fucked up though not in a unfixable way. Huzza.

And, it’s stopped snowing. No telling how long this will last but there is actual sunshine and the wind isn’t slicing through the house.

Which brings me to the house.  No, the reno is not done, and both Rob and I are weary past words of the whole thing. Drywalling may commence this weekend if he keeps up the same pace with wiring and plumbing but between my totally fucked back and iffy neck/shoulder and his recent gout attack – well – sigh*.

Dee chomps at the bit to be allowed to help but at nearly four feet tall and not 50 lbs drenched, she falls short of being useful.

Here is the worst thing right now – the hamster wheel effect. Since Christmas at least, it’s as if there is not one iota of difference from yesterday to tomorrow. I am Bill Murray living the same day over and over. People jet off to warmer climes. They throw dinner parties. Or have nights out without children. But we might as well be living in Pleasantville for all the difference in our white one white world.

Does that sound whiny? It’s not meant to. Just observing and wondering how much longer the quo remains at status.

 

*The worst of it is the lack of space with half the house in shreds. Barely room to spread a yoga mat most days and don’t get me started on the continually shifting of stuff necessary to even cook a meal. Weekdays I manage, but on the weekends – that’s at least two or more preps and I sometimes just want to sit on the floor and cry because it’s like Sisyphus and the rock.

The Long And Winding Road to Crone


Old woman pouring tea, unknown artist, 19th ce...

Image by Black Country Museums via Flickr

Health, my own, dominates at the moment. Since late last year, it has been one thing on the heels of another. Despite my visible skin-crawling anxiety about dealing with the health profession, I’ve spent numerous hours trekking from one appointment to another.

The good news is that I am not officially allergic to anything, which should have me dancing about like Snoopy after sending the Red Baron into a death spiral. However, the allergist does concede that what I experience – hives, swollen itchy eyes, wheezing and sneezing – are allergic reactions.

To what?

Good fucking question.

But more good news is that though my system reacts, I am not at risk of anaphylactic shock and my body is just as likely to ignore a past trigger as it is to go haywire. Possibly it’s something to do with the planet alignments or moon phases.

Also, along the good vein is the apparent revival of my thyroid. I’ve gone from hypo to heading toward hyper. Woo hoo.

But the flip side, I am creaky. Tweaked here and there to the point that I am off to see the physio next week.

And,

the aging thing is on the warpath again.

Hormones. Malfunctioning. Tests. Doctors.

Probably it’s nothing. Usually, it’s nothing. Unless, it’s something, but that is rare absent a family history.

Let me pause to thank the bio-parents once again for not bothering to look me up as an adult to clue me into any medical history that may have cropped up in their lives in the last 47 years that I might need to know.

Rob let my latest testing procedure slip into a conversation with the older girls tonight. He didn’t note the alarm, but I did.

“It’s just the whole change thing,” I assured them. “It would be easier if I had a biological mother to run things by and ask if such and such was normal or ask how things played out for her.  It would save me a lot of worry and the doctors a lot of hunt and poke. But the odds are it’s just aging and running down.”

Probably.

I can’t quite dismiss the “probably”, and it’s not like my doctor was worried, but she doesn’t know me well enough – yet – to know that I can worry in Technicolor 3-D with THX surround sound without taxing my vividly overactive imagination the slightest bit.

The getting old thing wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for my innate ability to worry about it.

Ow! My Ear Hurts!


Ear Infection

Image by clappstar via Flickr

Ear infections were the bane of my early childhood. I vividly remember having my ear drum lanced when I was about 4 years old. Easily one of the most painful medical procedures ever and remember, I’ve given birth and had my tonsils out as an adult – among other things, so I have a vast base for comparison.

Ear aches are common for me again because of the whole sinus issues thing. I had hoped the recent allergy testing would prove revelatory and provide a basis for relief.

No such luck.

I am allergic to nothing though I am having histamine over-reactions. Blood is off somewhere being micro-analyzed but the allergist doesn’t hold out much hope of finding a concrete cause because my irritants are man-made/chemical in nature.

“Well,” Rob said, ” at least we know that earth isn’t rejecting you. You are rejecting the earth.”

Only the man dominated parts of it.

The last couple of nights, as I also battle a mutant cold, my eyes have puffed like and itched and I couldn’t figure out why until it occurred to me that the blanket we’d brought up from the living room for extra warmth smelled like Rob’s mother.

The perfume was the culprit and the offending blanket is now in the wash.

But it’s frustrating not knowing what will trigger a reaction and I am tired of taking allergy medicine daily when the reality is that I don’t come into contact with triggers daily.

An allergic reaction to sawdust right before the holiday laid the foundation for sinus issues which triggered my ear trouble and set me up for a hard fall with this cold I now have – courtesy, we believe, of the soon to be FIL.

Years of allergic reactions have damaged my Eustachian tubes until the weenies clamp closed at the slightest provocation.

Going to the doctor in the old days of my American life meant antibiotics and a swift return to the land of the tolerably living, but in the Canadian wilds, I am told to use OTC’s and suck it up, which – unsurprisingly takes longer and about half the time lands me back in the doctor’s office with a “take to my bed” kind of infection.

What to do? What indeed.

Personally, I loathe taking Rx drugs because I am the kind of person for whom side-effects are a given. And though life is flexible enough that I can take to my bed – bed is boring.

Home remedies only take a person so far but so far so good in my case. Without a fever (and I pretty much have to be consumed with disease to run a fever at any rate), I can expect little action from the medical profession.

Yoga starts up again tonight. It might be a seated posture class. Just saying.

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