February 25, 2017

Health woes

Tuesday and Wednesday's dental work has meant a world of pain on Thursday and Friday.  I must have looked like I was in a black mood the last two nights at work, but that was I was waiting for the Motrin to kick in.

Well, I also was--am--in a black mood as of late for another reason, but that's a story for another post.    

Today, the pain is much better.  The rest of the dental work is next week, then I'm off the hook for six months.  

Meanwhile, the vision field exam went...weird.  I have ptosis in one eye.  Most days it's manageable, other days it's like someone's trying to keep my eye shut for me.  I finally got fed up with it, and now that I have decent medical insurance, I decided to see what could be done for it.  

I had to go for a preliminary vision exam so they can see how it's affecting me.  I drive up 45 minutes--in the rain, of course--to the vision tech.  For some reason, all the specialists I need to see for whatever reason are located at this specific office 45 minutes away from me, and they are all scheduled on days that it's raining or about to rain.  Then I spend another 45 minutes staring at little lights, either trying to keep the eyelid just so or having to have the eyelid taped in various positions to keep my eye open.

You know the movie A Clockwork Orange?  Kind of like that, but without the aversion therapy.

I don't know how I did, other than the fact that it was a lot harder for my affected eye to do what they wanted, than for my normal eye to do the same.  I'll find out Tuesday when I meet the eye doctor...in that same location 45 minutes away from me.  Any guesses as to what Tuesday's weather will be?

I did a little preliminary Dr. Googling on ptosis.  It's not always a medical problem in itself, but usually a symptom of another underlying medical problem.  So the best cure is to determine what that underlying medical problem is and fix it.  Or they can do surgery, but that would depend on what the underlying medical problem is.  Or I can just learn to live with it if it's determined that there's no major underlying medical problem.

As of late, the eyelid hasn't been too bad, so I'm hopeful that whatever is causing it is minor.  I'd rather not have surgery if I can help it.

Of course, between the dental work, the eye issues and the unspecified cause of my black mood, I'm not sleeping well at all.  It's come to the point that I've had to blow the dust off my bottle of alprazolam and take 1-2 tabs of that in addition to my regular HS meds, just so I could fall asleep.  Staying asleep isn't happening either, but when that happens I don't take any more meds:  I just do my best to doze off again.  That doesn't always work.

If this doesn't improve, I think a call to my psych NP is in order, as I don't want to be relying on alprazolam in this way.

On the brighter side, I'm down 17 lbs.  I finally broke the 180 barrier this afternoon.  20-30 lb more to go.