Sick, Sick, Sick

Hello my 2 readers. How are you?

I have been SO sick since my last blog. I had to take 6 ½ days off of work over the last 2 weeks. Thank goodness for weekends! Actually when I posted my last blog it was just the start of my glorious illness. Hopefully after this weekend I will be all better!

I had sinusitis for a week. I made it through that with herbs, etc. It was horrible, but I did not have to resort to prescription drugs - and especially the dreaded anti-biotics. Yay!

Then . . . just when I thought I was all better, here comes the worst illness I’ve had since morning sickness with my youngest child. It’s been nine years since then - and that was horrific and lasted 2 ½, well probably 3 months, all told.

What did I get? Somatitis. What is that? Very, very, very painful. It’s canker sores all over your tongue and mouth and throat. It’s inflammation so bad you can’t swallow anything - not even your own saliva - with out swallowing hard and grimacing because it hurts so bad.

I read on the internet that gargling with cayenne pepper will help soothe a sore throat. Oddly enough it did help my throat, but it made my raw tongue hurt worse.

I swear Sunday night I was lucky if I slept an hour. Every time I would almost fall asleep, the pain of swallowing would wake me up. Finally by 6 o’clock in the morning I was so exhausted I fell asleep for about ½ hour and drooled all over the place. Gross!

By Monday morning, I was ready to do just about anything to get rid of the pain and be able to swallow and sleep again: take anti-biotics, eat sea slugs, whatever. I didn’t care. I had gotten to the point I was speaking in one word sentences and writing my family notes, so making a doctor’s appointment was an arduous task.

I called the doctor’s office at 8 am. Earliest appointment: 11:35 am. “I’ll take it,” I slurred. It’s hard to talk when your mouth hurts really bad.

My husband took me to the doctor’s office, thank goodness. I finally got in and the doctor looked in my throat. He said, “You don’t have strep throat, you have somatitis. I’ll do a strep culture anyway, just to make sure, but I doubt you have it.”

He left for a few minutes to do the strep culture. Those have gotten really fast to do, apparently. He came back and said, “No, you don’t have strep, so I can’t give you any anti-biotics. I can give you prescriptions for lidocaine and liquid lortab. And eat lots of Popsicles, they help. By the way, you have the sympathy of all the staff. Somatitis is really, really painful.”

Then he thought for a moment and said, “Not that all our patients don’t have our sympathy, but you really earned our sympathy today.”

After that, David took me to Walmart for drugs and Popsicles. I was SO EXCITED to get those drugs. I wanted to get a teaspoon and take them in the store, but I restrained myself. Believe me, as soon as I got home, I ran in to the house, broke out a tablespoon and took the maximum dosage of liquid lortab. Even that burned, but it was worth it. The real godsend, though, was the lidocaine. Praise the name of the person who invented lidocaine! I few swishes of that and I couldn’t even feel my mouth and tongue. I was so happy I wanted to cry happy tears for the first time in days.

Ya know, when I called my kinesiologist, she said I was having a healing crisis (that's when your body is trying to clear out toxins from a past illness or incident that caused the toxins to build up in your body). Some of my illness was new stuff, she said, but most of it was old. I was trying to figure out when I had ever had this before, then it hit me. I had it when I was 8 or 9. Wow. That’s really old - I’m 40. Wonder what brought it on the first time?

I barely remember having it before, but I do remember the pain was excruciating. My mom took me to Dr. Lambert and got me some xylocaine and I was in heaven once I got the xylocaine. I don’t remember the pain lasting more than a day or 2, though.

The really good thing is that my mouth hardly hurts at all now. Yay!

So, that’s what I’ve been up to.

David and the kids? Dunno. Too sick to care until today. Thank god I’m not a single mother. How do they do it?

David and I did take all the kids to see a new dentist this morning. I think he looks kind of like Keanu Reeves - ’cept about 25. He seems nice enough. His office is brand new. Not even all the offices in the building are finished yet. Jordan Landing. What can I say? That place has popped up almost over night.

Each of the kids except Jarom has 1 cavity. That’s kind of funny, because Jarom is the one that has to get 4 teeth pulled. Like his mother before him, his teeth are too big for his mouth. Poor guy. The things we pass on to our children we wish we didn’t . . .

Well, better go.

Deep Thought, Courtesy of Jack Handy:
“Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it "dull" that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn't seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?”