I seem to have been through a lot of trauma recently – at least to me it was traumatic. But maybe it wasn’t – because any minor life disruption, however remotely painful, I consider to be absolutely awful.
I don’t like to write about my private life, but lately, things have been, well, you know, that kind of bad… Maybe not that bad, but aggravating and of some concern.
I can get anxiety over small things, like last night. I was all hyped up thinking about the upcoming weekend, but my happy anticipation didn’t last long because I “found” it, a Sparky’s Special – a pile of chocolate pudding on the living room floor.
It wasn’t chocolate and it wasn’t pudding and not all things go bump in the night. Sometimes they ooze and sometimes they smell bad, very bad. After the cleanup from the floor and in between my toes, I used a flashlight for the remainder of my nocturnal meanderings which I should have done in the first place.
But things were worse prior to that scuffling, bumbling, night-time step.
I’ve been going to ophthalmologists for extremely elevated eye pressure, better known as uncontrolled glaucoma which is not a good thing if it makes your eyeball pop out or explode.
On my first visit, a retinal specialist injected Avastin in my eye. I hate needles. As for the one going into my eyeball… it was huge and long. So long I thought it was going to come out the back of my head. My husband was there too, he got to watch. And I know he was thinking, “Better you than me!”
The Avastin has worked, for the time being, and my eye pressure is normal again. My ophthalmologist says a hypermature cataract in that eye is causing the elevated pressure. But neither doctor wants to remove it (the cataract, not the eye). Both implied the removal is beyond their surgical options because the cataract is so old and brittle. I probably will have to go to a specialized eye institute where they will use a Sawzall and 2-stage vacuum pump to remove it. Maybe I should start searching Amazon and Costco for glass eyes and eye patches. Nothing is ever simple.
In this same period of time, I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my upper lip. The Mohs doctor removed at least a centimeter (in diameter) of flesh. It looked like a chunk of chicken fat. It took a plastic surgeon to close it up. She did a decent job of it – thankfully I did not end up with a cauliflower lip.
But there was another down-side to all of that…The plastic surgeon put me on doxycycline for 2 weeks and I got a yeast infection. (Based on my own personal astute diagnosis, that’s what I thought it was.) Now I haven’t had a yeast infection for a long, long, time but I remembered there are OTC antifungal medications for that. So, I went to CVS and eureka, so many choices! But they all had different treatment times: 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, 10 days…. So I chose the one day treatment, after all, who wants to drag out treatment when you can do it in one day, right?
Well, I should have been suspicious, I had no idea that the easter egg insert in that package was the equivalent of a 350,000 Scoville Unit habanero pepper.
If I had read the reviews before I bought the medication. I would have known it had a 2.4 rating out of 10 with reviewers making comments like: ”burns and itches like there was a pineapple in me….”, “wanted to throw ice cube grenades up there…”, “wildfire in Cooterville…” and worst of all, “if you are reading this, it is too late!”
Three days later, the heat and burning subsided. For a while, I was tempted to lay on my back, legs up, with an ice pack between my legs, kind of like a cockroach spazzing out in a pesticide fit. Anyway, I think I’m alright now.
I could have avoided what went on this past month, beginning with the use of a flashlight and then reading labels. And the cataract? I survived the surgery and it’s gone but that’s another story.
Take care and step wisely,
Maggie
