Sunday, September 21, 2008

When what you fear the most meets you halfway...


It’s a gorgeous day out there today near as I can tell. The sun is shining with the proverbial ‘not a cloud in the sky’ sky. Hopefully its an omen of good things to come. Not that things have been bad... just sort of staid is all.

And in the ‘it never rains but it pours category’... around the end of July my eyes started to bother me. Itchy, watery- I thought it was just allergies. But it seemed to get progressively worse until I woke up one Sat morning and my eyes were so swollen and red and... crusty... ick.... that I could barely open them. Luckily my eye doc is right down the street and she squeezed me in. The diagnosis was Pink Eye.... PINK EYE?? I was so grossed out. There’s such a stigma attached to that particular diagnosis I felt dirty. The treatment was fairly simple. She gave me some drops to take every 3 hours and sent me on my way, rescheduling a recheck in a few days. But it also vamped up my OCD a notch, like I needed THAT. So now I have hand sanitzer everywhere and I try to cover my hands with my sleeves before touching public doors and so forth, and if I can’t I won’t touch my face until I can wash my hands.

So a week.. ten days... later I get the all clear. Eagerly pop in brand new contacts and make an appt to get new glasses because mine had to be at least 10 years old. But then... a few days later... familiar sensations are returning... what... how.... god damn its back. Off to the doc I go again to confirm its flared up again. But how? HOW? Then something occurred to me... without even thinking I do believe I used the same mascara..... ooopppsssss.... So I bought some cheap make up to use until I was all clear... then tossed that and started with new brushes and mascara, etc. It killed me to have to throw out a pot of MAC Fluidline only a few months old, but I’d rather just have to plunk down $18 for a new one and $12 for a brush then have to toss out ANOTHER set of contacts and go through that grossness again.

So my eyes are all wonderful again and I have a fabulous new pair of glasses that look like they were created in this century. But.... isn’t there always a but... while I was dealing with my eyeballs... sometime back in March I began to have some discomfort in the back of my mouth from a tooth on the top. Nothing major at the time... but like my eyes... it got progressively worse to the point that around the same time I was dealing with the eye problem I would have these random unbelievable pains shooting from it that would stop just as quickly as they’d start. And as if that wasn’t enough... I have a tooth on the other side on the bottom that had a piece break off about 8 years ago and had been fixed twice after the repair had broken about a year or so later. I called it my Bionic Tooth because my dentist basically used filling to rebuild it back up to what it was so it was half silver. He wanted to do a Crown but my insurance wouldn’t cover it so we went this route. He had warned me at the time he didn’t know if it would hold but it did all these years.... until I got a cavity in between the good part and the filling part. It wasn’t hurting me at all but the crevasse was getting bigger and I could feel little pieces of the good part breaking off. Eventually it got to the point that I could feel the silver part lifting up and I knew there wasn’t much left holding it in and I couldn’t chew anything on that side. And then... and THEN a piece broke off the upper back tooth, leaving a really sharp dagger that rubbed against my cheek and that was it. I couldn’t put it off anymore. I had a very small area left to chew my food and I knew once my daughter asked if we could go have Chinese food and I said No all because I was afraid to eat it... well... once you start messing with my food.... well that’s it.

So I drove everyone at work crazy asking who their dentist was, did they like them, and what about the pain... I finally settled on a place and made an appt.

Its not that I was necessarily afraid of the dentist because I loved my last dentist... literally (snicker). But when I first went to him for the aforementioned broken tooth the very first time I admitted I had been avoiding the dentist for a very long time due to fear from a previous barbaric dentist as a child. Don’t get me wrong- the man was sweet... and everyone went to him... but lets face it, dentistry 30 years ago was something you lost sleep over. So I admitted I was quite afeared. But he was a brand new dentist right out of school with all the latest tricks at his disposal so the procedure was painless. Luckily my teeth weren’t in that bad of shape- two small cavities and a root canal and I was all fixed up. Even after the root canal, which I had cancelled twice before I finally went through with it... when he announced he was done 15 minutes later I said ‘That’s it?!" and he said Ayup. I said ‘No way! Gimme another one!" Then he told me to get out of his chair.

So I tried to keep my mind off it as much as possible and kept telling myself there was no point because it had to be done. My teeth were messed up and needed to be fixed. So yesterday off I trotted to my brand new dentist, praying to the gods of such things to please be kind. So after he had a looky see and took an xray he gave me the news I was dreading to hear but had a feeling was exactly what was going to happen which is why I was avoiding going... the teeth couldn’t be saved. They had to come out.

But oddly enough... I kind of went... eeeeeehhhhh... but I don’t remember feeling sick or nervous. I felt more of that previous in the week just thinking of going. But now that I was there it was more resolve that this is what had to be done and I think I was more anxious to get it over with so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. So I asked him when we could get this over with... and he said I could name the place and the time... and I’m thinking, this is my worst effng nightmare... I won’t sleep thinking about it... so I asked him if we could do it today and he said absolutely. I felt so relieved and he looked happy I decided to just go for it. I told him I just wanted to get it over with and he agreed that was the best thing.

He knew I was nervous and him and his assistant were great. He made sure I was good and frozen, even having to give me a few more shots in the back one because it didn’t seem to want to freeze. That one came out relatively easily, just as he said it would, and the second one he had to drill through to basically split it in two because there wasn’t much left to grab onto. I got a few zings from hitting the nerve and for the first time I actually smelled smoke during the drilling... that was odd. And speaking of odd... they have tv’s in the ceilings and they put it on for me and we decided on Dumb and Dumber and in the middle of him yanking on my tooth one of them makes a boobie joke and I start laughing, which makes the dentist and his assistant laugh.
So its all over and done with and most of my face is frozen and packed with gauze and I’m sitting there feeling relieved and happy and really pretty proud of myself for being a brave little soldier. I have a pretty high pain tolerance... thank god... so I’m not much afraid of most things... but the thought of having sharp things in my mouth sends me over the edge.

But honestly.... after that... hahahh I really can’t see there’s anything left for me to be afraid of. He said the rest of my teeth are still in pretty good shape so two teeth going at the same time was just a coincidence and not indicative of some larger problem going on he suspected might be the cause.

PHEW.


Np- "Love Remains the Same" – Gavin Rossdale

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

I'm Baaacccckkkkkk...

Blows the dust off...
CoughCoughAcccCHOOO!

Hello? Hellleewwww.... is this thing on?

Yes yes I know. Where have I been?

I did trail off on the posting for a bit... my last rant in regards to the dreaded ‘croc’ phenomenon that seemed to take over the earth for a time. Hopefully the scourge has been chased back to the depths of hell where it belongs. However I won’t hold my breath for the one at least for the time being. It is winter after all so they could just be hibernating.

No... I hadn’t really gone anywhere. Sadly my life took a turn for the mundane. Not necessarily boring as I always seem to be off somewhere doing something as evidenced by the messages on my voice from various friends and family members giving me shit for never being home. Just not anything worth blogging about really.

I did have lots of thoughts and ponderances but one day I just decided I wanted to keep those to myself. I didn’t feel like sharing what I was thinking. I do that sometimes. Okay, I do that alot. And I know that’s not healthy for me because when I keep things to myself they tend to mutate and evolve into something something really weird and twisted and sometimes even ugly. But as soon as I open up and discuss its like it never was and I feel much better.

Sometimes I like to be selfish with my thoughts... and sometimes I just like to hold onto them until I can process them myself without outside intervention, then I let it out and open the floor to discussion once I have had time to examine it in private first.

So not only that... but I think my Sprog discovered my blog and that did a much quicker job of cutting off the flow of information much faster than any irrational fear of being psychoanalyzed by people who don’t know shit from shinola.

But lately I have missed writing on my Blawg and I think it was watching Diablo whats-her-face on Oprah, the former stripper who wrote Juno (fan-TAS-TIC movie by the way- go Ellen!), telling her story of how Juno came about. Apparently she was (probably still is) a blogger and one of her constant readers suggested she write a screen play. Which she did. Which he liked. And thus begat ‘Juno’.

And holy tropical storms Batman, I’m surprised we still have power the way the wind and rain is beating against my windows.

I can feel the hinges on my writing chops rusting up and that cannot be allowed to happen. I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month- write a 50,000 word novel in one month) in November. Despite my most valiant efforts I didn’t make the 50,000 work mark, however I came up with a story I really like, reached a respectable 30,000 words and realized with a little discipline I can get back on track. I think I need to find a happy medium there though because last time I was writing on a regular basis I was whipping off 6-10 pages a night. But those were the days when my child went to bed at 9pm on my command. Now she’s a –gasp- teenager and things just aren’t that simple anymore. Be that as it may, I should still dedicate 2 or 3 nites a week to hitting the keyboard for something more productive than Scrabulous or Facebook stalking.

So I am back now I guess. I do find lots of thoughts hit me on the bus commute to and from work each day... gotta start remembering to write those down. If I can’t seem to churn out the great novel that will be the start of my elustrious career... heh... I will at least keep the wheels greased and moving along with a Blawg post now and again.