Shelby Cass’s Weblog

A couple weeks ago I saw Dr. Li who took a measurement of my jaw opening and found it was 30mm!!! So very nice. He said he thinks it will get better too. We had our usual bantering conversation…and then I asked, “When is my chin going to stop hurting?”

Pause. “What do you mean?”

I pointed to my chin point (courtesy of Dr. Li) and said, “It hurts here when you push on it. And also when it gets really cold.” Did I tell you how badly it hurt when it was cold? Oh my gosh. There was a week where the temperature dropped pretty low (for where I live) and I told Court “I think there’s a screw in my chin that is frozen and it HURTS!” He pooh-poohed me…and we went on our merry way.

Dr. Li heard this and stopped in his tracks. “It hurts when it’s cold?” Yup.

He went over to his little computer and pulled up my xrays. He looked at them, then looked at me…then looked at them and put one finger up…he looked at me, then the xrays, then back to me and zeroed that finger in to my chin–OW!!! “That’s a screw.” He explained that because in some people (like me) the amount he had to move the jaw was so extreme that he was unable to make the screws flush with the bone and had to go in at an angle. So the pain I am feeling will never go away so long as I have those two screws in my chin. He also said that in Scandinavian countries they ALWAYS remove the screws after the jaw is healed…because of the cold.

So I have a choice. Move to Hawaii and never get below 55F. Or stay here and deal with the week a year of pain…never go to Tahoe… (oh and did I mention that it hurts when I kiss my Pookie and his chin point and my chin point get intimate?). Or get the screws removed…which does involve cutting of things and more healing of things…but is a minor procedure because he can do it in his office under conscious sedation. Grr. I know how this will end. Don’t you?

Aloha!

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Today I see Dr. Li. First time this year. I’m fat…so he’ll not be too proud of me. But I started going to the gym on Tues. And I went on Wed…and I am sore, so SOMETHING is working. I go with Nicholas the slave driver. he asked me how I was feeling yesterday and I said sore but not to sore and he said that means he can push me harder next time. I politely declined (I think my exact words were: nooooo!!!!!!!!!!), to which he replied, “I want you to hate me the next day!!! THEN we’ll know we’re doing good.”

Yeah. Gotta love friends. We’ve named our gym mission Operation: Jiggly Puff. Okay that’s mine, His is Operation Jiggly Pecs.

Okay. I’m off.

I have been remiss…not an entry or even a squeak since the nuclear eggs incident. I guess I kind of assume…who wants to know? Then people ask. And then more people ask. And I feel bad for not posting to begin with…and then I think “Oh it’s been too long…” and blah blah blah…the end result is me under my covers hiding from the world like the scared procrastinator I am. So here. I give you: My Upper Endoscopy. (please, hold your applause)

The final frontier of GI specialist world (for now) was my upper endoscopy. That’s the one they did after the LOWER sigmoidoscopy and the “how long does it take your gamma ray eggs to evacuate?” test. The last was far easier in that 1. they “consciously” sedated me and 2. I didn’t have to eat or drink anything nasty to prep. Nope, the only prep was that I had to stop eating and drinking at midnight the night before the procedure to ensure an empty stomach. No problem.

At 5pm I was eating at Fresh Choice and by 5:30 I was done…so being that it takes 6 hours for the average stomach to empty (and the nuclear egg test had concluded that I was normal) and my procedure was 15 hours later, you can imagine my surprise (and my doctor’s when he discovered) when I woke up and my doctor said, “Your stomach wasn’t empty.”

eh?

“I found salad.”

I was about to say, “I ate at Fresh Choice!” but he beat me to it and said, “From Fresh Choice.”

I was stunned. How did he know? Did they brand their lettuce? Then I realised that conscious sedation thing meant he’d probably had that conversation with me at least twice by now. I just didn’t remember. A few days later I got a call from him (what is up with my doctors calling me to see how I am? When did this thing happen? Has the world gone nuts? How can I have the 3 doctors in the world who care enough to do that? I am NOT complaining) and he said he was really glad we did the upper endoscopy or we never would have known my stomach didn’t empty in 6 hours (since the eggs lied). NOT that anyone came to any conclusions, unfortunately. The prognosis is: Shelby, you do not have cancer or an ulcer or anything else we can test for right now. Nothing is swollen. Nothing is broken. You have nausea and that sucks. Eat small meals frequently. Take these drugs (prilosec, prevacid and reglan if it gets bad). Your side pain…well, maybe it’s the siamese twin you never had. Who the f knows. Nonetheless, I am managing. And I have no scopes in my immediate future (except the green stuff that helps prevent plaque).

On the braces front: I went to see Dr. Quo and told her I felt like my teeth didn’t touch in the back on my left and she unfortunately confirmed that and said my bite had slipped…So now I get the old school retainer (which I wouldn’t have minded having to begin with) and maybe some “buttons” in the back to pull my teeth together again. I think “buttons” are probably brackets on some teeth but not enough to call “braces”. You know how I missed those cheek spreaders. So they took a mold (peppermint flavor) and I looked like I had made out with a patch of wet cement, and I will see them again in 2-3 weeks when we will start working on my teeth again. OH! Did I mention my ortho sent out a calendar and it was all client pix and I made the back cover?! Yeah baby.

So, today…Christmas Day…2007. Hard to imagine exactly a year ago I was preparing to go to bed wearing a CPAP machine FOR THE LAST TIME.

In all my CPAP chinstrap glory

Pre-Knife (or was it a hacksaw? How DO they cut through bone these days?)

The Recovery Begins

Day 2

The Day (2 months post op) I tried to eat Pizza (yes, I was frustrated, how can you tell?)

The Day Nicholas brought me LIQUID CANDY. mmmmmmm

All I needed was my cat and my drugs.

Ah, sweet sleep…and sweeter dreams. NOTE: Lack of CPAP machine. w00t!

Best Holiday Wishes to all of you and yours…and Sweetest Dreams Possible.

Love,

Shelby

OOOOooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh  I got it, I ate it…I chewed…got it all over my teethses….and then I had ANOTHER PIECE.  Yeah baby.  Livin’ la vida loca!

No one ever sits around and revels over how awesome their body is. Okay, that’s not true. But as far as I’m concerned it is. Meaning, I don’t have frequent thoughts like “Wow, my body is completely healthy.” Instead, I notice when it’s not. I don’t think that is uncommon. But I would like to introduce a new concept, at least to myself.

What if, when I wake up in the middle of the night and feel a splinter in my thumb, instead of getting upset and thinking “Sheesh, will I NEVER be fine?”, why don’t I turn it around and say “A THUMB splinter? That’s the worst of it right now? RIGHT ON.”

My first inclination tonight after realising that my thumb hurt was to despair, “Could I PLEASE go some period of time without having an issue?”  Then I thought, what about the space between?  The space between this physical annoyance and the last?  I should revel in the fact that I am not in chronic pain and there is, in fact, space between.

And so that is my revelation now which I got out of bed and broke my sleep hygiene rule to write. That’s my plan and I’m sticking to it. Good night.

This should satisfy those Mochi-watchers out there.  She’s only 1.5 lbs lighter than Rira now.  Crazy belly baby.

Today I saw hot Doctor Steve my dentist (he has a Shelby too) and he filled Mr. Crapity sans big needles full of numbing drugs.  I mean really, I’m still numb on my gums, a little nerve action shouldn’t bother me.  Actually, I don’t like getting numbed, so unless the doc knows they are going to touch/expose the nerve, I go numbless…  There were actually 3 people (including me) today who declined drugs in the office.  So I guess they’re crazy too.

Off to Hawaii in 3 days.  Life sucks.  Again I ask…how on earth did I get friends like the ones I have?  I mean, loan me your house in Hawaii?  Yeah…I dreamed that.

Aloha!!!

Today was my ultrasound of my kidneys. They made me drink 24 oz. water 1 hour before pressing very very hard on my belleh…that’s just mean! Well, I found out that more fluid=more pain. So I’d like not to do that again, except that they keep telling me to push fluids. Blech.

One would think (well, I was hoping) that with all this nausea and lack of appetite I would have squeaked a little closer to my OTT goal, but alas, I am still in the 149 range, though one morning I saw 147 and almost broke the scale jumping in excitement. So I guess that diet is on hold…or done with and the new one is called…Operation MMAniversary. So maybe one year after my date of surge (December 26, 2006) I will be the ALL NEW, ALL IMPROVED Super chomping and gleaming tooth action super hero I would have dreamed of being, if I could have had normal dreams. How’s that for a mouthful?

Speaking of a mouthful, I went to a movie yesterday called “Wrist Cutters. A Love Story” Okay yes, bad title…but AWESOME movie. And Tom Waites is in it, so…BONUS. I loved it…and you know what else I loved? POPCORN. A whole frikkin bag of it with MY NAME ON IT. I was shoving that stuff in and getting my hands all greasy and Courtland almost lost a finger trying to snag a kernel. Oh I was loving that. And then I flossed last night WITHOUT the stupid threader thingy…Heaven, I tell you. Absolute Heaven.

And just because I’m so excited to have slippy slidey teeth, I will show you again…

I’m going to make a time line…I am hoping to figure something out. It started in July of this year when I decided to go back on THE PILL. You know the one. Although there are millions of pills in the world, if you say you are on THE PILL, not many have to ask for clarification, unless they want to know “which one”. So, I warned Courtland…I am going to be nauseated and horrible for 3 months. And he said okay, and so it began.

The nausea. The uck. The horrible horrible uck. More than a few times Court said “maybe this wasn’t such a good idea” and I would say “I’ve done it this far, I may as well stick with it. Only 3 months…”

I guess I should add here that the reason I stopped the pill many years ago for health reasons. I had bad side effects and decided to detox for a while.

So, July began the trouble and August sucked. In September I began feeling the pain in my left flank inside. I passed a couple stones. I got pyelonephritis after insisting I had an infection and no one believed me until I produced blood in a cup. So they treated me for that. I still had nausea with eating and drinking, and the pain. Oh the pain. But as you know, the urologist I got told me I psychically predicted my kidney infection because that pain was completely unrelated.

I went a few days (the lst few days of your pill pack) without nausea and things were feeling better when I started my next pill pack and BOOM nausea. And that was the beginning of month 4 so I was OVER IT. And I stopped the pill. The nausea is less, but still there. The pain is definitely still there. What pain? Let me try to describe it: When I inhale I get a SHARP stabbing pain under my ribcage on the left towards the back. While inhaling, if I press on my side I can make it hurt more (wooo fun!) and when I toss and turn at night it wakes me up. I am unable to create the pain without flinching or making sad noises. The good news is it only hurts with inhaling and not exhaling, so only 50% of my day sucks.

In October I got a cold. It started in my throat and went into my chest. I got a cough. Sounded worse than it felt. The pain is not when I cough. It’s when I take in a deep breath.

It’s November. I worked all of 4 HOURS in September with all this stuff, and now it looks like November will be a money hemorrhage month too. I hope you don’t mind getting well wishes from me instead of gifts this holiday season! So anywho, I was at work on Monday when the pain stopped being just with inhaling, I couldn’t even pick anything up with my left hand without pain, so I went to urgent care on the advice of my doctor. I have never wanted surgery so badly. I seriously was praying for gallstones so they could rip the gallbladder out and be done with it already. So you can imagine my despair when the ultrasound came back clear (only a tiny polyp in the gallbaldder and a mildly swollen bile duct) and the chest xray showed nothing significant.

My doc has scheduled one more ultrasound of my kidneys this time for Monday and then wants to pass me to a GI specialist. She wants to get this solved before I get on a plane for Thanksgiving week in Hawaii. SO DO I. But what do I do if she hasn’t? Grr… If it was just pain, I would deal. I can deal with pain. But the nausea. And the lack of appetite. I don’t want FOOD?!?!? That’s just insane. And I just got my braces off!!! I should be celebrating with crap…but I am not. I am celebrating with bland food and ginger ale and lots of pills.

I just want an answer…and I want to be able to eat food…and enjoy it…and…okay I’m done complaining. Just wanted to vent a little because I know my posts are usually happy and positive but this has been eating at me for far too long. I’m getting super depressed…and I don’t even feel like eating to help myself! Stick a fork in. I’m done.

Had to check to make sure it wasn’t a dream.  Yeahoooooo!!!!!