Category Archives: Health

Can’t stay away…

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After what seems like an excessive amount of scanning, poking, prodding, and stressing, my faith in the marvel that is modern medical science, is somewhat less than complete. The good news is that there are no obvious signs of things that could cause me to suddenly drop dead. The bad news is that whatever it is that’s causing my head to occasionally explode remains as a diagnosis of “uhhh… we’re not really sure, but here’s some heavy duty pain meds to take in case it comes back.” Now I’m as big a believer in better living through chemistry as anyone around, I think It’d still rather know what it is than what it isn’t. Since that outcome is apparently a bridge too far, I’ll follow my other tried and true solution and try ignoring the problem until it goes away on its own.

… And now back to your regularly scheduled blogging hiatus.

Wrong again…

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Every time I get the brilliant idea to take a brief respite from writing, something happens that nudges me back here. Some of that is just my nature as an e-attention whore and the rest is that writing things down tends to help my give my thoughts a little bit of structure. So instead of a Christmas hiatus, here we are again.

Since I’m now working on day three of this headache, I think it’s fair to finally have to start giving it some serious consideration. The good news is that the initial period of feeling like someone shattered the back of my skull with a baseball bat is over. The bad news is that the searing pain has given way to an apparently semi-permanent dull ache running from behind my left eye around my head and down my neck. Loading up on aspirin dulls it a bit and the doc was nice enough to give me a prescription for Oxy to use if the worst of it comes back. Still, though that doesn’t tell me much about where it came from in the first place. In the absence of actual answers, I’m all in favor of better living through chemistry.

Doc seemed happy enough that there was no neurological issues yesterday, but the MRI should give us a read on whether something is lurking around waiting for the opportunity to strike. I suppose aneurysm is a possibility, but then again the MRIs are a great excuse to jack up the bill too so every one wins. Except the guy who didn’t realize he was claustrophobic until they jammed him into the machine. The brain is a marvelous thing… My abject fear of dropping dead from a blood vesel exploding in my head apparently overrides my newly discovered abject fear of confined spaces. Even fear is a matter of priorities, I guess.

So until I hear otherwise this morning, I’ll be sitting here with my OCD running through all the possibilities that Google can come up with. If I come at it logically I know if there were any critical issues, they’d have me strapped hospital bed right now. Being a pessimist, though, my tendency to plan for the worst isn’t particularly helpful this morning. Getting my answers on someone else’s schedule just isn’t working for me.

No man’s land…

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I’ve spent the last week feeling somewhere between sick and well. It’s not that I really feel bad in any way I can put my finger on, but then again it’s not that I’m feeling bad enough to want to stay on the couch all day trying to recover. It’s a madding no man’s land between the two. If there’s some fall crud lurking around, I wish it would just smack me around and be done with it. As it is, mustering the enthusiasm to do much of anything is getting to be a bit of a chore. Until I figure out what it is I’ve got and convinced it with high doses of chemicals that it needs to go away, I’ll keep treating the symptoms with ridiculous amounts of caffeine administered regularly throughout the day. That course of treatment might leave some people awake half the night, but the one perk of whatever it is picking at my system is I’m practically sound asleep before my head hits the pillow. Now if I would just start waking up rested, we might just be in business.

Freebies…

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Some offices give away swag. You know, coffee mugs and key chains, lanyards and stress balls. Not us. We give away free flu shots. Which is great and all since it’s saving me a $20 copay and visit to the doctor’s office. I also know that there’s an ulterior motive for employers giving free flu shots. A $20 shot is a hell of a lot cheaper than the lost productive time of an employee who goes down for a week with the flu. Plenty of those private sector types go with the “play hurt” philosophy, but government employees tend to have banked a lot of sick leave and aren’t at all shy about using it. That translates into an employee who could easily be out for a week or more if they get a good case of it.

Regardless of the reasons behind it (unless it’s actually a plot to sap and impurify my precious bodily fluid), it’s actually a perk or working around here that I appreciate. As much as I enjoy time off, I’ll take a pass when it involves spending most of it in bed or in the can. Now we’ll wait for a day or two and hope that the shot itself doesn’t make me sick as a dog.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Shot in the arm…

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I’m starting to remember why I always think twice about getting the flu shot. Last year’s shot was perfect; a little soreness in the arm, but no troubles. The year before that, I was sick as a dog for three days afterwards. Today I’m not quite feeling like I got hit by a freight train, but I’m a damned far cry from feeling good. I think I spent more time in the can this morning than I did at my desk. I’m sure you all wanted to know that, right? Since I’ve gotten home, I’ve only been off the couch long enough to let the dogs out and make the still obligatory trips to the bathroom.

If nothing else, today solidified my love of ebooks. Leave a reader upstairs in the can, have the iPad on the couch, and an app on your phone when you’re forced outside with the dogs and everything is perfectly synced to where you left off on any of the other devices. It’s not exactly magic, but it beats the hell out of settling in somewhere and finding that the book you’re about to finish is somewhere across the house.

Banned…

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I saw a Facebook post yesterday morning from my alma mater proclaiming a smoke free campus. Personally it’s sort of a “whatever” moment for me as it doesn’t impact me one way or another. You can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been back on campus since I walked across the stage at the PE Center. Plus, there’s the whole quitting thing so I won’t be strolling campus jonesing for a fix any time soon. Still, it got me thinking about the old stomping grounds a bit.

I probably shouldn’t admit this here on the internet, but some of my best memories from college are the times sitting on the wall in front of Cambridge Hall smoking and joking with whoever happened to show up. Those were some great late night conversations and friendships that were bonded in the face or driving snow, wind, and rain. Of course it was always nice that if you jumped inside the wall, you could find a few feet of dry space and keep the conversation going? I could rattle off a few names, but for their sake a decade later I won’t. If you’re reading this, chances are you know them or might even be them. Standing in front of Dunkle? Yeah, I was there too. Or if I was lucky, I got one of the coveted benches at Guild Center between POSCI classes. It was a golden age… and as much as the anti’s would have me feel ashamed of it, I enjoyed every puff.

Look, I know the health risks of smoking. You’d be hard pressed to find a current or former smoker who doesn’t. We’ve lived them and will continue to live with the repercussions for the rest of our lives, but that’s the choice we made. I’ll direct you to the ill-fated experiments of Prohibition and our ongoing War on Drugs as an example of how “banned” substances come back and ruin your day with unintended consequences. The only thing this kind of ban does is force those intent on continuing an activity to find alternative ways and places to do it. They’ve moved the behavior across the street and declared victory because it isn’t happening “on campus.” That’s some victory they’ve got there.

Rave…

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I make a habit of calling people out here in print when they have offended me in some way. It’s only fair that the opposite should be true as well. You get just that one chance to make a first impression and Johns Hopkins Community Physicians at Water’s Edge hit one out of the park for me this morning. I spent less than 5 minutes in the waiting room after checking in. The nurse was in the room to take my vitals before I even set my file down. She was still taking my history when the doctor came in. The doc had me walk him through my meds and history – good move making sure I understood the issues and the treatment plan, by the way – and gave me a once over and checked under the hood. He easily spent 20 minutes in the room before walking me over to the lab for blood work. Less than five minutes with the vampires, and I was on my way. In a 45 minute appointment, total waiting time was less than 5 minutes.

These guys deserve big kudos for efficiency and professionalism. If this is the way they do business, I don’t think I’ll have any issues working with them in the future. They’ve set the bar pretty high for themselves, so I hope this wasn’t a fluke experience. We’ll find out in November.

Sawbones…

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My new doctor’s office sent me a helpful packet of papers to fill out before I show up for my first appointment. After filling out about half of them, I feel like I’m about to buy a house or lease a car at the very least. To add insult to injury, I’m pretty sire 97.9% of this information is covered in the giant medical record I had my old doctor ship to them last week. It just seems that there is a better way to deal with this than filling out endless hardcopy forms in duplicate. If the Library of Congress and Google can basically digitize the sum total of printed human knowledge, I don’t think a digital medical history you can upload to the cloud is too much to ask for here in the second decade of the 21st century. I mean if science can build a nanorobot to scrape the plaque from my aorta, surely we can figure out a way to pdf the sheet of paper that says I came in last February because my dosage of Nexium needed kicked up a notch, right?

Eyes…

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I’ve been wearing glasses since 7th grade. It’s been so long that I don’t even think of them as equipment so much as they are just another appendage like arms and legs. They’re like eyes on the outside of your head. On second thought, scratch that last part. The imagery there is a little off-putting.

Up until Friday, I thought my corrected vision was just fine. I legitimately hadn’t noticed anything change and have even commented that I didn’t think I needed anything aside from a new set of frames. Then of course there’s the moment of truth when the doc gave me the side by side comparison of the glasses I’m wearing now to my new prescription. Ouch. That would be a definite fail for the Mk 1 Eyeball, even with its upgraded external hardware kit.

Admittedly, it’s been two years since my last exam, so I shouldn’t be surprised that things had changed a bit. I just hate how they sneak up on you like that. It’s a bit like being the frog who just noticed his pot of water is getting uncomfortably warm. I’ve got a bad feeling it’s like the lady said… getting old ain’t for sissies.

Kraut…

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Since I had some unexpected free time this afternoon and realized that I had all the key ingredients at the house already, I decided it would be a good idea to make up a pot of sauerkraut and kielbasa. It sounded like a good idea at the time, because it sounds like a good idea every time. That’s just one of the flavor combinations I love – sour and savory. Ohmnomnomnom. The part that I always seem to forget is that as much as I love kraut, it does not love me. Not one little bit. I promise that I won’t trouble you with the fine points of the inner workings of my digestive system, but suffice to say that I will pay heavily for this momentary lapse in judgment. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for an appointment to inspect the domestic waterworks. There is no time this evening for deep or philosophical thoughts or even ranting about the government hiring practices. Yeah. That bad.