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Something I learned today: Pain indexing [Sep. 12th, 2008|08:58 am]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmidt_Sting_Pain_Index

The Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index is a pain scale rating the relative pain caused by different Hymenopteran stings. It is mainly the work of Justin O. Schmidt, an entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center. Schmidt has published a number of papers on the subject and claims to have been stung by the majority of stinging Hymenoptera.

* 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
* 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
* 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
* 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
* 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
* 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
* 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
* 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
* 4.0 Tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
* 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.
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Update of [info]takayla [Jul. 10th, 2008|02:33 pm]
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So, yesterday was all of her deep scanning tests. In the morning, she had an EEG, then ultrasound on the carotid artery on the right and left side of her neck. Then she got a Doppler scan on her temples, eyes and the base of the skull. In the afternoon, I caught up with her to be with her when she got a 35 minute MRI where they scanned for pretty much everything.

The second the MRI machine turned on, all the iron in my blood rushed to the front of my head, and I passed out onto the floor. Apparently these vitamins I took were very high in ferrous minerals.

Okay, that's a lie, but it woke some of you up! The MRI was actually very dull, and [info]takayla slept through part of it. The staff was VERY NICE, and I want to point out the Russian-accented technician was a sweet man, in particular. He knew how to deal with nervous patients, and let me sit in the room with her during the scanning. I read my CompTIA Linux+ exam prep book most of the time, looking for signs of panic, of which she had none. The only complaint she has was her shoulders got sore during some of the initial process, and the pressure waves made by this thing in the air actually lightly vibrated my exam book at first.

The scanning was just a precaution to make sure she didn't have anything else wrong before they prescribe "migraines" as the official reason.
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Update on [info]takayla [Jul. 2nd, 2008|11:32 pm]
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Well, it's a mixed bag. On one hand the neurologist (who was a super nice guy, but a McCain supporter) doesn't think it's a stroke or epilepsy, so yay for no complications associated with that. He said it was the classic symptoms of an "aural migraine," which is like a shock to the brain (the same symptoms caused by epilepsy, but with different roots). They will do some more tests and deep scanning next week to make sure they didn't miss anything. The downside of this is there's no cure, and no warning it's going to happen again, if it ever does. So... that kinda sucks. She's not exactly pleased with this news, despite so many people replying to the diagnosis with positive enthusiasm.

Now I have migraines, and man, did I learn a lot about them today. I was diagnosed before my favorite doctor, and I never asked the last two doctors about them. Mine is more of a classic kind, with headaches and shocks that leave me partially numb and paralyzed on the left side of my body during the most extreme attacks (which I rarely have these days, thanks to medication). I learned about stuff [info]apeyanne would have probably told me (if I had asked I am sure) like how the brain cells have a positive and negative side, how they can be "neutralized" and how they are essentially like capacitors. Suddenly, this part of my mind awoke with a "Zzzz... huh? What?? Oh, god! Save this info!" As a computer geek and troubleshooter, the human organism is just a vastly more complex computer to me.

She starts a treatment for the after effects tomorrow, and gets the deep scanning next week. Wish her luck.
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[info]takayla update: still working on finding a neurosurgeon [Jun. 30th, 2008|01:48 pm]
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No news yet. I stayed home with her today, because she's tired and worn out all the time. She still has episodes of confusion, but they are pretty mild, like aftershocks. My view on it is that she's improving and almost back to normal, but there's no prediction if this is a one-time thing, or something that could happen again. This is extremely serious, and I think [info]takayla has accepted that now.

The recommended neurosurgeon was, sadly, some guy who operated in a hospital very far away, so we called our doctor's office and are trying to get referral to one close to us.

Again, this has been medically determined not to be a stroke, micro-stroke, or anything related to the classic stroke of a blood vessel in the brain bursting, getting clogged, or having loud parties near the cerebrum. She's had a CT scan, had blood work, and so on and was ruled it out pretty quickly. It's definitely neurological. She has a genetic tendency to have these things, since her younger sister died from MS, her mother had severe and crippling arthritis, and she has osteoarthritis that has affected her nerves before.

People have offered to help, and I don't know what to ask for. Um, prayer? I don't know.

[Last update for today:]
- Doctor finally called back at like 5:15
- He recommended two doctors
- He also said, "If they don't get back to you right away, you come to my office tomorrow and get the tests started."
- He's not fucking around, either. Like most doctors (including my previous one who I loved but retired), he's a great doctor, but has a terrible staff, which explains the delays in getting back to us
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[info]takayla hosiptalized - she's home now [Jun. 29th, 2008|04:30 am]
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A few of you know, via the grapevine, that [info]takayla went to the hospital last night. Before I start off on this, let me summarize by saying she's back, and sleeping now, but we're unsure about what's going to happen over the next few days. She's currently "fine" in the sense that her symptoms have gone away, but the next few days we'll hopefully have a better idea what happened. What I am about to tell you will lead to a premature conclusion, so to be fair, she did not have a stroke. But we are not sure what happened.

It started at about 7 at night. She had been out most of the day, and felt no different than any other day. But as she was making herself dinner, she started to go blind. It started with a peripheral vision, but within a few minutes, she couldn't see out of one eye. We were watching the new Futurama CD, and she had to kind of scroll around the TV screen with her remaining vision.

I was really alarmed by this, but she pooh-poohed it. I said fucking around with losing sight is a very bad thing, and we should go to the hospital, but she wanted to wait it out. Then I got a distracting phone call from a friend who was visiting his mother in the hospital after a very close call with a serious bacterial infection in his mother's bloodstream. I was not aware she was even ill. But I did my best to be sympathetic, but I was watching [info]takayla while she was on her laptop on the bed next to me. At one point, I started to see her left side droop a little, which is a symptom of her Bell's Palsy, a childhood ailment of hers. Maybe droop is the wrong word, I would say "stop moving" would be a better description. She seemed to be frozen in place as she was on her laptop, like someone hit her with a stun gun. Then she came back. I wondered if I had imagined it. But I got this... sixth sense... that something was wrong. She called the doctor, and got the answering service.

When I got off the phone, she said that she was having numbness spreading down her arm. Then it spread to her face. She also expressed difficulty in speaking, like she could think words but not say them right. The doctor's answering service called back and said to go to the hospital.

At this point, I went from "we should go to the hospital" to "I am going to call an ambulance." She talked me down to having someone drive her there, which started this circus of finding a ride. We tried to call Anya and Brian, but they were out doing something with the Korean relatives from out of town, and unreachable. Then I tried to call [info]stodgycat, but he and his family were out of town. Luckily, our long-time friend Gay was available, and she said she'd drive us to the Fair Oaks hospital. Before she got to our house, all the weird symptoms faded away, but I was convinced she was having a classic stroke. She just didn't look good, either. She felt very tired, like she had been drugged, and was thirsty all the time.

So we went to the hospital, and everyone there was very nice (which, as you know how I bitch about customer service these days, was a welcome refreshment). They did blood work and a CAT scan, and determined it was not a stroke because while the symptoms seemed like it, there were some classic signs they look for that said it definitely was not a stroke. First, the blood work came out clean. Next, the CAT scan showed nothing wrong with any blood vessels in the brain. Plus the symptoms were not consistent, and affected both sides of her body, moving around, which seems more like a pinched nerve or something else wrong neurologically. They briefly touched upon epilepsy, but said it was too early to make such a serious diagnosis (along with all the complications involved in declaring someone epileptic). They sent her home a few hours after we got there.

So she's being referred to a neurologist, and that's all we know for now.

She couldn't sleep because I snored, so I am in my den, hoping maybe to sleep during the day or something.
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Bleah, pollen, asthma... bleah. [Apr. 17th, 2008|02:55 pm]
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I am staying home today because my asthma is still not better. I may ask for higher meds if this does not improve, like go on Advair or something. An annoying side effect of asthma, for those who have never had it, is belching. It's because you strain so hard to breathe over a long period of time, you swallow lots of air. I have been burping so much, my throat hurts. I still don't think I am sick, per se, because I don't feel achy or feverish or anything other than a standard asthma attack. Maybe it's being sneaky.

I am also missing-a da Pope Mass.
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For the medics among you [Jan. 19th, 2008|10:25 am]
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I thought you'd like this, from a user "DiePilot" from the Ars Technica board, who is a medic with the military. He has these things called "fentanyl lollipops," which is a lollipop form of a painkiller drug with a potency approximately eighty times that of morphine.
I get the mega 800mcg ones, tape them to the casualty's thumb, and then tell them to suck their thumb when it hurts. They do this, then pass out eventually. Their thumb falls out of their mouth, and I don't have to worry about overdoses while they're in the helicopter.
Brilliant.
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Still not at 100% [Dec. 19th, 2007|01:23 pm]
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I think I have been "well" since Tuesday morning, but my lungs are still trying to collect gunk. I have had this happen before I feel better from a "minor cold" and a few days later I got pneumonia. Of course, that's not a forgone conclusion by any means, it's just after a few times of this happening, you get scared every time. I keep taking an expectorant (Mucinex), which seems to help. Perhaps I am worrying too much.

Last night I was well enough to catch up on some of the backlog of housework (laundry, dishes, trash) and moving my stuff from my old den to the new one. CR now had half of my old den available to him, including my old desk. I miss that desk because it was very functional and useful, but it was a particle board thing from Office Depot I got in early 1999, and it barely survived the move from Reston to Fairfax as it was. The base is split and sagging. But I paid $149 for it and it lasted me 9 years of good service, which is roughly $16/year. That's a good value in my book.
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We lost power last night [Dec. 17th, 2007|04:01 pm]
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Apparently power loss freaks Widget out. He was on the bed, shivering. We didn't get power back until I think 3 or 4 the next morning, which was fine with me because it went out at 10pm, and I wanted to sleep anyway. Kudos to me for buying a new, atomic clock synchronizing clock radio last month. It came back up, set itself, and my alarms went off on time.

I am recovering from the bad cold. The rattling in my lungs has diminished, and I broke fever last night. I still have a very stuffed head, I am dizzy from the stuffed head, I don't feel like eating, and my nose is seriously chapped, but I think I should be back to normal tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. So far, [info]takayla and CR did not seem to get sick.

In other news, I am one of many DC residents anxious to get a new package from Libertyville, Illinois. Shipping to us has been erratic. If you have no idea what I am talking about, it's a surprise. If you're waiting for one, too, or know what it is, don't spoil the surprise in the comments section.
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Out sick today [Dec. 15th, 2007|02:41 am]
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Whatever cold I got kicked my ass. I was sick Monday, then got better, then was a little out of it Wednesday and by Thursday evening, I was really starting to slide downhill.

Friday I spent trying to sleep, but work kept paging me. I didn't have to answer because people were there, but we have this customer with 4 servers and a monitoring station that had all these Windows updates, and they kept going up and down, up and down, up and down with each update. I'd be paged when the went down, when they came back up, and then the monitor would also page to say it hasn't heard from the machine that went down. On no wait, there it was.

On top of that, people kept calling the house. Over and over.

Then later, I had to go out and get party supplies for [info]takayla's party tomorrow. And I need to set everything up, including house cleaning, decorating, and other preparation.

I am up at 2:30am because I got paged again, and I can't go back to sleep. I have a fever, my nose is running, I keep sneezing, and I ache all over.
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