Valerie turned six recently.
As you see a hint of above, she and the other kids recently got a lesson about roughhousing in the stairwell…
Valerie is in kindergarten and doing pretty well, though a lot of it bores her, and while she’s extremely bright, she is differently so than her prodigal sister. The broken arm is her left, which wasn’t good, since she is overwhelmingly left-handed. She seemed to like all the attention, though.
As is well known, Henry has allergies to bananas, dairy, eggs, peanuts and tree nuts, and when he was very young was sensitive to salicylates, azo dyes, and some aspect of screen printed ink on many of my T-shirts. He is gradually easing on the egg and milk fronts, in that he can eat foods into which those have been baked or cooked thoroughly, and can eat foods which have been fried in butter, or that contain butter or sour cream cooked into them.
The girls never had evidence worth noting that they might have allergies. Until now.
Valerie had classic allergy symptoms after eating a peach, skin included, and getting the juice on her skin. She had also drank “peach punch,” a favorite juice we sometimes buy the kids when it’s on sale for a dollar per half gallon, but I discount that as a direct factor, with reason. Turns out that onset of peach allergy can be a symptom of the onset of birch pollen allergy, naturally manifesting in the spring, and common in our neck of the woods. Processed, peaches or peach juice might not trigger that the same way a raw peach, skin and all, could be expected to, or so I gather.
It has been several months since we needed Benadryl for Henry – approaching a year, perhaps. It took a solid dose of it – initially I gave her a lighter dose based on what I remembered giving Henry when he was younger – but that and washing thoroughly cleared it up. A bit slowly. She had hives all over her belly, was extremely itchy, was red around her mouth, and had one eye get red and puff up almost closed.
I called the doctor’s office and they lined up a prompt appointment with the allergist. Early next week will be busy! Sunday there’s a beach get-together the kids and I are going to, centered around a friend visiting from Oregon. Monday Valerie has two sessions of evaluations at the kindergarten, seeing just what help she may need with school and how she should be placed. Then we have a brief get-together with someone I haven’t seen since 1976, visiting from Minnesota.
On Tuesday afternoon it’s Valerie’s allergy testing. Should be interesting, since she’ll get a battery of them, and they are notorious for showing allergies that have never been seen to exist in actual practice. Like my grandniece with the peanut allergy that isn’t. Which I suspect may be true with Henry, since that’s the one thing he never showed signs of at all. In his case we won’t take chances, though.
So yesterday was Henry’s annual allergy appointment, which turned out a bit unexpected, as the doctor decided not to retest him this year. He’d like to wait until next year, at which point he’ll be to the point of maybe growing out of the ones that are commonly grown out of before adulthood.
Things have been going well, so just keep doing what we’re doing. He’s had no signs of any new ones that needed testing. There was no answer to the question of why his tree nut allergies showed up positive without our having had evidence he was allergic to any of the ones in the suite. Macadamia is not part of the testing. He broke out after sucking the salt off a macadamia, and it could have been cross-contamination or something else. Also, he had eaten most tree nuts, and showed a reaction to what he’d had, in proportion to how much he’d had it, but none to what he’d never had. If I were going by observation, I’d say he was allergic to milk, eggs and bananas, not the peanuts or tree nuts, yet those are the most dangerous, traditionally, and also the easiest to avoid.
I was able to report to him that he was correct about Henry eating things with dairy or eggs cooked in. He can eat cake, brownies, donuts and bread with those, for instance, and we no longer look at whether red sauce has milk, as some unexpectedly do. If it is flavored with cheese, duh. If it’s “traditional” flavor, why would I expect milk? But there it is!
I still have to pick up the eppy pen prescription, waiting at Walmart, which I’ll swing by tomorrow. In effect, that was what the appointment was about. Which is fine, though I was already curious about what a retest might find – if there’d be a breakthrough.
At the risk of having to reschedule it or whatever, I made an appointment a year ahead. He goes back, and gets the retesting next time, April 12, 2012. Subject, of course, to any need to change it for scheduling or insurance conflicts.
This kind of thing makes a lot of sense and I’ve been seeing more and more of it. Probably some of it also queued with old links I never blogged…
Anyway, MS is of particular interest, given that my sister has it, a friend has it, a former, albeit lousy, supervisor had it, the first guy I ever bought web hosting from had it, and Deb has symptoms that act like it. That very list make it feel like MS and the like are more prevalent than they once were.
Recently I got an ear infection. Not shocking, given my childhood propensity for them and the fact that I’ve been almost continuously sick since Sadie started kindergarten in September, culminating with and resuming after a quick bout of flu and about two days of feeling better than I can remember feeling since… I don’t know. Possibly as far back as 1977. Yet shocking in that I’ve tended not to have ear infections as an adult, or even as an older child. I used to have respiratory infections every couple winters, but my ears have never behaved like this.
I’d had the normal sniffles and stuffiness. In a meeting before work in the wee hours, I was especially stuffy. Near the end of it, fluid started dribbling out of one of my ears. Freaky! It kept doing so during the shift, then I went home and searched online for the symptom and what the properties of the fluid meant. Clearly it was not cerebrospinal fluid and I didn’t have meningitis. I didn’t even have a fever.
That was Saturday. I ended up going to emergency care at my doctor’s practice on Sunday, seeing an excellent doctor and getting diagnosed officially with a middle ear infection. That meant antibiotics, which were a bit slow but did clear it up. It stopped briefly right after I started those, but then the leaking ear went on leaking for a few days.
More importantly, this was the first time I had been to a doctor since last May. I’d been shirking, since they like to monitor my blood pressure regularly. Because I simply couldn’t afford to go! We got kicked off of MassHealth as of the end of 2009 for having the audacity to have low enough income to qualify, but an employer who offered insurance we couldn’t afford to buy or use. That’s just the two of us, not the kids, who remained fully covered, because we had low enough income to qualify, but…. what? Insurance from the employer that would have cost too much wasn’t good enough for them, just for the adults? In reality, looking at the rejection, there was some level of care they covered even for us, but it was unclear how to use it. Apparently it was a safety net thing where the doctors and hospitals were supposed to figure out what not to charge us for or something. Also, other people who were required to buy insurance got part of their insurance cost reimbursed at borderline levels of income, but if we were supposed to once we obtained it, I was never aware of that. Perhaps this year, if they ever get back to me, they’ll be clearer. That’s a whole other story, the kids being thrown off and our having to reapply from scratch. They’re seriously taking their time, and we’re overdue for checkups for two kids. Ugh.
Anyway, our insurance meant the first 12 visits to the doctor, or a lower number and some testing, since that’s not unusual, would have cost me entirely out of pocket. I can totally afford 10% of my income before insurance starts to pay 80% of the cost. Yup.
Plus I’d been off and on, mostly off, the three blood pressure meds since early 2009. When I saw the doctor the last time in 2009, I took the drugs for a couple weeks ahead of time, enough to have a passable blood pressure but have him mildly concerned about edema. See, the meds made me feel like crap, and left me almost unable to work. I’d take them, and after a fairly short time the managers would wonder why I was so darn slow. I’d wonder why I was so darn slow, and my brain didn’t work right. Not that this should have surprised me, since one of the meds was a beta blocker. The second doctor to treat me for hypertension avoided giving me beta blockers because they affected me so badly the first time. Arguably I lost my very first tech support job because I was on one. I couldn’t remember anything, couldn’t think as clearly as I ought to be able to, and had a total lack of ambition that went beyond ordinary levels of lazy or disinterested. Took me a long time to blame it on the pills, and I seem to recall that was only when I stopped taking them and transformed back. The second doctor to treat me was happy if he could keep me from going much about 150/95. The next time I went to that practice , seeing a different doctor because mine had left, after being off meds a while my pressure was 185 or something and they flipped. I sat in the waiting room for hours, waiting for meds they gave me on the spot to kick in and lower my BP enough that they’d let me leave. I don’t remember what that doctor gave me, but he specialized in hypertension and set out to determine a root cause.
I don’t generally consume inordinate salt, don’t seem to be affected by it, and am aware that they’ve found minimal correlation, even though doctors still ask. I believe they have figured out 1/3 of people can go higher on account of salt, 1/3 are not affected, and… 1/3 go down! I did 24 hour urine samples for levels of catecholamines. I got an MRI of my kidneys, looking for pheochromocytoma. Nothing. My current doctor, technically the fourth to treat this, also found nothing, in part taking my word for the prior guy’s findings, since the other practice never passed along my records when asked.
Nor did anyone find damage as a result of the high blood pressure, in the past anyway. I was already about to the point of going back to treatment, sure I was being affected by it. I started losing my eyesight when we switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, but I’m not convinced BP hasn’t been a factor. On the emergency visit for the ear infection, my blood pressure was 210 over… now I forget, but not as high as my record 220/140. 120 or 110, this time. Naturally this got me an EKG, and skepticism about my chest congestion pain when taking deep breaths being normal congestion. Heck, that’s an old familiar pain to me, the breathing pain. Without being congested at all I’d get it when I was a kid, if I tried to run any distance in elementary school. Singing, bike riding (I miss my bike!) and expanding my lung capacity mitigated it, but it come back now and then.
I was lucky that the doctor I went to on the Sunday let me go with instructions to resume taking lisinopril, the least likely to cause a problem, in an effort to start controlling it some, and to go to my regular doctor in a week to followup on that and the ear. The EKG showed very minimal signs of uncontrolled blood pressure but was basically fine.
On another note, nobody ever finds I have high blood sugar or cholesterol, despite my mother being convinced from the time I was young that I was fat and was going to get diabetes, have a heart attack and die. Knock on wood.
Backing up a little, the very last time I took the combo of lisinopril, atenolol and hydrochlorothiazide was in the fall for a week. After a week it turned my brain to mush and provoked depression like flicking a switch. It was remarkable to observe! Since it had been months since I’d touched the stuff, and it was completely out of my system, it was a clear test. I’d previously observed that, at least at times I tended to get dehydrated from work and weather, hydrochlorothiazide may have been provoking gout attacks. The emergency doctor thought that made sense, and that the actions I ascribed to the beta blocker made even more sense.
About nine days later I saw my own doctor, getting an extremely prompt appointment once I finally called. You’d think they were concerned or something.
My blood pressure was dramatically lower, like 165/100. My doctor was ready to give me an EKG until I noted I’d had one several days before.
I kept me on lisinopril and added back hydrochlorothiazide, but switched me to amlodipine instead of atenolol. To be honest, I thought I’d made my feelings about beta blockers clear when I first saw him and already thought they messed me up, and I thought – and maybe it was true initially – he was not giving me one of them. Eventually I learned that one of them was, and perhaps that was true all along.
Looking up amlodipine after I got home, I was amused to see it is prescribed for angina as well.
A week went by and…. No wait! Two days went by and it was as if I’d become a new person. It improved more from there. The combo, presumably to be pinned on the amlodipine, almost seems the opposite of a depressant. Since it worked that fast and with no side-effects, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the one day I forgot to take the pills caused a bit of a mood crash. There’s incentive! Skip a day, go all gloomy for two days before returning to normal? Naw, I think I’ll just keep to the regimen, thank you. My vision hasn’t improved. If anything, it’s worse. However, something else I suspected was affected by blood pressure went away, and the ear problem stopped dragging on, as it seemed to be. Google seemed to suggest that the ear symptoms could be tied in with blood pressure, apart from the fact of a very real infection.
It’s hardly perfect, since how glowingly happy can you be when you’ve gotten in a life hole with canyonesque sides, but I’m optimistic and energetic and alert and awake in a way I haven’t been for the most part in years. Not sure it was this good in the parts of 2003 and 2004 when I wrote about being on Lexapro. Who knew I needed it to counter the blood pressure drugs! Could have avoided the whole thing. I’ve also had some insight that goes deep and may help explain the blood pressure problem’s roots, while also helping me move on, but that’s another story. Time to make supper!
Continued from and explained in Link Dump 1.
Eggless batter for deep fried shrimp (works nicely for chicken, came out just like Chinese chicken fingers but that Henry can eat, moved from this to lighter tempura style)
Efficient markets after the financial crisis
Controversial propositions (some good ones! including Bobby Orr)
The shocking ages of rock stars
Ethiopian Injera recipe and another and another and a detailed post about making it
Nerd, Dork and Geek explained in Venn Diagram
The parable of the satellite dish
What if the jobs are never coming back?
Shy and introverted process the world differently
Quasars don’t show time dilation – what’s up with that?
Fighting allergies by mimicking parasitic worms
Truth in accounting (Madoff vs Social Security)
Massive tax change hidden in healthcare law
11 Music superstars who are technically one hit wonders
Most people carry neanderthal genes (big surprise!)
Creating a more private Facebook alternative
Monday Sadie got her walking cast off, got still more X-rays, and was allowed to leave cast-free. Yay!
She faces 10 days of taking it easier than normal – walking on even surfaces, no roughhousing, nothing athletic, going in a pool if she wants – and then we’re really done. Unless she remains sore and stiff, in which case the doctor wants her back to see him.
It took her over a week in the walking cast before she started being comfortable getting around by herself, and by the end she was just walking away, just with an odd gait due to the cast. Now it’s her ankle and lower leg, but she is already making an effort, and now understands it needs to be exercised to be back to normal.
What a relief! It’ll be just a month from start of school when she is all the way to normal.
The weird thing is the hair.
Apparently it’s normal if not universal to experience heavy hair growth under and around a cast. From above where the original cast ended down to her shin is a mat of fur that would do my leg proud. I’d thought her knee was inexplicably dirty , then it became clear with the worst of it visible after the cast was gone.
She got the genes for hair to begin with, and of course the cast covers it and it does tend to be darker. But it’s actually thicker, dramatically. From what I found online, the cast irritates the skin under it, which stimulates blood flow, which stimulates hair growth. Never heard of that!
[I originally started this post a week ago last Monday, July 12, got interrupted, never finished and posted it, and so here it is. Not bothering to edit the timeframe up to the point I’ll indicate I am adding to it.]
Took Sadie to get her three week cast off today. She was freaked out by the saw, so much she took most of the way through subsequent X-rays to get over it.
The X-rays showed it healed well, as expected.
What I didn’t know to expect of the followup was a “walking cast.” For 2 weeks she has another cast, but this time starting below the knee, going well onto the foot, so her knee can bend and she can walk. She also has a “boot” to strap on, rather than walking on cast and toes.
Today I had to continue carrying her. She can try walking tomorrow.
After the two weeks, it comes off and she really should be done. In the meantime, it’ll be tough
[Continuing from where I left off, and updating to what’s current.]
I think I was going to say it would be tough because we had a pool party to go to, and she would be unable to swim, or maybe it would be tough because we were going to dental appointments in Boston on the 14th, which had I realized she would get the additional cast I might have postponed.
The pool actually helped derail her funk, in which Sadie wouldn’t even try to walk, and was happy to sit and do passive things. She ended up on the side of the pool, cast covered in a towel, other leg dangling or a hand reaching in water to play with it, and playing with cousins. She got so happily soaked, she might as well have been in the pool. But the cast stayed safe!
It still took until yesterday for Sadie to get up and walk around the apartment by herself. She found it painful, stiff and – it still is – awkward. At least this means I am freed up extensively, and the transition won’t be so tough Monday.
As for the dental appointment, because she couldn’t get around readily, and there was some distance involved, I used the umbrella stroller, which works well as a wheelchair of sorts. We were very late getting into the place in Boston, but they squeezed us in before breaking for lunch. It’s very efficient and the people there are awesome. All three kids got a clean bill of tooth, and we don’t have to do this again for six months, assuming nobody develops a problem. Valerie is the best one at dealing with the dentistry, amazingly, because they are her heroes. When I took her there with a lost filling and some pain, they patched it up and it demonstrably didn’t hurt anymore. She raved to her mother that the dentist made it better. Sadie had to be big but wasn’t happy, since Henry had to be held and freaked a bit. Though even he is used to opening wide for having me brush his teeth, so he did pretty well. That and he’s so darn bright and good at following instructions, when he’s not being intentionally stubborn.
But back to the leg… We go Monday, July 26, get the cast off, and from what they said, that is that, not even yet another set of X-rays. As I was saying with the title, the walking cast seemed like kind of an “and we mean it” thing to be sure all was healed and well, and protected with an exoskeleton for a bit as it got used to being in use again.
Or so I hope!
Tomorrow morning I take Sadie to get her cast off and get X-rays.
Presumably that will be it, and we will return home triumphantly cast-free after three weeks. Via some errands. And a trip by my mother’s house, if I leave the other kids there. Among whatever else, I plan to use it as the day Sadie gets to shop for new shoes. Hers are beat, to the point of getting holes in the toes, and I hadn’t been able to find her presumed size (next one up) in that model on a couple casual looks. This way she can participate and try them on, so if they don’t have size 13, maybe we can try the next size up, which is apparently size 1. Sizing is weird.
She may not care that much, but I think it’ll be nice for her to be able to bathe normally, and not just because it’s a pain for me. At least that is infrequent, compared to carrying her to the bathroom or between locations in the house. It’s been helpful that she entertains herself in place easily.
It’ll also be nice for her to be able to swim, or at least go in the wading pool at Grandma’s. We have a couple pending possible pool visits. Yay!
Anyway, I’ll update here with the outcome after we are home tomorrow…
Just a followup, since I didn’t post what happened subsequently yesterday.
We saw the same orthopedic guy Sadie once saw to have her walk/gait evaluated on doctor’s concern. He looked at the X-rays and pointed out the spot, which is both clearly visible and not large. It’s near the top of the large lower leg bone, and is something like a tiny hairline that doesn’t appear to go far into the bone combined with a buckle into a bit of a point.
To our surprise, she did not get a cast yesterday. The ER people did a superlative job on her splint, so nothing needed to be changed in the meantime, and Monday we go back for a fiberglass cast, which allows enough time for any swelling there may be to have happened first. Good thing we no longer have the original dental appointments in Boston on Monday!
Speaking of which, the cast will be on for a minimum of three weeks (or, as Sadie said, “three weeks!!??”), which puts us close to the time of the rescheduled and expanded dental appointment in Boston for all three kids, on Bastille Day. I may have to reschedule that now.
Work missed me badly, yesterday, more so because another guy was also out, though that didn’t directly affect the worst problem. Ripple effects: Someone I work with was unable to go to her day job as a result of Sadie’s injury, and some packages did not get onto their delivery trucks.
Anyway, so far I have had to carry Sadie everywhere. Otherwise she sits, leg propped up, making the recliner ideal. It’s been kind of a style-cramper for those who work late and use the living room after work, having Sadie camped there. The bad thing is the doctor passingly remarked that I would continue to carry her once she has the cast, so nothing would really change. While I was unsure if they’d give crutches to a kid so young, Deb says she’s big enough. We’ll see what happens. That would make things easier. Even if not, being in the real cast should allow her to sleep back in the bed. Just that I’ll have to put her there, where she normally puts herself to bed after I have gone, since I need to be early even to get a few hours of sleep. Speaking of which, even without the heat and the roof being worked on here today, with Sadie immobile, it’s going to be hard for me to nap during the day. I could face a lot of days of 3-4 hours total sleep, except the weekends (Sunday and Monday) when I can generally get a full night worth.
The other two kids have been remarkably good so far, not climbing on the recliner or doing anything that might hurt Sadie.
This whole adventure brings to mind the phrase “there’s always something.”
Last night just after 8:00 I was trying to coax Henry to get into a pullup for the night, while Sadie and then he started, per usual, jumping on the bed like maniacs.
All of a sudden I hear a distinct snapping sound and Sadie is writhing on her side in pain on the bed, left leg having spasms it hurt so bad.
Based on sound and all, I assumed it was broken right from the start. Deb headed home from work. I got Sadie comfortable enough to hang in there while I read Henry to bed and got dressed to be able to leave. Deb covered home while I took Sadie, sitting across the back seat of the Buick because no way she’d manage a booster, to the ER.
I’d been up since 2:30 AM, having not managed, and oddly not missed very much, a nap during the day. It’s only 5 hours, but it’s more work in 5 hours than I ever did anywhere else, so 3-4 hours of sleep doesn’t cut it. Speaking of, I called in before I’d even read to Henry, with a probably don’t expect me due to injured kid.
The ER took forever, naturally. They’re good there, though. It’s where we took Henry for allergy attacks, once in the ambulance and once when I drove him.
She got a couple X-rays. It’s so nice she’s old enough to answer questions, showing and saying where it hurt. Everyone felt bad for her, and admired what a trooper she was. She has high pain tolerance, and even when it’s intolerable she tries to be stoic. It’s as if being hurt and showing it is weakness, and she just can’t let that imperfection show.
She has a buckle fracture, which the doctor found odd. Usually that’s something like jumping off furniture to the floor. They put her in a splint and I had to pick up Tylenol with codeine on the way home.
Just now I learned we can’t take her to the guy they referred us to, insurance incompatibility, so I tried to call my doctor. Managed an appointment with orthopedics there at 1:30 and have to pick up X-rays in Taunton on the way, since they are not in the same network. Wasn’t thinking about that when I could have gone to ER in Brockton versus the closer one in Taunton. Considered Brockton because it wasn’t so critical, but the distance still seemed important.
Looked up the type of fracture. Apparently it’s fast to heal, relatively, but that still means 2-3 weeks in a cast and 4 weeks to heal. And that assumes accurate info, that what I read wasn’t specific to arms, etc.
Poor Sadie.
A couple days ago, she lost a lower front tooth. I mean, lost it, when it fell out in an unknown place, time and manner. She had been telling me it was loose, had been excited, and I’d thought nothing of it. Had no idea it might be that close to a done deal, with the successor well underway beneath it.
Deb noticed it missing yesterday, and apparently it had been lost the day before. Sadie was mortified to have lost the tooth, and claimed absolutely no idea when or where, apart from being sure it had happened the day before, or overnight.
We have yet to find it.
Less than an hour ago, we were eating corn on the cob. You know where this is going, don’t you?
Sadie asked me why her ear of corn was getting red stuff on it.
I looked, realized it was her mouth bleeding, looked and saw a two-tooth gap where one had been gone before. Oops! It was bleeding slightly where the tooth had newly self-extracted.
No sign of the tooth, naturally. Sadie is opposed to the possibility that she swallowed it, but hello, logic. So sad!
That’s two for two, out of the blue.
I investigated the Tooth Fairy, and got a consensus of a buck per, maybe a bonus to as much as five for a first or multiples. I also understand there’s precedent for missing teeth, or even the lack of or desire not to use a pillow. Thus I am sure as the budget allows the Tooth Fairy can come along and leave a stipend somewhere.
Meanwhile, Sadie opined that it’d be a good idea to use her side teeth as much as possible next time.
Of possible interest to the person or two still reading and in case you missed this , I have started a new food blogging concept to replace the old Married Guy Cook. Now it’s the Frugal Guy Cook. Besides food and cooking, it will incorporate shopping, saving money, cooking for fickle kids and coping with allergies.
Check it out, and by all means, links are welcome.
Due to genetics compounded by parenting errors and circumstance, all three kids require a mouth full of dentistry under general anesthesia to fix their teeth, relieve pain mainly in Valerie’s case, and set them up to get through to their adult teeth and do better with those. They’ve gotten better about brushing. We’ve all but eliminated drinking things with sugar, and thrown away the sippy cups. Oddly enough, the youngest was the one most comfortable using a regular cup, and most willingly ready for the change.
Valerie has massive cavities in rear molars, and has had a course of antibiotics on suspicion of infection.
She has a long history of flipping moods like a switch, dropping into full blown irrational tantrum mode for no apparent reason. That includes asking for random this or that, then vehemently not wanting the same thing she asked for. I’d wondered if she had sugar crashes and maybe had a food-related issue that way. A snack could help, after all, if she calmed enough to eat it. I’d wondered if it was a psychological thing. It was a matter of time – not much time – before I’d have asked the doctor.
Her back teeth are especially rotted.
She tends to get a strained sounding voice, almost hoarse. Noticed but didn’t give it much thought. Sore throat, maybe. Not a tendency to cough, though, or to spit up.
While she was on antibiotics, helped by her being able to distinguish and communicate more clearly what hurts, it became clear she had a major gas and heartburn problem, probably reflux. Turns out the sudden tantrum thing is a symptom. She’s missing some of the possible symptoms, but once suspected, I could see that it would come on like clockwork a while after meals, varying with what the meal was. She seems to get heartburn from some of the same things I do, so I can predict it more easily, or get it at the same time she does.
I need to find out what to do for her other than mere gas drops, which help but not always as much as I’d like. It can be almost like an off switch, though. She’ll be hysterical, let out a belch, then be fine. The whole thing got more pronounced and obvious on the antibiotics – that is, she had obvious gas, so there was no way to miss it.
She still confuses and conflates the two. I am sure she has tooth pain, plenty of it, but it appears that most of her “my mouth hurts” pain and tantrums are on account of gas and acid. I feel for her, because I know just how awful it can be when that hits. I give her a lot of latitude in choice of treatment. She’ll ask for gas drops if that is the problem from her perception. She’ll ask for ibuprofen if it’s the teeth, or if gas drops didn’t work yet and she’s frantic, which is the tough part.
Thus I’ll be glad when she gets the teeth fixed and the immediate aftermath pain of that is done. Then if she hurts the same way, it’s not teeth. Hers are scheduled first, on January 11. Sadie goes on the 14th, and Henry on the 18th. Three back to back trips into Boston in the car I am not sure will pass inspection it’s due to have before the end of December, for which I don’t have the money. Fun.
Worse than the confusion between things causing pain or discomfort, she uses “my mouth hurts” like an attention getting cudgel. That is challenging to distinguish from the real thing. Sometime, anyway. Other times it’s obvious, though not sure I could explain how.
Anyway, how weird is it to get a real post here? Time to get a shower, throw in still more laundry, maybe call the doctor about what to give her for the above, get the kids dressed, go pay my car insurance, get gas, and probably go to my mother’s to get the camera I left there and some pea soup they have for me. Maybe leave kids there and get my hair cut, but don’t think there’ll be time. It’s long overdue, though, and that would save a trip. We’ll see.
One problem we’ve had lately is exactly this dead zone, which you can see as a sharp drop in the 30s before the steadier line upward. You have to click the chart to see a bigger version.
And basically if I do anything other than what I am now and/or work at home/online work as allowed, we then run into daycare issues. If I were on my own, I’d keep what I have for security and bootstrap from it. A part time other job even if I could get nothing full time. Return to being available for unpredictable side computer/support or other gigs. Use any spare time for building more passive but by no means self-constructing income streams. Six months and I could probably be back to “real money” without even relying on a single “full time” thing.
Right now our net effective income is actually down because our income went up, but not enough. A full time job roughly opposite the other full time job would net less than I do now up to hourly rates that start to approach those of a “real job.” It’s a conundrum.
The good thing is the kids are becoming more self-contained, so I’m starting to see clear to being able to do some of the passive side stream and work from home stuff without having to leave for on-site/emergency work of the sort I used to do. Just trying to work out a system where that is organized and balanced against housework…
Update:
This is the source and has more, and a second, more impressive chart of how implicit marginal tax rates fluctuate.
He may not be allergic to strawberries, but man is Henry allergic to something in a big way.
We spent much of the afternoon and evening with my mother and grandmother. Late in the day, my mother doled out M&M’s, being Pandora before I could remind her it’s milk chocolate. I consented to his having a few, but she reduced the number he got. It was probably half a dozen. Though perhaps there were a couple more thrown in. Of course, I also used to worry about something like M&M’s due to his clear reaction to the azo dyes in things. That seemed to be related to sensitivity to salycilates, which he also outgrew.
That was the last thing he ate before we came home, and pineapple has never bothered him before. I am sure nothing bad was in the other food, and the timing doesn’t fit.
When we got home, he looked fine but for one lumpy hive/welt I took to be a strong reaction to a mosquito bite. I swatted one in the back seat as I strapped them in, so not unlikely to have had them feasting on him, and I have thought before that he’d reacted strongly to bites.
Then his face blew up with multiple hives and redness, one of the more severe attacks I’ve seen, if not up there with what happened when he ate a pile of eggs.
He’s had Benadryl and his face scrubbed in case there was a contact component. He seemed to be a bit itchy. Figured that’d help, whatever the cause. I still lean toward the milk chocolate, though, and that’s impressive beyond anything I’ve seen him have to what amounts to a tiny trace of allergen. I’m watching it go down even as I type, to where it’s mainly crimson cheeks and a couple peripheral spots.
Anyway, just when you figure you can relax…
For the record and any who might care to know, given his history, Henry not only seems unambiguously not allergic to strawberries, but also has decided he likes them a lot.
He’d mostly snubbed them previously. That seemed significant, given his dislike of eggs and peanuts, both of which are allergens. On the other hand, he loves dairy products, which give him a rash on contact, whatever they might do internally. That also tested positive. And he loves bananas most of all, but while those tested negative, he reacts worse to them than anything but significant ingestion of eggs. Apparently this is an “allergy” related to latex allergies, as opposed to the “oral allergy syndrome” food allergy they test for.
He wasn’t tested for strawberries, because we had no suspicion, and they limited it to the biggest (thus wheat and soy being included) and the supected (thus banana, which wouldn’t have been otherwise).
The remaining ones I can think of that are not yet known and potentially serious are a couple of the tree nuts and shellfish. There are allergies to Brazil nuts, walnuts and shellfish in the family, as there were with eggs and dairy.
I still see him get a little red from ??? when eating things that should not be a problem. The most recent instance, and it was minor to the point I’m not even sure it had anything to do with food, was basically just fries and iced tea at Wendy’s.
Anyway, glad that’s one more thing out of the way.
Today I had my visit to the doctor to have sutures removed, from where I had a mole and skin tag removed. Those were benign. He’d like to remove more skin tags, so said to remind him next visit. Seems like that’s more likely to be cosmetic than medical, though you never know.
He did a quick check of the blood pressure, which was 140/90 on the left, which he considers good, for me. He joked he wouldn’t even tell me what it was on the right, because it spiked as I answered questions and hit the sensitive zone. Which is funny, because he observed that I used exactly the same flat tone as a patient he has whose answers would have gone like:
“How are you?”
“Good.”
How are the kids?
“Good.”
“How is the wife?”
“Good. I just slit my wrist. You should see the blood.”
Except instead of the last two sentences I said “we’re getting divorced.” That must have been interesting, timed exactly with the right arm blood pressure reading.
I go back in six weeks for blood pressure and whatever else. I neglected to mention the back thing, which I think is mainly in hands of neurosurgeon for now, but man the symptoms have gotten interesting. Some of the weirdest seem to be as much a matter of sleep deprivation as anything.
Our insurance leaves a lot to be desired. The whole mandate thing falls kind of short if too few places actually accept the plan.
Anyway, back to attempting to sleep a couple hours. Henry fell asleep early as if it was nap time, then woke after the rest of us went to bed. Deb took him in with them, but I was already on the trajectory of giving up and sitting in here to maybe fall asleep in my chair, with or without him.
Genital Integrity Awareness Week. Via Rob Sama.
I’ve gone from having no particular opinion to believing circumcision is barbaric, and would even had I not eventually learned that mine was… performed less than skillfully, if not exactly “botched.” Pardon the TMI.
My back has not bothered me nearly as much since the mole was removed from the vicinity of the worst pain. I’ve still have the numbness and such, and can more or less predict what and when can cause it, as well as it being unexpected other times. Even that, with one extreme exception that helped keep me awake for hours, seems to have improved. Makes no sense.
Meant to call the neurosurgeon and doctor today. The former because I need to make an appointment, even if they have no results or copy of the MRI yet. The latter with questions, maybe for a freeform referral.
Maybe tomorrow.
Mainly intended to leave house to do combined computer work and job hunting work tomorrow, maybe go out just to be out, but I believe I am wanted here at the time that latter element would be. Plus then I am not forced to spend money I don’t have. I use a tank of gas every two weeks if I don’t do extraordinary driving, have car insurance and cell phone, and after that there is approximately zero per month left from my FredCo and ad money for anything else, if there’s not extra side or ad money, or a month when car insurance is paid off for the year. Everything else goes to rent and household. I’ve been spending too much, so I don’t know where the money will come from for the things I have to pay next time I have to pay them. But I digress.