if I am a good girl and some luck finally comes my way,
I will be on the road to recovery, if not better, by the New Year !
When I get more answers and have my Plan-du-Healing established, I'll share the situation with yas.
But for now,I'm going to tell you about the diaper on my back.
I am lying here in bed, going batshit crazeeee because I'm not allowed to do much.
And the doctor neglected to tell me how little I would be able to do,
so I didn't plan on it. I didn't give the apartment the overhaul scrubdown I was going to because I had a migraine, and I didn't stock up on books and magazines and snacks.
So I'm just kinda stuck here in Purgatory until Friday.
When Eli comes home from work he helps me out (mainly picking things up off the floor, moving things, scratching where I can't reach, and helping me change clothes).
The Backstory:
We decided to investigate a metal allergy.
We know I'm allergic to nickel and a few other alloys,
and considering I've got a titanium alloy implant in my jaw
that hasn't been working out as planned, and I've felt like hell basically since the same time I had it put in, I needed to know. Just to make sure.
Especially considering my bone marrow graft around the implant is depleting.
Bad, bad bone marrow graft! You stay where I put you! The hip you came from is a little less from your removal, and if you decide to go all AWOL, all the bones in this body will be very unhappy with you!
So after a hellish 2 week battle with the insurance, we got me set up for a patch test.
Which, apparently, you can't get from an allergist, even though it is testing METAL ALLERGIES.
You have to go to a dermatologist.
And no offense to dermatologists, but I've never met one I liked.
They tend to be pompous, self-obsessed jerks that demean your questions and sneer at your pimples and are overly-interested in Botox.
The last dermatologist I went to had a dozen Hermes scarves mounted and framed behind glass!
And hung all around his office as decoration. And since I know how much those scarves cost, I threw up in my mouth a little bit. And again, when the nurse was interviewing me and taking notes all blase on his iPad. Ew.
And this dermatologist doing the patch test is okay. He is still kind of a bastard, and makes you sit in the waiting room for an hour listening to his 5 dumb receptionists jabber about waxing their faces and how many carbs that has in it, but when he tried to demean me over a medical issue I was talking to him about, and went off on medical jargon he assumed I wouldn't understand, I owned his face.
Note to doctors:
Don't think using semi-technical terms in front of someone who has spent their life in and out of the hospital with a multitude of health problems is going to impress them. Or shut them up.
Just yesterday the doctor said "The implant is in your jaw, right? That's what you'd call it, your jaw?" And I said "no, my left lower mandible."
He later asked me about passing out -- "What caused you to faint?"
I responded "It's just typical syncope." He stopped being disparaging after that.
So, the patch test.
I had to call the oral surgeon, and then the implant company, and then their supplier to get the exact components in my metal implant and the screw holding it to the bone.
[P.S. when they tell you in school that chemistry and the Table of Elements will come in handy one day, they're right]
Then the dermatologist ordered all the metals we would be testing for.
Yesterday I stripped down and they pasted these little cubes with dabs of extracts from those metals on my back.
They led me to believe that they would be testing 12 metals and I would just have a strip across my upper back that would prevent me from showering for 5 days.
They didn't say that they'd be testing more than 40 things on me, and that they were going to cover my entire back, then tape me up for 30 minutes with strips of this terrible, non-sticky tape and leave me feeling like I'm wearing a frontless corset.
I feel like I have a turtle shell, or a soiled diaper on my back. I could go on forever.
Eli keeps saying he sees the wraps and thinks I've had a skin graft!
It forces me to walk completely upright, and I can't bend over to pick things up, or reach around, or move my arms much because they taped it so awkwardly.
They didn't warn me my movement would restrict me so much I would be essentially bedridden for a work week. Thanks, doctor.
And, to top it all off, I didn't sleep last night.
I can't sleep in this thing! It is a major operation to roll myself over, I get stuck to the mattress, and my hair keeps getting stuck in the tape. I tried lying on my stomach, and that was as close as I got to actually relaxing.I hope I can handle this for 5 days. It is honestly making me claustrophobic.
And the way they taped me I can't even decently sponge bathe myself.
Speaking of which, why does everyone think sponge baths are so hot?
They're awkward and disagreeable, and every other antonym of sexy you can think of.
And sponges, and anything foam-related is plain hateful.
After this, hopefully having a bare back and the freedom of movement
is something I will never
take for granted again.
As for now though,
it should keep things interesting at the Jazz opening game tomorrow night ! Woot woot
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