So, it's been over two months now since I got health insurance and started setting up appointments. Much has happened since then, and much not. Most has been written about, but one thing not. Yet.
The allergist diagnosed my dermatographism as a symptomatic expression of underlying allergy(-ies), tested, and found a bundle of things to avoid. Some of that is possible. Most, not so much. After some thought, I decided to go for the allergy shots, which actually start tomorrow morning, and go Monday and Thursday mornings for a while. Three shots per visit. Wheee.
They cause their own "little" side effect, and I'm not talking about the possibility of reaction to the shots, or even my decreasing availability for work causing lessening of income. After ordering having them made up, I was discussing with their office how much individual shots would cost if the ever-looming possibility of a government shut-down becomes fact on July 1st. My insurance is, after all, sponsored by the state. (An alternative scenario is I could get kicked off any insurance if the legislature budget goes through as written.) She thought about thirty bucks a piece, which is a strain but doable, especially if any shutdown is brief. Then she threw the zinger at me: it's formulating the shots themselves that costs thousands.
Thousands!?! Oooohhhh. Ummmm, maybe it's time to check how much of my $10,000/yr. insurance budget I have left. I figured this was one of the two things this year that I could take care of. There are already enough dead ends.
Getting the fibroid evaluated cost a visit to the OB-GYN, an ultrasound, having a radiologist read the scans, and an option for shrinkage treatment with surgery to follow in a few years when Medicare kicks in. The main problem with that treatment is that it is standard for it to require an overnight stay in the hospital, a very sensible precaution in case the wrong arteries got blocked somehow, but all by itself busting my budget. So, no go there. Keep carrying that football around, watching it grow. Meanwhile, a nice chunk out of that ten grand.
Getting the knees evaluated involved an orthopedic visit, X-rays, and a recommendation for surgery which also is a budget-blasting $60,000, give or take. So, live with them for another few years. Another, expected, dead end. Another chunk of the budget spent.
The last thing I'm dealing with, and have been since three days after my original physical when the labs came back, is diabetes. This at least is cheaper to treat. So far it's been two nursing visits, diabetes education on diet and a meter kit for stabbing my fingers three times daily and reading the blood sugar levels from a blood drop. The lancets and test strips need to be renewed by prescription, and there is an increased cost in food because the cheap carbs have to be avoided, but it has to be dealt with - forever! - and I'm doing it.
Actually, I'm doing a much better job of dealing with it on a dietary basis than I am in coming to terms with it. Mom always used to nag me that if I kept eating the sweets I love, I was going to get diabetes. Though my nurse tells me that's not strictly true, it still feels like a shaming punishment from Mom that I managed to cause myself. But I have developed a basic diet that works well, and occasionally try adding things into it that might or might not work, and getting the instant (2-hours) feedback that tells me when I've screwed up. For example, a 6" Subway is supposed to fit in, but the test strips tell me that they're pushing it. Don't do it often. Naan is out, since the allotted amount is way too little to consider anything but a hardship as a meal, and the pashwoori naan is too sweet to even consider trying, though I love the flavor. The beef-filled naan isn't worth eating. When I go for a burger or hot dogs, much of the bun is left out, which is OK unless I had in mind something that would hold a whole slew of condiments.
It's a lot of brown bagging, and my hours translate that into simple, easy, no-thought, no-cook, easy-measure foods. Cottage cheese is king. One carton covers two meals with fruits stirred in. Hence my recent expertise on what is good and what not. Cheerios are still OK, one of my favorite snack foods. Of course, that could and used to mean half a box if I was watching TV and not paying attention. Now it's a half-cup serving in a leftover container packed as mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. Baby carrots are not supposed to count as a starchy veggie (who's kidding whom here?) but my test strips tell me that they seem to accentuate the carbs in anything else I eat. I do have to go shopping at least twice a week, since fruits spoil quickly, and there's only so much room in the 'fridge.
It's a good thing I don't drink my carbs. For years it's been diet sodas, diet lemonades and fruity teas, water, and coffee. Morning coffee turned over a year ago into morning mocha, but I found a cocoa brand months ago that offers a good sugarless variety, 1/2 carb unit the way I do it, and still makes good mocha. I found months ago that I need a little something to get my stomach to accept the plethora of pills I cram into it with my morning cuppa, and besides, this is my daily allotment of chocolate, a necessary ingredient in quality-of-life. Since I have my mocha first thing and delay breakfast till about 8:30, I can still get a full set of carbs in for breakfast. That's 30-45 grams. You try reading labels to see how it works!
I'm supposed to have a bedtime carb. Many days I'm just finishing supper in time to run a test strip before bed, and a late carb just wouldn't get tested. So I choose no snack, a slice of meat, or if it's early enough, maybe a slice of toast, possibly with margarine and garlic. Hold the garlic if it's raisin toast.
The reason for a bedtime carb is that the liver tends to decide by morning that there's not enough sugar in the bloodstream and releases some of its store, shooting blood sugar levels up. It doesn't seem to happen to me. So I don't take the bedtime carb as a religious mandate.
One side effect of the change in diet is its effect as a diet. I've been losing weight, slowly but surely. Steve noticed, as did Steph. Apparently mostly it's around my middle, something greatly to be desired, but not really noticeable until I stand up. However, the uniform man-shirt I wear for work now buttons at the bottom button, and those are designed to taper in where we girls taper out. Monday I go in for a weighing on the original scale from 2 1/2 months ago, and find out if all these different scales in all these different offices are uniformly set. I figure it counts more on the same scale. If all are equal, two weeks ago it was 14 lbs. down. Or 29 lbs. less than my overall max.
The good news here is that I can pretty much monitor the blood sugar and treat the allergies on an ongoing basis if the state shuts down or I've exceeded my insurance limit already. The surgeries I already figured out will need to be postponed, unless I happen to win the lottery.
Yeah, that'll happen. Of course, the lottery office also shuts down July 1st if the state does.
But the two most important things will get taken care of.
And Koda can come back and sleep in my room again, after a few months. That's not to be sneezed at. Hopefully.
Showing posts with label allergies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label allergies. Show all posts
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Monday, May 31, 2010
Bye Bye Fish
It was finally time. I'd been threatening to do it for a couple years now, always derailed by something or another, notably the size of the job. Occasionally even a renewed interest trumped the bother and kept it all going for a bit longer. But now, the help I'd been getting was gone again, and it just got to be way more effort than reward, so... bye bye fish.
It all started twenty years ago, when my youngest, Paul, asked for an aquarium of fish for his X-mas present.
What on earth for?
But, I finally gave in, got a 10-gallon tank and the accessories, and, against all advice, stocked it full of fantail goldfish. It turns out the experts were right: everything died. We had no biological filter developed, ammonia levels built up, and they were poisoned. Start over, slowly, and they started to survive. The tank sat on the counter of the pass-through between kitchen and dining area, handy to watch while eating. When I started visualizing their fin motions while driving, I realized I was hooked. The ten gallon didn't really use all the space available, but a 30 gallon would, and a family hobby was off and running.
We joined Minnesota Aquarium Society, aka MAS, learned a lot, gained access to experts and exotic varieties of fish and plants. Relocating to a house gave us a basement to turn into a fish room. More tanks filled with more fish of more varieties, and we started breeding them, gaining points and awards in the club. Ponds got dug in the back yard for koi and goldfish, lotus and waterlillies, water cannas, water hyacinth, water lettuce.... A pair of 300 gallon stock tanks joined the basement clutter for wintering goldfish, and for raising babies.
Who knows where it might have gone, if it hadn't been for my puffy eyes and asthma. Asthma?!? I'd never had asthma in my life! Where did this come from? Apparently, I was allergic to something, and since it was worse after taking care of the fish, it had something to do with them. The scratch test proved it wasn't the dogs or cats, and I finally talked my doctor into a patch test. Itchy itchy itchy, but she finally took the patch off, and... everything was red! She had to place the grid over my back to sort out what I really was reacting to and what I wasn't. The first thing was the medical adhesive used to hold the patch on, and I kept reacting to that for about two miserable weeks. Can't scratch, and that makes full removal a bit tricky. But the grid sorted it all out. I'm allergic to nickel.
Apparently it's common among Swedes. I'm a quarter Swede. Lucky me.
But how's this relate to the fish? Well, it was much worse after touching/feeding out bloodworms, one of the best foods for tropical fish, especially if you want them healthy enough for breeding. Usually these are found in ponds in small amounts, and it's not the worms themselves that cause the problem. Commercial quantities are harvested from what is euphemistically called effluent, which concentrates things like nickel and other metals as well as the crud the worms actually eat. I touch worms, later touch eyes, and Poof! I pour out dried worms, they go airborne in tiny particles, I breathe, and hack-hack wheeze. (Once I spilled some in the kitchen, and Mom thought to might help to turn on the fan to clear it up. I had to leave the house.)
So, we cut way back on the hobby, keeping only the vegetarian goldfish and koi. Of course that didn't last, so we restocked one tank, the 75-gallon, with tropicals, just for fun this time, not breeding, staying away from bloodworms. Of course that wasn't quite fun enough, so we added pineapple swordtails, and when livebearing threatened to overstock the tank we added predatory fish and found something of a balance. Then the knees went bad, it got harder and harder to keep up with only one tank, and they started getting neglected.
It was finally time.
I drew a bucket half full of tank water, and started siphoning/cleaning the rest. Plastic plants came out, driftwood and "African Root" pieces got searched for hiding critters - found one! - and set aside, air and heat disconnected. The ancistrus were the first fish caught. It had been one of those wedged in a hole in the African Root, and he flopped out on the basement floor, and easy catch for me. The other one, the albino, went and "hid" in a corner, easy to net. These guys eat algae and wood, having big sucker mouths with rasping teeth on their underside.
Next to be caught were the butterfly fish, our top-level predators. They normally hang on the surface, still as a dead leaf, until prey wanders in front of their mouth, and a big gulp sucks it in and snap! Dinner. They had been raised on baby swords, until we were finally down to three adult males. Floating flake and pellets plus an occasional bug made their diet, until recently we tried feeder guppies. Since none remained at cleaning time, we drew the obvious conclusion. I hadn't thought they had grown until we went back to the fish store for the guppies, and saw they were twice the size of the butterflies for sale there.
By the time the water was down to about five inches left, it was possible to start catching the swords. They're very fast and skittish, and it takes some practice.
That left the loaches. If we still had some, that is. Years ago I'd put in three horsehead loaches and four kuhlis. They love to burrow in gravel, and for years all I had seen was the occasional horsehead sticking up from the gravel. or darting across the tank when I got too close in gravel cleaning. I thought the kuhlis died, until one day I was taking some pictures of the fish, and noticed as one picture was expanded to full screen size on my laptop that way back in a corner were four heads sticking out in a clump. They lived! The flash caught them where I'd never seen them before. Even with that kind of encouragement, I had no idea recently with the neglect whether or how many might still be alive.
What I did know, having it etched on my brain by accidentally killing a huge loach hiding in the gravel of an "empty" used tank I'd bought once, was that I'd need to pull out the gravel and go through it by hand to find every possible surviving one. Ice cream buckets make handy scoopers, and can be set next to a large pail for hand transfer and sorting of gravel. I did find a piece of polished snowflake obsidian I'd dropped into the tank which had gotten lost in the gravel, but no loaches in the bucketfuls of gravel. They were, however, starting to appear in the bit of water left in the tank, scurrying through the puddles and over the gravel to the next puddle in their efforts to escape both my net and their lowering water levels. I stopped siphoning and started netting, occasionally removing more gravel to eliminate hiding places. In the end, I had 7 loaches, two very achey knees, and an arm that decided now would be a good time to start reminding me it hadn't healed yet and was about to get even!
But the loaches had all survived!
Even if I wasn't sure, now, that I would.
After calling the pet store to verify Sunday hours and their willingness to take back the fish for new homes (I pled "tank disaster", imagine what you will), I rested, cleaned up, and had Paul load the bucket in the car for me. I also made him go back down to the baasement to turn off lights and cover the gravel so the cat wouldn't decide it was a great new location with a new style litter. It does seem to attract them. Once I had quit, it was all over and I had nothing left for a couple hours. Well, except pain reminding me why I'd been putting this off for so long.
Later that afternoon, discussing this with my brother over the phone, he asked if the store paid, even in store credit, for the fish? What I got out of it was a lower electric bill, not having to go down those stairs twice a day to feed them and turn lights on and off and do any more water changes. In other works, that would be a "no."
It all started twenty years ago, when my youngest, Paul, asked for an aquarium of fish for his X-mas present.
What on earth for?
But, I finally gave in, got a 10-gallon tank and the accessories, and, against all advice, stocked it full of fantail goldfish. It turns out the experts were right: everything died. We had no biological filter developed, ammonia levels built up, and they were poisoned. Start over, slowly, and they started to survive. The tank sat on the counter of the pass-through between kitchen and dining area, handy to watch while eating. When I started visualizing their fin motions while driving, I realized I was hooked. The ten gallon didn't really use all the space available, but a 30 gallon would, and a family hobby was off and running.
We joined Minnesota Aquarium Society, aka MAS, learned a lot, gained access to experts and exotic varieties of fish and plants. Relocating to a house gave us a basement to turn into a fish room. More tanks filled with more fish of more varieties, and we started breeding them, gaining points and awards in the club. Ponds got dug in the back yard for koi and goldfish, lotus and waterlillies, water cannas, water hyacinth, water lettuce.... A pair of 300 gallon stock tanks joined the basement clutter for wintering goldfish, and for raising babies.
Who knows where it might have gone, if it hadn't been for my puffy eyes and asthma. Asthma?!? I'd never had asthma in my life! Where did this come from? Apparently, I was allergic to something, and since it was worse after taking care of the fish, it had something to do with them. The scratch test proved it wasn't the dogs or cats, and I finally talked my doctor into a patch test. Itchy itchy itchy, but she finally took the patch off, and... everything was red! She had to place the grid over my back to sort out what I really was reacting to and what I wasn't. The first thing was the medical adhesive used to hold the patch on, and I kept reacting to that for about two miserable weeks. Can't scratch, and that makes full removal a bit tricky. But the grid sorted it all out. I'm allergic to nickel.
Apparently it's common among Swedes. I'm a quarter Swede. Lucky me.
But how's this relate to the fish? Well, it was much worse after touching/feeding out bloodworms, one of the best foods for tropical fish, especially if you want them healthy enough for breeding. Usually these are found in ponds in small amounts, and it's not the worms themselves that cause the problem. Commercial quantities are harvested from what is euphemistically called effluent, which concentrates things like nickel and other metals as well as the crud the worms actually eat. I touch worms, later touch eyes, and Poof! I pour out dried worms, they go airborne in tiny particles, I breathe, and hack-hack wheeze. (Once I spilled some in the kitchen, and Mom thought to might help to turn on the fan to clear it up. I had to leave the house.)
So, we cut way back on the hobby, keeping only the vegetarian goldfish and koi. Of course that didn't last, so we restocked one tank, the 75-gallon, with tropicals, just for fun this time, not breeding, staying away from bloodworms. Of course that wasn't quite fun enough, so we added pineapple swordtails, and when livebearing threatened to overstock the tank we added predatory fish and found something of a balance. Then the knees went bad, it got harder and harder to keep up with only one tank, and they started getting neglected.
It was finally time.
I drew a bucket half full of tank water, and started siphoning/cleaning the rest. Plastic plants came out, driftwood and "African Root" pieces got searched for hiding critters - found one! - and set aside, air and heat disconnected. The ancistrus were the first fish caught. It had been one of those wedged in a hole in the African Root, and he flopped out on the basement floor, and easy catch for me. The other one, the albino, went and "hid" in a corner, easy to net. These guys eat algae and wood, having big sucker mouths with rasping teeth on their underside.
Next to be caught were the butterfly fish, our top-level predators. They normally hang on the surface, still as a dead leaf, until prey wanders in front of their mouth, and a big gulp sucks it in and snap! Dinner. They had been raised on baby swords, until we were finally down to three adult males. Floating flake and pellets plus an occasional bug made their diet, until recently we tried feeder guppies. Since none remained at cleaning time, we drew the obvious conclusion. I hadn't thought they had grown until we went back to the fish store for the guppies, and saw they were twice the size of the butterflies for sale there.
By the time the water was down to about five inches left, it was possible to start catching the swords. They're very fast and skittish, and it takes some practice.
That left the loaches. If we still had some, that is. Years ago I'd put in three horsehead loaches and four kuhlis. They love to burrow in gravel, and for years all I had seen was the occasional horsehead sticking up from the gravel. or darting across the tank when I got too close in gravel cleaning. I thought the kuhlis died, until one day I was taking some pictures of the fish, and noticed as one picture was expanded to full screen size on my laptop that way back in a corner were four heads sticking out in a clump. They lived! The flash caught them where I'd never seen them before. Even with that kind of encouragement, I had no idea recently with the neglect whether or how many might still be alive.
What I did know, having it etched on my brain by accidentally killing a huge loach hiding in the gravel of an "empty" used tank I'd bought once, was that I'd need to pull out the gravel and go through it by hand to find every possible surviving one. Ice cream buckets make handy scoopers, and can be set next to a large pail for hand transfer and sorting of gravel. I did find a piece of polished snowflake obsidian I'd dropped into the tank which had gotten lost in the gravel, but no loaches in the bucketfuls of gravel. They were, however, starting to appear in the bit of water left in the tank, scurrying through the puddles and over the gravel to the next puddle in their efforts to escape both my net and their lowering water levels. I stopped siphoning and started netting, occasionally removing more gravel to eliminate hiding places. In the end, I had 7 loaches, two very achey knees, and an arm that decided now would be a good time to start reminding me it hadn't healed yet and was about to get even!
But the loaches had all survived!
Even if I wasn't sure, now, that I would.
After calling the pet store to verify Sunday hours and their willingness to take back the fish for new homes (I pled "tank disaster", imagine what you will), I rested, cleaned up, and had Paul load the bucket in the car for me. I also made him go back down to the baasement to turn off lights and cover the gravel so the cat wouldn't decide it was a great new location with a new style litter. It does seem to attract them. Once I had quit, it was all over and I had nothing left for a couple hours. Well, except pain reminding me why I'd been putting this off for so long.
Later that afternoon, discussing this with my brother over the phone, he asked if the store paid, even in store credit, for the fish? What I got out of it was a lower electric bill, not having to go down those stairs twice a day to feed them and turn lights on and off and do any more water changes. In other works, that would be a "no."
Friday, January 29, 2010
Drippy Nasal Post
I have a drippy nasal post. Yes, it's gross. Stop reading now if that upsets you.
What? You've never heard of one? Of course not. It's just how my mind plays with words sometimes. Perhaps you've heard of a post-nasal drip? That's really what it is, and I've only had it for a bit over a year. It's minor, really, and related to allergies, or mock-allergies, like dermatographism. In order to deal with that condition, I've been taking Claritin or its generic substitute for several years. Daily. Otherwise life is just so itchy that I can't stand it. With the medication it's only moderately itchy and only on occasion. Mostly.
Eventually the body fights back. Caffeine no longer keeps you awake, the painkiller doesn't stop the pain, and the dermatographism symptoms return. Those nice dry nasal passages that came as a side-effect of the Claritin find a new equilibrium as well. Drip. Drip. Drain. Tickle. Cough cough.
The cough started in October. Sixteen months back, that October. It came on like a cold with no other symptoms, and when I get a real cold, I go full-spectrum. I went to the doctor anyway, having managed to cough long and hard enough to pull a chest muscle. After about ten days on a cough suppressant and a muscle relaxer (that amazingly didn't make me sleepy and impair my driving) my chest felt better. I still was coughing, but eventually even that found its own equilibrium. And I learned mostly to ignore it.
Lately it's decided to tweak things just a bit more, so when I first get up in the morning, and just after I take my morning pills, it makes me cough to the point of nausea. If I'm lucky, and can hold very very still, I can manage to get through it without event. Sometimes I'm not so lucky.
No, I won't describe it. You'll thank me.
I recently switched to a different allergy medication, still OTC because I can't afford the really new ones that haven't come off patent. It's still too soon to really tell, but I haven't noticed any difference in any of the symptoms, the ones I take it for, or the ones that come along for the ride.
I do get to explain to folks that I'm not contagious, a statement met with many a dubious eye during the height of the H1N1 scare. I get to explain to my dad repeatedly that I'm not actually sick or coming down with something. (His memory is not what it was: I pretty much get to repeat that daily.) Mostly it's just an annoyance that I try to ignore, even as I think I should take out stock in my favorite cough drop company (Halls). The annoyance is kind of like a filter through which I live my life.
So with all this, perhaps you'll forgive my little twisting of the terms in referring to my drippy nasal post. There's got to be some humor in it somewhere.
What? You've never heard of one? Of course not. It's just how my mind plays with words sometimes. Perhaps you've heard of a post-nasal drip? That's really what it is, and I've only had it for a bit over a year. It's minor, really, and related to allergies, or mock-allergies, like dermatographism. In order to deal with that condition, I've been taking Claritin or its generic substitute for several years. Daily. Otherwise life is just so itchy that I can't stand it. With the medication it's only moderately itchy and only on occasion. Mostly.
Eventually the body fights back. Caffeine no longer keeps you awake, the painkiller doesn't stop the pain, and the dermatographism symptoms return. Those nice dry nasal passages that came as a side-effect of the Claritin find a new equilibrium as well. Drip. Drip. Drain. Tickle. Cough cough.
The cough started in October. Sixteen months back, that October. It came on like a cold with no other symptoms, and when I get a real cold, I go full-spectrum. I went to the doctor anyway, having managed to cough long and hard enough to pull a chest muscle. After about ten days on a cough suppressant and a muscle relaxer (that amazingly didn't make me sleepy and impair my driving) my chest felt better. I still was coughing, but eventually even that found its own equilibrium. And I learned mostly to ignore it.
Lately it's decided to tweak things just a bit more, so when I first get up in the morning, and just after I take my morning pills, it makes me cough to the point of nausea. If I'm lucky, and can hold very very still, I can manage to get through it without event. Sometimes I'm not so lucky.
No, I won't describe it. You'll thank me.
I recently switched to a different allergy medication, still OTC because I can't afford the really new ones that haven't come off patent. It's still too soon to really tell, but I haven't noticed any difference in any of the symptoms, the ones I take it for, or the ones that come along for the ride.
I do get to explain to folks that I'm not contagious, a statement met with many a dubious eye during the height of the H1N1 scare. I get to explain to my dad repeatedly that I'm not actually sick or coming down with something. (His memory is not what it was: I pretty much get to repeat that daily.) Mostly it's just an annoyance that I try to ignore, even as I think I should take out stock in my favorite cough drop company (Halls). The annoyance is kind of like a filter through which I live my life.
So with all this, perhaps you'll forgive my little twisting of the terms in referring to my drippy nasal post. There's got to be some humor in it somewhere.
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