OK, THIS IS RIDICULOUS

I thought my last blog was the end of my ‘troubles’ but I was wrong.  I was doing pretty well but I noticed that everything I ate tasted funny, even wine!!  I put up with it thinking it was just a residue of my anesthetic.  But it got worse so I googled it and found out I had thrush.  (This was caused by all the antibiotics and steroids I had taken.)  I phoned up my surgeon and they told me to call my regular GP so I phoned them and got a prescription for some kind of mouth swishing stuff that tastes like bananas.  I was supposed to do that for seven days.  I did this religiously and it did help but not completely.  I also ate lots of yogurt, a natural probiotic.  So that was one thing.

Of course I have been off my arthritis medicine for 6 weeks so the arthritis I have on the top of my foot has flared up as well as several places that plague me.  I figure I have to live with that until Oct 24th when I see my surgeons and get new X rays.    But last week I started to get sharp pains on one side of my head.  They are quite painful and happen as often as every 15 seconds up to about 2 minutes.   Have had this before but usually a few years apart.  And no-one has really helped it and just gave me more pain pills.  So I decided to wait it out cause it usually goes away in a couple of days.

By the third day I was miserable and sleep deprived so I went over to the clinic on the reservation and hoped they could do something.  But they were very busy and I would have to wait 3 hours to get to see a doctor.  I just couldn’t see me waiting that long so I headed back home.  I took some tylenol and toughed it out.  The next day it started out the same but it gradually eased up and eventually stopped completely.  I had a great day, thinking it was over.  The next morning it started up again with a vengeance.  By Saturday I had enough so I asked Dale to take me to the Colville hospital.  Even though I am pretty sick of hospitals by now, I couldn’t stand it any more and the drugs weren’t helping.

We were lucky and there was no wait.  After the nurses were through with me I was visited by a lovely Dr. originally from Sri Lanka who examined me thoroughly and said that I had an enflamed nerve running from the neck up to the ear.  She said that she would inject some lidocaine into my head at the trigger point and wait 20 minutes to see what happened.  She felt around until she found the area she wanted and did the injection.  After 20 minutes the pain had dulled a bit but was still there.  She then injected a healthy dose of steroid into the same area and we waited some more.  It eased up a bit more.  She sent me home with a three day supply of 60 ml of Prednisone and told me to ice the area for 15 minutes every waking hour.  This evidently keeps my skin from denting in, seriously!

I had forgotten to bring some tylenol with me so the ride home was pretty rough.  At home I took the pain pills and the prednisone and took a nap.  By the time I woke up the pain had almost disappeared.  What a relief!!!  I thought that I’d sleep like a rock that night but I forgot just how strong prednisone is and I was wired until midnight.

But now I will have to contend with a flare up of the thrush, lucky me.  Grrrrr

surely more to come….