Steroids

Mother Would Be So Proud II

On Friday I did something that my mother would routinely tell me to do after I did some sort of stupid thing or another while growing up – I had my head examined.

Remember the earache steroid episode from back in June/July? Well, after the doctor ordered the second round of steroids to clear hearing issue he also scheduled an MRI. Two weeks after finishing the steroids and a week before the MRI my hearing is fine so I think I’ll just call off the scan. But I waited another 6 days, until the day before, to call and cancel.

Wouldn’t you know it, but on the way home from work on the Friday the MRI was scheduled for the left ear acts up again. Not only that, it sort of sounds like the right ear going a little wonky too. Naturally by the time I get home and call on a Friday everyone has gone home for the weekend.

I called the imaging place on Monday and ask if I can reinstate the MRI appointment that I had cancelled on Thursday. The nice lady said that she’d be happy to reschedule me. But – uh oh – it looks like the Southside Imaging Center’s MRI machine was down for maintenance. I asked, “Well when will it fixed?” “November,” she says. “You can have the scan done at the hospital,” she says, “They have an MRI machine.” “Great,” I say. “Let’s see when I can get you in…” “How about September 1st?” It is now the third week of July. “Wow,” I say, “If that is as soon as I can get in, I’ll take it.”

The left ear has been good and bad, off and on ever since. The last few days it has seemed fine, so does that mean the MRI won’t see anything up with the auditory nerve? But more importantly will they be able to locate the source inside the brain that causes me to do those stupid things or anothers?

Here is Part 1 of Mother Would Be So Proud from 2006.

This Is It!

Tomorrow is the last dose of the second course of steroids and I handled it real well over vacation and the first day at work, but for some reason, reason ran off the rails today and continues unabated into the weeds tonight.

I am not allowed to change this pattern! I’ve just spent the last 3 hours playing around with various patterns for the garage floor tiles. Any number of checkerboards, stripes, diagonals and at least twice randomly selecting colors then randomly selecting squares…

The right hand side is 2-wide carpet tile aisle that interlocks with the regular tiles (it is there because that is the path by the car to the laundry room.) The other 2-wide outside areas are the regular coin tiles in Graphite which is similar in color to the carpet. The center section is 4 x 4 checkerboard squares of Alloy & Royal Blue grated flow tiles for drainage.

98552 Humptulips, WA

98552 Humptulips, WA

OK, we are back home and I’ve about finished up the second course of steroids. As a favor to you I posted a picture from the trip everyday because everyone knows a picture is worth a thousands words. As a favor to me I didn’t have to try and tamp down the verbiage. And as a favor to my editor who would have had to make it intelligible.

Regular posting will continue tomorrow. I’ve got a nice one about our welcome home, what our best moments were on the trip and one about our biggest disappointment. Maybe I’ll go back and add a story about each day under the picture of the day or maybe I’ll add them as I go along. Oh, and it is time for a garage flooring update.

Relapse

A little more than 24 hours after telling Dr. ENT he fixed me, I started with a headache and then it turned into a slight buzzing in the left ear, finally moving on to that annoying sort of low frequency muffling thing again. The only explanation I have is that I was slowly clearing the steroids from my system and there was just enough left to hold the inflammation at bay on Wednesday. By Thursday night the levels had decreased to the point where the symptoms reappeared.

The Dr. had told me that if this did reappear that the next step was an MRI to see if I had a callous on the auditory nerve. If in fact that is what it is, they can treat it with something called a Gamma Knife. An all I thought of when they said that was:

So this morning I called Dr. ENT’s office up and said, “It’s baaack.” After some internal consultation over on their end, the Dr called in another round of my old pals the steroids because I can’t get an MRI until the week after next (we’re going on our yearly visit to see the Space Needle.) About 11:30 AM I got a text from the Kroger and it said, “Rx# xxx0151 is on order and will be ready for pickup at 9:22 PM.”

Fast forward to just a few minutes ago, I picked up the phone to call the pharmacy to see if it was ready and that is when I noticed the date, 07-03-17, hey, wait a minute, that’s Monday… The pharmacist at Kroger suggested that I try calling around to see if anyone locally had it and if not I could call ahead to where we are going and see if they can have it ready for when I got there. Several calls later I think I found a hook-up at the 24-Hour CVS over in Augusta near all the hospitals. If they call back pretty soon we may make the drive over tonight.

Oh, boy, another 2 weeks of 800 word blog rambling posts. Lucky you.

Can I Hear You Now?

My original follow-up with the ENT was scheduled for today, Wednesday, in downtown Augusta. I put in for a 1/2 day vacation because the appointment was at 1:15 and figured Donna and I could make a day of it in the big city, lunch then doctor, maybe see a movie matinee afterwards.

Last week the office called and said, the doctor has a surgery scheduled, could I do Thursday at the Evans office. Reluctantly I agreed because I wanted to get this done. I picked the last appointment of the day, 3:15, so Donna could pick me up from work at 2:30 and I’d take an hour of “lost time.” I cancelled the half day vacation. For this appointment, after the doctor we’d hunt up some different place to eat dinner over that way, because we’d probably never purposely say to ourselves, “Let’s drive over to Evans to eat out on a work night.”

Yesterday afternoon the ENT office called and said that we now have a conflict with Thursday appointment, could I call and change it. I called them back fully expecting to tell them forget the f&*^ing follow-up, my initial complaint has been solved to my satisfaction. But was stunned into silence when the girl asked if I could come to the downtown office today, Wednesday, at say…1:15?1 I asked if they had a later in the day appointment and got one at 3:20 PM so I could just that same hour of excused time.

Well, they tested my hearing again today. I think I am cured, the garbled bass is gone, so the steroids fixed me, but if you look at numbers and compare the two dates, today’s test doesn’t look that much better. And they didn’t test the same frequencies, so much for my planned apples to apples chart. 3khz was added and they dropped the 12khz which is probably where I had the greatest gains. I’m not happy with the chart, but I’m happy with the results of the medicine.

Good News Or Bad News?

Depends on who you ask.

In a weird way, I’m kind of disappointed, but Donna is probably pleased as punch by this development – the effects of my earache induced course of steroids is almost all gone. I slept right through last night, I’ve stopped fidgeting and have regained some control over my ability to stay focused at work. More importantly, I no longer have the compulsion to answer the question of “How’s it going?” by starting out with, “Well, I was born in Springfield, but raised in…”

Also good or bad, you decide, the blog posts will probably be a lot shorter and perhaps less frequent. To prove the point, that’s all I got tonight.

Go read something good: Before the Internet.

God

The way I’m feeling this may or may not be your bonus post for today. There may be more, way more.

One of the times I got up in the middle of the night I wandered over to the PC, and looked over my Google News feed for distractions. After scanning the headlines and looking at all of the crap that is going on here, there and everywhere it caused me to think of God. Your God, his God, their God. There are a lot of different religions in this world with their own corresponding deity. How the heck does that work? Is there a God Boardroom where they gather and divvy up all the creatures of Earth?1

But a God Collective can’t work, because there has got to be some being making sure nobody gets out of hand with the plagues and pestilence stuff. And all the religions I know about, the one big Tennent is I’m the ONE God, don’t be worshiping anyone else. Hey, maybe that is the way this whole thing works, all the little individual Gods can’t let anyone outside the board in on the secret. Kind of like Fight Club: Both rules #1 & #2 are: You do not talk about Fight Club. But I digress.2

Why would a benevolent god let all this bad crap happen? And from there I spent the next indeterminate minutes discussing God in my head. Well, today on my lunchtime perusal of my Google News feed I came across a headline that got me to click on it: Creationist Ken Ham Blames Atheists For Ark Park Failure. You can click on the link to read the actual article if you want, I found it entertaining in that this fellow is blaming the lack of success on the 3% of America’s Atheists teaming up with America’s new Enemy of the People (mainstream media) to damage the reputation of his big ol’ boat, the Ark Encounter.

I then wandered to the bottom of the article to read the comment section because this is almost always where the fun stuff really resides. It didn’t take long either. Four or five views down the line someone takes a slight dig at atheists and claims he, a mainstream Christian, is the harmed party by being lumped in with the Ark Encounter charlatan3 And then proceeds to state emphatically that the universe we all live in “is just not possible that universes don’t exist that have a ‘God’ of some sort.” And the reply to this is, which I’m going to copy below, is the sort of answer I would like to memorize so I could spout it at the opportune time when confronted with someone making that kind of statement to me.4

i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in god, just as i don’t rely on science to justify not believing in thor or my disbelief that hitler and elvis are living on the dark side of the moon planning an invasion. Your comment seems to suggest that ‘the existence of a universe’ has one of a set of answers in a multiple choice scenario – a. god b. aliens. c. science. d. computer simulation. The correct answer may not be in that set, it may not be something you could even understand at this point – but that does not mean you get to make up an answer or run with one these when the correct answer is “i don’t know, and neither do you”. You’re running with a god of the gaps explanation. The god concept is refutable because there is no evidence to support the claim – if there was, you’d have a fact, not faith. trying to support it by claiming it is ‘the only answer “that makes sense” to you’ regarding ‘why is stuff here instead of not stuff not here?’ no more supports your version of god than it supports thor or magic beans. So, i doubt anyone is “relying on science to justify not believing in god”, if they are that isn’t a very good reason. We don’t believe in god(s) because there is no evidence to back up that claim

For the record, I’m not a believer, nor am I a disbeliever, I consider myself an agnostic.