While “testing” some new medication (while still, of course, continuing my existing meds), I came downstairs one morning. At which point my wife said “your pupils are two different sizes.” And, indeed, they were.
As it turns out, I have every strange reaction that a medication can give you. Not the big scary side effects, mind you. Just the rare and weird.
Example: I wasn’t sleeping, really. So I’m told to take a smallish dose of Melatonin to help. And I do. I wonder, as I’m doing this, why I’m cold all the time. Like, my wife found me wearing six layers (three of wool!) while headed to work. In the fall. Apparently melatonin makes me hypothermic- my body temp was floating around 95F.
This has, roughly speaking, repeated itself with every new med I’ve been put on.
There’s no negligence, I don’t think- but it’s taken them a long while to understand that my body seems to work a little differently.
I hope you feel better soon.
This makes me think back to 20 years ago when I had the bleeding duodenal ulcer that nearly killed me.
Apparently that’s supposed to be agonizingly painful but I was processing it as “mild stomach ache due to stress” and didn’t think anything was really wrong until I started feeling dizzy and nearly passed out in the shower. I showed up at the GI’s hospital office on Thanksgiving Day and after a short wait threw up “coffee grounds” (i.e. semi-digested blood) over their floor which got their attention.
Anyway there is a point to this story, which is that they put me half under with something to do the endoscopy, put me on my back and started to put the thing down my throat and in my semi-conscious state I apparently started fighting them pretty seriously; I suspect a major abreaction/flashback to something in my past I don’t want to recall too clearly. They had to quickly hit the IV with something to knock me out completely.
On the other occasions since then where I’ve needed an endoscopy, I’ve warned them to knock me out altogether.
Good times, good times.
P.S. Fuck today. No major illness, just less than 4 hours sleep for no good reason. Some other “fuck this” stuff going on too, but eh.
I now remember that it was valium they give you… they need you out of it but able to communicate. my mom who used to be a hospital tech at the time she had one done to her got told she kept trying to get up from the table and help out.
Sorry, RatMan. You are THE man for sticking with it and being by his side. I really liked RatGirl’s suggestions and she has the proper amount of spark and snark to be on the BBS with us. If she joined, I’d be sure to pick online fights between you two and then just stand back and eat popcorn while the fireworks explode. Take care, RatMan. Mourning is a long and healthy process, and I wish you the best in your travels.
And another “Fuck today.” For the second time in two days, I have managed to completely freeze Windows 7 with the improved C# thread locking code I’ve been working on, to the point I needed a hard power-off to get it going again. Obviously some of the new code has some kind of nasty bug somewhere, but it is going to be a horrendous job to find it, given that it’s likely dependent on a zillion race conditions, and given that hitting it freezes the debugger along with everything else.
While we’re talking about medical stuff, I decided to tally up all the specialists my husband, my baby and I have seen this year. So far I have obstetrician (me), gynecologist (me), neonatalologist (baby), pediatrician (baby), cardiologist (baby), ophthalmologist (baby), physiotherapist (baby), dietitian (baby), podiatrist (husband and me), dentist (husband and me), optometrist (me), dermatologist (husband), psychiatrist (me). I think that’s it.
It’s all good. It’s been a rough year, but my daughter is thriving now despite being born 10 weeks early, I’ve nearly recovered from the severe pre-eclampisa and post natal depression and my husband is the happy man he always has been. I have a great little family.
Try the not giving a fuck. Much better than the ssris that my kids mother conned me into taking 17 years ago.
I did acid, coke, lots of mushrooms and heroic amounts of black hashish in the 70s, and none of the messed me up more than 6 weeks of Celexa.
One 10 minute interview with an MD and I got a little plastic bottle full of little miracle pills.
I went home and took a pill and slept for 18 hours straight. I then floated around for six fucking weeks without one single individual though.
I went cold turkey to get my self back and my brain locked up and I hid in my basement for three days while I quietly screamed
I thought I was going to die.
I went back to the MD and he calmly told me I shouldn’t have done that, and prescribed me a different pill.
I realised then that this man, and the kids mother, we’re insane, and that I’d slipped into a Philip k. Dick novel.
I’m better by far now. I drink scotch whiskey and laugh at youtube videos on an evening with my wife and thank my lucky stars in not taking that shit any more.
We’ve also had a weird year, health wise. My son has a number of problems with his throat and lungs (he was born with a tracheoesophageal fistula, so there’s a lot of scarring in both tubes and a slight cough or cold can turn into serious bronchitis or pneumonia within a few days). This year it was only really bad once, which is pretty good for him. My wife had shoulder problems for most of the year after falling on ice last winter, and she was off work for over a month with it. My in-laws live with us and help to pay the bills a little, but my mother-in-law had to quit her job and have a hip replacement while my father-in-law had to be hospitalised with heart problems (which fortunately weren’t as bad as we had feared). Meanwhile I finally agreed to start taking medication for ADHD, and went on an interesting series of existential crises as a side effect while sometimes being the only one working. I’m cautiously optimistic about the future as all of the situations are somewhat better, as long as we can get our son through the winter OK…
OMG, thank you for helping me understand why my upper arm hurts so much! I fell twice in one day on Thursday, including once where falling against an outdoor cast iron chair left me dangling over the backrest rather than actually on the ground, which at the time I thought was helpful since it was the second fall that day, but now I’m realizing I messed up the underside of my arm.
It’s all about how you fall: landing on a shoulder is really bad. I hope your wife heals completely.
She slipped on black ice one morning when it wasn’t all that cold, just enough to freeze overnight. The next morning I warned her to be really careful as it had been cold again. Next thing I know she’s calling me to say that she fell and couldn’t get up…
It turns out that the biceps tendon had slipped, which was causing her most of the pain. We were able to get that fixed about a month ago, and it’s just relatively minor muscle pain at this point.
Hope your shoulder gets better soon, you use them more than you’d think…
Two hundred years ago your teeth would fall out, tendons would be ripped, muscles slipped, bones broken, and for most people it was a matter of, “well, that’s what you do now”.
It is heartening to see how much pain we endure, how much psychological/emotional/mental challenges, and things can get better on the other side.
You need yakk traxx and a big bag of SAND!!! Ouchie!!! Your poor rotator on that side is probably bruised as well as the blotch on the underpart of your arm.
Ugh. That’s a rough two days.
Make sure she goes slow- tendons take bleeding forever to heal. Something about the lack of blood flow (or something).
At least it didn’t pop out of joint. Dislocations, once you’ve had one, tend to happen easier and easier after. Case in point: I dislocated my sternum (I didn’t know that was a thing you could do). Now, years later, it will still pop out (partially, anyway), and have me squirming around trying to re-seat the thing.
Can she handle NSAID’s?
Actually, her shoulder did come out of the socket and it took some cartilage with it. She was taking NSAIDS for a while, but it was still too painful to work. Apparently she should have been operated on, but the doctor misdiagnosed her and told her that it should feel better after a few weeks. By the time they had realised the problem, it was too late to operate (this was about eight months later, after she’d been to many doctors who all had different ideas). Her chiropractor didn’t even work on her shoulder, as he thought it was a problem with her posture. Her physiotherapist gave her tendonitis, so she couldn’t even have therapy for while. In the end she was told by her doctor that they hadn’t seen the problem early on and it was too late to fix by that point. They would give her some steroid injections, but essentially she would have to get used to the pain and loss of mobility.
Since she needs her right shoulder quite a bit as a nurse, she was thinking of alternative work and also searching for chiropractic techniques that she could suggest to the chiropractor. She found one that seemed pretty straightforward, so I tried it and she felt much better pretty much instantly - I mean, within 15 minutes she went from too much pain to have therapy to not enough pain to bother, and pretty much full mobility. Since then she’s quit everything but mild painkillers 2-3 times a week and returned to full time work. Of course the chiropractor claimed that this was the technique that he had been planning to try on the next appointment, and my wife had another accident about two weeks later and hurt her back. I’m going to buy her a tricycle…
(She’s fine, it just wasn’t very funny at the time)
