Domestic Geek

I'm at that raspy, hacking cough stage of being sick. You know, the kind of cough that is so hard that you sometimes puke or pee a little (not trying to be gross, just honest). A dude at work today told me that he had heard that rubbing Mentholatum or Vicks VapoRub on the soles of your feet and putting socks on is supposed to help. Lots of Googling is coming up with people claiming it works, but no real reason why. Well, my feet are rubbed and the socks are on. We will see how well this works shortly.

One thing that seems to be helping is sucking on popsicles. Sunflower Market carries a really awesome fruit bar that is made from real pureed fruit. I had a watermelon one on the drive home from the store after work. That's my favorite flavor. I also like the raspberry one, but it has a lot of little seeds.

Well, Potomac St is back open and we're now able to drive over the new bridge. One more step down for that off ramp for 17th street off I-225 into Fitzsimons. I so don't want to live around there when that is complete.

I've got to face the fact...my body is getting old.

I'm trying to work on a pair of crocheted earrings from the July/August issue of Crochet Today while I watch Lost streaming from Netflix on my PlayStation 3. I'm using a tiny steel size 12 (1mm) hook with crochet thread and I can NOT see the stitches. *sigh* I had to bust out my Ott light with the magnifier on it so I can work on these.

I knew my eyes were getting worse and it was time to go in for an exam and get some new glasses. This reinforced that thought. Oh, to be able to afford laser surgery.

Speaking of Crochet Today, that was the first and only issue I will ever buy. That magazine sucks. The earrings are the only thing in there that I will make. Most of the patterns are stereotypical of what people hate about crochet. Most of this stuff is FUGLY!

OK, gripe over for now. Off to crochet.

I was finally starting to feel well again, then...

Wham!

My weakened immune system couldn't fight off the cesspool of germs floating around my workplace. I am sick yet again. *sigh*

I'm not exactly sure what it is this time. I'm guessing stomach flu. I started getting stomach pains around 10am, threw up my breakfast at work and then had the runs all day. Fever was 102°F by the time I got home from work last night and I slept most of the time between 5pm and 10am this morning. My fever broke sometime last night. I remember waking up at one point soaked in sweat. Gross. My stomach is still queasy now, so I'm hesitant to eat. I'm a bit dehydrated, so I'm trying to keep some water down. I know it wasn't regular flu because I never felt weak and sore like regular flu makes me.

It's amazing how many people at work are sick and still come to work. I wish our supervisors would send these people home. Instead, they are worried about work not getting done. I wish they'd realize that by making that one person stay away, there would be more work accomplished in the long run instead of having the whole staff under the weather and not being as productive.

Anyway, hoping I'll feel better soon. I'm way behind on my Ravelympics* scarf. I had hoped to be at least halfway done by now, but I'm only about a third. Between coughing making me drop stitches and having to go back and fix them to just not having the energy to even knit, I'll be lucky if I pull this off. Also, I've got housework piling up and lots of things I need to take care of. Please send me good health vibes! I need all I can get.

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you may recall this tweet two weeks ago:


I got progressively worse all day. Despite having a fever, I went to work Thursday morning. I was miserable all day, though. I had no energy and had to get people carry heavy stuff for me. Finally, about 5:30pm, I begged my supervisor to let me go home early. On the way home, I knew I was in bad shape as I fogged up the windows in the car from the fever. I pulled out a thermometer as soon as I got home and saw this:


I uploaded the pic to Flickr (which posts to my Facebook page). Several of my friends first thought I had posted a pregnancy test. Uh, no...that would be way worse!

When my alarm went off the next morning, I knew there was no way I'd be going to work that day. I called in sick and went back to bed. In fact, I ended up calling in on Saturday, too. All I did for two days straight was shiver from fever and sleep. On Sunday, I started coughing like crazy. My chest started feeling heavy. I couldn't even sleep due to the crud coming out of my lungs. As soon as I could Monday morning, I drove myself to urgent care. The doctor listened to my breathing and immediately put me on a nebulizer to help me breathe. Then I got sent in for x-rays.


I knew at that moment that things were not good. Sure enough, the x-rays confirmed that I had Pneumonia in my lower right lung. That was a new one—I've never managed to contact Pneumonia before. I was also told that I had a severe bronchial infection. I was given an antibiotic shot in my bum, sent home with more antibiotics, an Advair inhaler and some cough syrup with codeine. I was also instructed not to return to work the rest of the week.

Things were going Ok after that except for the weird hallucinations that anything with codeine gives me. I slept here and there sitting up in my recliner. Tuesday night, though, I couldn't sleep at all. I was so tired, but I just couldn't sleep. By Wednesday afternoon, I was crying from frustration at not being able to sleep. I knew I'd never get well if my body didn't get some sleep. I called the clinic back to see if one of my medicines was causing it. They claimed the cough syrup should be knocking me out. I did some of my own research on Google and found that, in some people, codeine actually causes insomnia. I decided to experiment and see what would happen if I stopped taking the codeine cough syrup and I slept! After that, I only used the codeine stuff during the day and switched back to my generic NyQuil in the evenings.

Today was the first day that I ventured out to run some errands. I did Ok as far as coughing, but I was so exhausted by the time I got home. I'm back to work tomorrow. Hopefully, it will go well. It's going to take some time before I completely recover, though. I'm told it could take a month or better before I really feel better. Man, I realy hope I never contract this ever again. Nasty stuff.

Not much to report this week. I started working on some knit Christmas stockings for Marcus and me. I decided last year that I can no longer use my old ones. I made matching quilted/cross-stitch stockings for Marcus, myself, Ursa and Skippy many years ago. It hurts now to pull them out and not be able to hang the dog ones (I'm teary as I type this), so I retired them. I purchased the Knit Christmas Stockings book and asked Marcus to pick out which one he wanted. Of course he picks the most basic one and then picked red/green as the color he wanted. Not original, but that is OK. I asked for his input and I'm going to make what he wants. When they are done, I'll post a link to the completed project post on the craft blog.

Marcus and I are celebrating our 17 year anniversary this week (10/28). We continued our tradition of getting Endless Shrimp at Red Lobster to celebrate last evening. We had a really awesome server, it was cold and snowy outside (just the way Marcus likes it). We had a really nice time.

I realized last night that Mayor Tortimer never gave me my golden fishing rod for catching all the species of fish in the Animal Crossing: City Folk game on our Wii. Grrrrr. To say I was upset was an understatement. I searched forum and cheat sites trying to figure out why I hadn't received it. I kept trying to tell myself that it is only a game and not that big of a deal, but I was genuinely disappointed. I open the game this morning and ta-dah!...he's outside my house with my fishing rod. D'oh!

I started my Netflix membership back up, so I've been on a movie watching kick. I'm also really pissed off at network television at the moment. At the start of the season, I picked which shows I would DVR and which shows I could watch online and which shows I would just have to give in and watch live if I wanted to see them. I had a schedule with all of my bases covered...or so I thought. The stupid networks keep changing when their programs air and a couple of shows I thought had online episodes do not. Then you throw in a hour episode here that screws up the schedule or a season premiere weeks after the other shows start that I hadn't calculated into the fray. It's maddening. I understand why they do it, but it still infuriates me to no end. You can't even do like you used to — watch one show the first half of the season and then watch another show during repeats — because there is no repeat season anymore. Show a few episodes, a couple of weeks of repeats, a few new episodes. Never coinciding with any other show's schedule. Annoying.

Marcus rented Scribblenauts for my Nintendo DS from Gamefly, so I played that this past week. Interesting little game. I'll have to get that one day. I went ahead and sent it back for now, though. I've got other stuff I need to be doing instead of being addicted to yet another video game!

Well, it's that time of year to get the wishlists in order. I guess I'll start tackling that later today. The weather is supposed to be halfway decent today, so I guess I had better get the oil changed in my car before it snows again. Lots to do today, so I'd better get to it.

10/27/09 - ETA: CBS had repeats on last night — showing shows from last season. WTF is up with that? Why do I want them to show stuff that I may now already own on DVD? Lame! Network television sucks!

I just wanted to pop in here quickly let everybody know that I had my gall bladder out last Thursday, thus the lack of posting again. I was in the hospital all last week. I'll post a little more details about the ordeal later. For now, I'm just trying to get back to "normal."

After our dinner over at Nina's last Saturday, she realized the chicken she had purchased was organically raised and was probably the reason they were not as large as she normally got. It got us to discussing how they put hormones in everything lately, which can not have a good effect on us humans. Especially the estrogen hormones they put in milk. It's a likely cause to the increasing number of men with "man boobs" that you see everywhere. Marcus was a little horrified about this as he was not aware of the practice of giving cows additional hormones to increase milk production. We're going to be switching to organic milk.

My grandmother was a strange and complex woman. She had a pretty hard life, had been widowed twice and had a career as a nurse. I always found that an odd choice because she was a rather hard and gruff woman. She'd get mad easily and hold grudges forever. She was stubborn and fiercely independent, yet she also let my uncle and his family walk all over her. Even though she was in my life for 17 years, I really didn't know her very well. She was not very forthcoming with feelings or sentiments and being a shy child, I didn't push to get any closer. It's sad, really, because she was the only grandparent I really had. I still loved her, though.

When I was either a Junior or Senior in high school, my grandmother got really ill and had to be hospitalized. She was in for quite a long time — complications from a staph infection she had picked up from her nursing, I believe the was the diagnosis. Looking back now, though, even though she was never officially diagnosed as such, I am wondering if she was also suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. She was becoming increasingly forgetful and toward the end of her life, she didn't recognize any of our family members. I remember one incident where she was extremely frightened because she thought we all were strangers. The whole experience really unnerved me and I quit visiting her shortly after that — a decision I still feel a little guilty about to this day. My parents were forced to move her to a nursing home and she died a short time afterwards. I remember being relieved to hear of her passing. We were lucky in that we didn't have to watch her suffer in that state for years, no did she have to suffer, as well.


The sad fact is that the exact cause of Alzheimer's Disease is not known (they do know that it is genetic) and there is yet still no cure. There are estimates that more than 5 million Americans now have the disease. Not only do those afflicted lose their memories, their lifestyle and their dignity, but their friends and families are left to shoulder the burden of caring for an individual that does not seem to know or recognize them. Through efforts such as the annual Alzheimer's Association Memory Walk, millions of dollars are being contributed to raise awareness, fund research and provide care and support to the victims and families affected by this horrible, debilitating disease.

The event is held every fall in communities all across the United States. Chances are good that someone you know has or will have Alzheimer's Disease. That someone could be you. If you'd like to help raise funds for the cause, click the image above to find a local event in your area. The walks average 2–3 miles.

The walk coordinators are looking for volunteer Team Captains to sign up immediately. If you wish to participate as a Team Captain, make sure you sign up right away so as to have plenty of time to organize your team and its fund raising efforts in time for the walk in your area. The process of becoming a leader is simple and there is plenty of support and documentation available on the site to assist you in putting together a successful team. They suggest you gather 10 of your co-workers or family members, design a team t-shirt, hat or banner to bolster team spirit and keep track and motivate your team members to raise funds.

While I can't participate in the walk that is taking place in Denver's City Park on September 15th myself this year, I will be sponsoring several of my online friends that have signed up to walk. Colleen over at SimpleKindOfLife.com has even signed up to be a Team Captain in the Orlando, FL area. I'll put this on my list of activities to participate in next year, though. It's definitely a worthy cause and a disease that we should make every effort to eradicate. I hope someday we can free Alzheimer's Disease sufferers from the prisons of their own minds and relieve the stress and burden placed upon their loved ones.