I'm still swollen up above my belly. The prednisone dose last night knocked it down by half, but it still is a thing of note! It's so weird when it's like this. When a lot of blood plasma is released into the surrounding tissues, like in this instance, it takes 4 days for your lymph system to reabsorb it. Bummer. The all over pain that I was in last night is much better today, I'm very glad to note.
I got up earlier today and my housekeeper didn't come in till late, so I had a nice morning all to myself. I used my nice tea travel cup my husband gave me for Christmas. I used my Teavana Earl Greyer tea leaves and thoroughly enjoyed it. I got a pretty good amount done in my library and it is being SOOOOO FUN! I absolutely love this ap! I didn't get finished today, which I knew I couldn't possibly, but I did get a good number of books put in. The problem is that I'm having a little bit of a hard time figuring out what categories to call them. At this point I've got about 25 categories. I may decide to combine some of them at some point, but right now I'm just trying to get them into some kind of basic order. It's so nice seeing the top of my credenza again! And I figured out a way to keep all my notebooks on the bottom shelf standing up better. I think I'll get several of those metal magazine holders and slip the notebooks in them. Many of them are soft-sided and so they don't stand up very well. I'm looking forward to going through them, but not until I have one bookcase finished.
I have an appointment to see an endocrinologist this coming Friday. I'm so happy that I was able to get in to see someone this quickly. I imagine that he'll rerun all the tests on Friday and maybe then send me to get a scan and then we'll take it from there. I'll be very happy to have this resolved!
I scheduled a mammogram today, so ... yeah, I guess. I remembered that I also cancelled a dermatologist appointment a long time ago, but I forgot to schedule that. On my list for tomorrow!
Darn it! Something just happened and my keyboard isn't communicating with my iPad anymore, so I'm going to be pecking this out with two fingers and making all kinds of errors!
I had the appointment with the oral surgeon today and got a lot of good news there. One is, he agrees with me to wait till were moved to decide what to do with the small cavities in the wisdom teeth. He thinks I would manage fine having them removed, even though I can't have pain meds and all allergic to antibiotics and suture threads. He says it's the lower wisdom teeth that cause so much pain (mine were removed in 8th grade), but when you remove only the upper ones it's not bad at all. I'll think about it. He examined this lump in my jaw. He said its a cyst of some sort and is currently about the size of a quarter. He's not worried about it since I've had it so long with no real change, but he said if it swells up before we leave again, he suggests letting him do a needle biopsy. He doesn't know why the other doctor so long ago didn't want to do a biopsy. He said it's just a needle and it's not going to sever a facial nerve, even if you hit it. He thinks it is likely a dermoid cyst since it swells up sometimes when I am having a reaction. He said the dermoid cysts have lymph tissue in them which would make sense of that.
Did you know that you can have a cyst that gets impacted with saliva?? Doesn't that sound gross? I asked if you just squeezed it hard and he said, nope. Those have to taken out. He also said there is a chance of cutting a facial nerve if you have to do that, so ... It would take a LOT to convince me to do that!
The best news, though, is that I should be able to get my teeth straightened! The people I had seen here said that there was no room for braces unless my wisdom teeth are removed. This doctor said that's possibly true, but there may be enough room without removing them since it's just my front few teeth that need to be moved and the three back ones on each side don't. So then I asked him if it would be possible to straighten them with a retainer instead of a full set of braces and he said that he was sure it would be. So that is GREAT news! At this point I had been resigned to my teeth shifting more and more since extracting the wisdom teeth would be such an ordeal. I'm going to wait till we get moved, though, before I do it.
After this appointment, I had to run several errands, including taking one of my dogs to the vet. I didn't get home until 5:00 so that pretty much precluded getting anything else done.
I got the sweetest letter from an older, quite older, woman in town. She wrote me upon learning that we were moving because, as she said, she was too "miffed" at my husband to write him! But she said how wonderful we have been for the community and how. Up husband has united the town and gown more than any other president ever has and us moving is going to leave the university and the community with a gaping wound! Nice, but sure makes me feel a little bad about it!
I finished the Regeneration Trilogy today. The ending was. To as emotionally brutal as I had expected it to be, thank goodness. But still very rough. I think it should be required reading for everyone in every developed and not-so-developed country. I just don't understand why she wrote in so much homosexuality. Almost everything is about homosexuals in England and a big dog-and-pony trial that went on at the time. Two of the men are historical and were homosexuals, though surprisingly the one who survived the war married some years later. But even so, I still don't know why she made the sex scenes so incredibly graphic. She developed a fictional character and put him into her plot in the first book of the trilogy. She continued developing him in the second book, and most of the third book is about him. He is bisexual, and falls in love with a woman who works in a munitions factory. But he continues having sex with just random people throughout the rest of the book ... men, women, and one boy. With no thought about it. No feelings of being unfaithful to his sweetheart or anything. She has a list of books that she recommends at the end of this final book that look really good. One is about the psychiatrist who is treating the men throughout all of the books. I looked up three of the poets of WW1. Two of them figure in her stories, and one of them I'm familiar with because of the three summers we spent in Cambridge, England. We would ride our bikes to Grantchester and have tea at The Orchard, a wonderful tea room that is set in an orchard of fruit trees. Rupert Brookes lived here before he went into the war. He died at 27 from blood poisoning he got from some minor thing that didn't even happen in battle. The whole thing was an unbelievable, monstrous waste of human lives. A lot of it seems to have been caused by arrogant, buffoon generals in the English army who would not even look at reality and change their plans until two years into the massacres. They just kept sending their men in to die like they were some sort of expendable, renewable resource. It's horrible. I'm going to start reading All Quiet on the Western Front tonight.
I didn't work out today because I thought I would have time when I got back in the afternoon. I dressed to go to the dentist and so worked in my study until it was time to go. If exercising had been important to me, I would have not taken a chance and would have done it in the morning. But on the other hand, I had really been in so much pain the night before that it's probably just as well that I didn't today.
Thanks for keeping up with me on this. Writing this down in a blog has been extremely helpful to me. It has made me evaluate my actions each day and admit whether or not I was making progress toward my goals. I don't think I've ever stuck to anything this rigorously before or for such a long time. No miracles happening, it's hard to override my laziness and giving in to all my health issues. But this is being very helpful to keep me on course.
It's 11:23 so it looks like I'm going to be going to sleep significantly early for me! Tomorrow is my day to do something nice for myself. Maybe a pedicure. I've got to find a place that gives cheaper facials! I can't believe the prices people are charging!
Cheers!
Lisa
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