Need some Absolut Vanille

This is what I did this week: yoga, swim, take cats to the vet, job-hunt. Oh, and laundry and floors. Good: the new muscle relaxers seemed to help a lot. I had about twenty minutes yesterday when nothing hurt. Nothing. Not belly, not neck, not whole right leg. It was a little hard to breathe from the disbelief. But awesome.
Job hunting sucks boar testicles.

Shit that doesn't even happen to other people

My RSD leg has been acting up badly since I have been going to yoga class.  Horrendous muscle spasms. The neurologist says there's nothing to do for them except take muscle relaxers and keep going to class, just do less. Really severe muscle spasms, hip to toe. Hurts like a mother, and have been keeping me up from about four in the morning on. This morning the numbing pads weren't helping, and I draped my side over a big body pillow because the spasms were spreading up to my lats in my back. Kind of a contortion, but it was oddly comfortable and I got another hour of sleep. When I got up, I was standing up, talking on the phone and just turned my head in a normal fashion---and started screaming. I had to put the phone down for a while and try to fix what had gone wrong. A rib, about three or four down from my neck, had subluxed from its attachment to my spine. Holy shit. I had to get off the phone and do some serious contortions to get that mean fucker back where it belonged. and it offered to slip back out about ten more times in the next few hours. If you had looked into my kitchen you would have seen a big old woman in a vintage red nylon nightgown, doing a slow-motion version of the hokey-pokey.  I could not figure out how the hell such a thing happens but the only reason I can come up with is, I shoved my ribs up lying with that pillow under them and stretched a ligament. Lesson learned.
I am going to get into a wine bottle and not get out for a few days.

Drain Bramage

Good news, sort of, at the neuro doc's office; I have zero markers for any known syndromes. There is a not-that-big cyst in my skull but he doesn't think it is big enough to be troublesome. I have some encephalopathy, mild brain damage, and he doesn't know why. He thinks it could account for my memory problems. He also doesn't think the RSD in my right leg will ever go away, but maybe it will get a little better. So, now, on to the immunologist! God, I'm getting tired of telling this story to people who scratch their head and can't think of what to tell me.

Suckitude and awesomeness

The awesome thing is, my kid got into grad school. They will pay her tuition and give her a stipend, so she can get her Ph.D. We were really sweating it, she had gotten a bunch of rejections and were thinking she was going to be taking her $120,000 education over to Mickey D's to ask if people wanted fries with that. There was a lot of screaming and crying when she called me, all happy noise.
Suckitude is how my company is planning to terminate me because I can't return to 12-hour killer shifts. I have asked for an 8-hour accomodation but it doesn't look good. So I've been applying for other jobs and have been crawling around the backyard looking for four-leaf clovers. None yet, only a few dog turds, but who knows.

One calla bloom

I'm a little shocked the callas survived that winter; a lot of my tropicals did not. Only one bloom as yet, but it's a peach.

My family practice doc looked up my neuro tests from last week. No active lesions to indicate MS, so I've got that going for me; but I have a largish subarachnoid cyst, and the EEG showed some encephalopathy, which I'm not that surprised by since I still have some neuro symptoms and memory problems. I see the neuro doc Friday to get his opinion on what, if anything, to do next. I am going to have to tell my boss this week that I can't come back to direct patient care. I bet I get fired. But with any luck, I will get my clinicals done and get a new job in the consulting area I am certifying for. Fingers crossed! Ow, muscle spasm, uncross uncross. 

An Herbaceous border

The landscaping I did at OoA#2's house, with the new urn that replaced the Mexican pottery one which didn't survive the superfreezing winter in one piece. Most of the irises, mint, and daylilies are pass-along plants. It's white, yellow, and blue with the azaleas this time of year and smells pretty great.

Leukotrine inhibitors and the single girl

So I begged some Singulair out of my primary doc when I got to wheezing a little over a week ago. I felt better, less wheezing, less overall-achy, in just a few hours. Then about five more days went by and I suddenly realized: gone. Abdominal pain that's kept me sitting down for months, gone. I have done more housecleaning and actually mowed the yard over a period of three days. I think OoA#2 is a little confused at how cheerful it has made me not to have constant bellyache. The steroids have made me gain even more weight, so now I'm going to wean off them, they weren't helping anyhow. And I don't have to have that glass of wine just to be able to swallow dinner, which is helpful to the budget.  My GI doc now thinks the mysterious auto-immune illness that caused all the trouble is mastocytosis, which is sort of like being allergic to yourself; he is calling the allergy/immunology guy at the teaching hospital to see if I can get in to see him. Meanwhile, I suddenly feel like shopping. Very uncharacteristic.

Magical thinking and the Neurologist

My neurologist is a friend. We've worked together well for years, and I've helped him give countless neuro exams to other people. So it was more than a little weird to be on the other end of his safety pin today. I was hoping, I suppose, that he would tell me that the long list of things I had typed out for him were all being imagined, and I was fine. But the corner of his mouth kept pulling back, and he stifled the "humph" noise he makes on several occasions. The noise means, "That's not good." When he checked my eyes in the dark it came out, and his shoulders sagged.   I forgot to tell him I had recently been diagnosed with sleep apnea; it came up in some papers that his staff had printed from my recent labs, etc. He was extremely startled that I had forgotten such a thing. Honestly, I was not that surprised; there's just so much.
I actually passed several parts of the exam that I thought I'd fail, but it took me a looong time to remember the list of three words he assigned me.
He is testing me for lupus, MS, and myasthenia gravis for now. He had trouble meeting my eyes when he was telling me the plan, and trouble thinking of anything positive to say. That's unusual for him. But he's also checking for thyroid and B12, which no one has done lately. So there is that, anyway.
I got my hair cut and put in a call to the woman I had planned to do clinicals with starting in about two weeks. If my magical thinking had gotten my ailments pooh-poohed, I was going to try to go on and do them. Now I am finally going to tell her I will have to put them off.
Awkward.