Healthy Me

While I was sick and my husband was off work taking care of me, he did some much-needed painting.  Here is a picture of part of our living room he just finished (ignore the pull-ups on the top of my armoire...you can tell kids live here):

Summer is unofficially here.  With the mid-80's to almost 90 temperatures are any indication, we skipped spring and went right into summer.  Sad for me because I love wearing boots and was hoping to extend my wear of them a little longer but it's just too warm. I'm not sure how my husband does it having to wear heavy, steel-toed boots to work the way he does in this heat without an air-conditioned work environment. 

I'm glad he does his own laundry for his work clothes.  I'd imagine those socks of his smell!

I don't do well in heat though so you won't catch me outside sunbathing in this sun!  I'd pass out.

My husband has been experiencing a lot of pain through his wrist up to his elbow.  They tried steriod pills and then moved to a cortisone shot (he said those hurt).  They're thinking a tennis elbow type of thing (from the repitition in his job and playing guitar most likely).  If not, it could be arthritis. 

I think he should be looking at http://www.jointsupplements.net/ to see if there are joint supplements he can take to see if they help. I'm not too crazy about repeated use of steroids. He's had cortisone shots for his knees before for pain (he used to race bicycles cross-country and then road racing and really stressed his knees out) so he's familiar with them.  I just hope it's not a cover for the problem instead of a solution.

Did you know one of the symptoms of thyroid disease is hair loss?  As a woman, this is important to know since thyroid disease affects women moreso than men.  I left behind hair everytime I showered.  Luckily, I have really thick hair so it wasn't noticeable to people in general (just my husband who hated all the hair in the shower). 

If you have hair loss that isn't attributed to thyroid disease, click here to see if there is anything that may help you. Because mine was due to my thyroid betraying me, the hair loss was helped with thyroid medications to regulate my hormones better. When my thyroid hormones get out of whack, I still can experience hair loss. It's a good indicator for me on when my thyroid needs attention and once that is taken care of, the hair loss stops.

I said I'd tell about my illness so here goes...

I was hospitalized due to a really bad case of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (due to bacterial vaginosis...NOT a sexually transmitted disease which the doctors would not believe until the cultures came back proving neither myself nor my husband cheated on each other and gave each other a disease!). The doctors actually ticked both my husband and myself off with their disbelief that one of us must have had multiple partners which one of us got an STD from and that's what gave me PID.  The tests they did proved otherwise but it took a couple days for those tests to come back. We've been faithful to each other for 15 years and having that questioned was irritating!  I'm glad I had my cell phone with me because I was able to learn more about PID and the antibiotics they were giving me on the Internet through my phone. Thank the gods for technology because the doctor was driving me batty!

I was really sick with high fever and extreme pain with the possibility of abcessing. They gave me morphine in the ER for pain, then dilaudid (I think that's how it's spelled) once admitted, then Percocet as the pain went down. Apparently, the flu I thought I had with fever for four days a few weeks ago was the start of the infection raging through my reproductive organs until they were screaming at me to get to the hospital.

Unfortunately, the antibiotics (Gentamicin and Clindamycin) they had me on had such bad side effects (dizziness, nausea, ear pain and hallucinations) that I was happy to get off them after 2-1/2 days when I got sent home. Those side effects lingered for several days after but they eventually worked their way out of my system thankfully. I think it was the Gentamicin that did all that to me. The faces flying at me in my head were bad enough (and the evil grins some of the faces gave me were downright scary) but when the Virgin Mary statue outside my hospital window turned and looked at me several times, I rang for the nurse to get me off the medications!

So that's some of what happened.  There's more to chat about (the CT scan results) but I'll do that later.