A CAT Scan Is Nothing To Sneeze At

I'd planned reruns and pre-written blogs until the Haunted History project was finished, but I popped in to tell everyone the source of my constant head pain and sinus infections has finally been isolated.

It was in my sinuses.

Maybe I should be more specific. Various allergy/sinus/head doctors have poked and prodded me for years. A sleep study revealed I do, in fact, sleep. My allergy tests showed I was, indeed, allergic. To everything. I even had surgery to unclog a lower part of my sinuses that seemed to be causing the trouble. Still, in recent months the pain became sometimes debilitating, although I think I did a pretty good job of hiding it. Witnesses may disagree.

While typing this I realized I should have taken a medical leave from the fire department, for all the good I've done the last couple of years. What a headache.

"You expect me to sleep with this thing on?"

I found out after we got Beowulf that I was allergic to dogs, but refused to give him up. Now that he's passed you'd think maybe it would get a little better, but instead my sinus infections kept on coming and the headaches got worse and worse. The truth is, many days in recent months the headaches were so bad I was incapable of doing much of anything ... but I could still write, so I told myself it was all good.

It wasn't.

So the allergy doctor suggested a CAT scan. I patiently (because I'm the patient) explained to him that would be bad, as one of my worst allergies was to cats. I hugged Beowulf every day, but if I came within a block of a cat I ended up looking like patient zero in a zombie outbreak.

A brave photographer caught this assassination attempt.

Turns out I got my dander up for nothing: CAT is an acronym, which stands for ... um ... something medical. Not only that, but it took all of five minutes, and the doctor would be waiting to show me the results right after.

Only the doctor was called away to unplanned surgery, and I had to wait a week and a half. Just to let the imagination simmer a bit.

When I finally saw him, Doctor Herr, who's a he, didn't even bother poking and prodding much. "Your two uppermost sinuses," he explained, "are completely blocked. Nothing can get out, and that's where your sinus infections have been hiding."

My sinuses were constipated.

Dr. Herr (who's a he) didn't explain to me how the infection itself got out, but maybe it has a special pass. In any case, we could try another course of the same antibiotics that didn't work last time, or he could go down to Doc's Hardware, rent a roto-rooter, and dig that sucker out.

That's not exactly the way he described it.

"Dude, I may be a doggie angel now, but I can't protect you from a mad doctor with a post hole digger."

So at the end of September I'm going under the knife, and also under the needle and the drill, and possibly the hammer and chisel. It's more major than my other sinus surgery, but Dr. Herr (who may be a her, I didn't ask) told me if he drills through to my brain, he'll just switch to reverse. Maybe I'll come out of surgery able to speak Latin, or play the violin. Or play Latin violin music.

Hope to see you at my first concert.

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Remember, whenever you don't buy one of our books I get a nosebleed. Save the Kleenex.

A Sick Sense Of Humor

As mentioned before, I don't usually write about bad stuff unless it can somehow be made funny. Well, funny to me. That's why I haven't said much about Emily and I both being sick through the entire month of December, and now into January.

I mean, it's winter, I'm sick, it's moved into my sinuses--not exactly breaking news. Everybody's sick. People buried for five years have set off local seismographs with their coughing. You may think I'm joking, but remember: Many of those same dead people voted in the last several elections.

I got so sick I was unable to do any writing work for over a week. No editing, no submitting ... a little promoting, but that's the un-fun part, anyway. I started going into withdrawals. I also had to take time off from my full time job, but I had about fifty sick days saved up. In this one case, that's not an exaggeration.

"I could take a sick day, but I prefer to wait until I turn green."

 

At the rate this winter's been going, I'll be down to zero in no time.

It's led to certain things being said around the house that I'd just as soon not have said:

 "I talked to the doctor: She wants us to stop talking to her."

"Why do we still live in a house with one bathroom?"

"Siri, how many cases of Kleenex can fit in a Ford Escape?"

"Dr. Fauci's at the door, he's coming out of retirement just for us."

And my favorite: "My mucus is fluorescent green. Could this be Kryptonite poisoning?"

Hm. It occurs to me that this bug makes us feel exactly like having a hangover, but without any of the fun parts from the night before.

 We still don't know what it is, although Emily got a two for one case of croup. She coughed so much that at first our worried dog hovered over her. Now he curls up in the room furthest away. (He was sick half of last year. Now he's fine, except everyone keeps waking up in the wee hours to make ramen and tea.)

"Good news! They want a few gallons of my blood for a study!"

 

They tested us for flu a. through f., Covid, mono, strep, plague, rabies, mad cow disease, and something called M-Pox, which is apparently transmitted by monkeys, but for some reason we can't say so. The CDC set up a tube passage that ran directly from our back door to their tent. "Have you figured out the problem?" I asked the Doc while he was doing a preliminary check of my wallet.

"Yes, you don't pick up the dog poops enough. It'll take hours to clean up our clean room boots."

"No, I mean about what's wrong with us."

"You're trying to earn enough money writing to retire."

"No, I mean medically."

"Oh. Uh, you have an upper respiratory illness."

"Thanks. I figured that out when I started sounding like Elmer Fudd."

 

"Well ... it's a bad upper respiratory illness."

At that point he prescribed a controlled substance to Emily to quiet her cough, because people who haven't slept for three days have been known to throw kitchen implements at doctors, not that it happened here.

No pharmacy in northeast Indiana had that medicine. Apparently we're not the only people with a cough.

 But it's okay, because after a few weeks of insomnia I was able to sleep right through the coughs. As for me, the crap moved--as usual--into my sinuses. Sinus infections are like my old friends, who stop by twice a year to visit for a month. That, I know how to deal with.

Oh, and don't worry: I'm taking care of Emily. Nothing ever goes wrong with anything I'm trying to fix.

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Remember: Whenever a book doesn't sell, a doctor loses his patience.

A Hypothetical Kneed For Down Time

 Let's say some guy--not me, you understand, but just some hypothetical person--started to get a little ache in his knee. Maybe it started, for example, from lifting a sick 75 pound dog into a car, or maybe his job moved to a new place and he was climbing a lot of stairs he wasn't used to, something like that.

This is strictly hypothetical.

Now, let's say it got to hurting him, but after a couple of weeks it started getting better. So he--it could be a she--put on a knee brace and decided to mow his lawn, in the theory that it would test how serious this particular medical malfunction could be.

It would be like running your lawn mower until a wheel fell off. Which this hypothetical person also did. Allegedly.

And let's say the next day this person couldn't walk.

Would you call this person an idiot?

You would? Oh. Well, it's hypothetical. Still, you'll be happy to know that you'd be in agreement with his wife, his dog, the doctor, and himself. But if this whole thing had actually happened, you can be sure he would have learned his lesson, especially when the pain got so bad he couldn't even sit propped in a chair, working on his writing, because it hurt to much to concentrate.

Hypothetically.

Brace yourself!

 

So that guy would probably suck it up, get the x-ray, take the pain med, and stay home in a chair with his foot propped up even if the weekend weather was great. There comes an age where you can't just push through this kind of thing, even if there are yards to mow and bushes to trim, and chores from last year he never got around to. It's hard for some people to not feel productive, in one way or another, but hey--there are always books to read.

Still, it makes a person think. That's more than this person was doing when he wore himself down to begin with.

Hypothetically.

Let's face it: It's not the dumbest thing this hypothetical personal ever did.

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