Off topic

This post is not about politics, guns, prepping, or anything relevant to our usual topics. I just needed a place to put down my thoughts.

   I was recently diagnosed with adrenal fatigue. It has caused me to be hypoglycemic. It has also caused a hormone imbalance, low blood pressure (like low enough that I should go to the hospital almost weekly), low cholesterol.....oh yeah and I also got mono on top of all of that.
   Fun stuff, right? I forgot to mention fibromyalga also goes hand in hand with adrenal fatigue. Lila was right. She has been convinced I had fibro for years.
   My doctor is big on changing lifestyle rather than handing out meds. I like that. At least I thought I did until I was told I could no longer eat carbs or sugar. Honestly, I am just griping. I needed to cut way back on those things anyway. And I really WOULD rather fix this with diet. I have to be careful to balance any carbs or sugars with protein. If I don't my blood sugars skyrocket then drop low enough to make me lose consciousness. One good thing that has come of this is that my little Boston terrier is now a service dog in training. She had been cuing in on my lows long before I knew I was having them. I just thought I was sick. One morning she jumped up into bed with me and refused to let me up. I checked my sugars and was very low. She now alerts me when she smells the change in my blood sugar level and when I ask her to check.
   The hormone imbalance can be reversed by eating three eggs a week. I am not fond of eggs and this has been hard for me. I am learning to be creative!
   The low blood pressure can be raised by adding more salt to my diet. It is more of a long term fix though rather than a quick fix when I find myself in trouble. One way to raise blood pressure quickly is with caffeine. I don't drink coffee or black tea (yuck). Pepsi or most other caffeinated beverages are out because of the sugar content. I would just be fixing one problem and creating another one just as bad. Energy drinks can cause stroke and I am already high risk due to the blood pressure issue. So what's a light headed girl to do? I found some energy strips at our local GNC that are caffeine, ginseng, and Vitamin B. PERFECT! I keep those in my purse along with my blood pressure monitor and my blood glucose meter and my jerky. I have had to learn to carry a big purse.
   The thing that is honestly the worst is the fibro. I absolutely loathe feeling this way especially when there isn't a lot to do about it. Today is a bad day. Yesterday was worse. I have a lot on my plate and no one to help take up the slack. I can only work outside when it is cool. I can only work in the house until my body screams at me to stop. Stress shortens the time I can do anything. I have three little boys who create stress and toss it around the house like confetti. They fight, they destroy, and they make messes faster than I can clean them even on a good day.
   I feel stupid. I lose track of conversations even before they are through. I will argue a point with someone until they laugh and point out that they are saying the same thing I am. I am just too out of it to realize it. I almost wish I didn't know about the fibro. At first I was relieved to have a diagnoses of any kind. Now I have a name to get mad at. I KNOW what is causing me to feel this way and it pisses me off. Maybe it is just something to blame, but I sometimes find myself in a fury with an invisible foe. It's hard to fight an enemy you can't see or smell or touch. I can however feel it and it sucks.

Update on the girls!

After multiple days of the girls going from one illness to another I took them both to see our pediatrician this morning. I love this woman. I was worried that after the amazing Dr. the girls had in the PNW we would get stuck with a cruddy one here but that is not the case. She looked at both girls. Bug has pink eye. She gets eye drops 3 times a day and benadryl to help with the itchy eyes part. Squeak has pink eye, an ear infection, and a sinus infection. She gets eye drops twice a day, antibiotics twice a day, and a decongestant type med every 6 hours as needed. Poor baby. Both girls are closer to their usual happy selves and I am better able to deal with them since Hubs let me have yesterday to rest and recover while he helped with the girls. Add that after tilting Squeak's crib mattress and fixing her humidifier meant better sleep for me last night and a happy mom doth make. Bug gets to stay home one more day for the eye junk and then things will get a bit more back to normal.

On an annoying note the Dr. said that Squeak's ear infection looks pretty bad and she has probably had it well over a week so the ER should have caught it but of course they didn't. When I said that they did not check her ears, eyes, nose, or throat I thought the Dr. was going to go murder someone. I don't regret going but I do realize now that I need to insist on certain things here if we are seen outside of our PCP's offices.

Hair-pulling Mommy moments

Bug is sick. She has this virus thing. Hubs is sick with it again. I have it too but I rarely throw up so mine is just terrible tummy pain. Sooo I kept Bug home from school today and told her she needed to rest as much as she could. She hates that. All day she threw fits about where to lay, what to watch, what to eat. She is very like her father in that she gets horribly grouchy when she is sick. Then poor little Squeak is teething. She has always been a very miserable teether . Tears, whiny, and miserable no matter what. First she wants to be held then she wants down then she wants food then she throws it at me. Between the two girls I was about to rip out my hair. Add that I feel pretty miserable myself and it made for a very long very moody day. Luckily Squeak is in her crib sound asleep and Bug is in her room watching her Friday Disney shows. I am going to take this much-needed opportunity and curl up with a glass of juice and my book.

What do you do on those days you feel like you are going crazy and all you want to do is scream and hide from the world?

illness and antibiotics

I have a sinus infection. A bad one. I don't want to go to a dr and get antibiotics. We are not always going to have those around and I feel that I need to learn to deal with being sick and find way to get over illness without medications. I am going to do some research but I wanted to throw this out there and see what everyone else thought. What are some of the ways you keep healthy? What do you do when you get sick? What are some natural remedies you rely on?

Swine flu

I know the swine flu thing has been beat to death but now I have it (I think). I was pretty prepared because both times there was a local panic over it, I went to the store and got masks, hand sanitizer, meds ect. What I wasn't prepared for was how completely horrible I would feel. The kids got it first and are already almost over it. I on the other hand just came down with the worst of it this morning. I seriously want to crawl into a hole and die. I have a headache that makes my migranes feel like a walk in the park. My throat is sore and swollen, its hard to breathe. As fast as the kids felt better, I don't think we got it really bad. If this is mild, I am grateful we didn't get it really bad. I will keep you up to date on if I get better as fast as the boys. In the meantime, I have three hyper active boys home from school for a week. That might prove to be worse than the flu.

Mags is MIA

Maggy wanted me to let everyone know she will be MIA for a few days. The Boy is still having health issues and has to do a hospital stay to fix it. Nothing life threatening but he does need the medical intervention. She will update herself when she can.

Of all the families in all the towns in all the world.....

mine has to end up with a case of potential swine flu. Now luckily it is not in my immediate family but family I was hoping to see this weekend has potentially been exposed. My nephew has tested positive for Influenza A but the strain won't be determined until Monday. I am not sure I could in good conscious take Squeak over there even though the household we would be visiting is not the household the flu is present in. She is just about 5 months old and unable to really battle an illness like that yet. I would absolutely loose it if i did go over and she ended up sick and died and I could have avoided them. I know the incubation is short so I plan to give them until Sunday to display symptoms and then go from there but I am pretty sure that Hubs will still prefer that I not go over there. I really don't want to risk my baby.

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, I suppose that's a question.

I'm not sure I understand all the hubbub about vaccinating kids. I mean, I understand both sides of the argument. I did my research before my son was born, and I had an idea of what I wanted to do before I ever held him in my arms. I've read articles from just about every news source you can imagine, and some that probably weren't too kosher to start with. I've had discussions with friends and family. And when I made my choice, I felt comfortable in my decision.

The boy has been vaccinated. And vaccinated to the hilt. I know a lot of people don't agree with me on this. That's fine, I don't mind. My mother is a nurse, and when we were young she worked in a speciality that exposed her (and through her, us kids) to some very, very nasty things. She had all of us vaccinated with everything she could because she was so scared of bringing something home. I don't blame her. I've inherited my 'mama bear' insane over-protective streak from her, so I get now where she was coming from.

And like I said, I'm very glad with the choice I made. For instance, one of the vaccines I questioned getting for my son was the Chicken Pox vaccine. I remembered getting the chicken pox in grade school, and didn't think it was that bad. When I asked my grandmother about it (My parents had unknowingly shipped me off to Northern CA for the summer, and I sprouted them while I was with her) as I only have vague memories of ice cream and cool baths.

Turns out the reason I remember eating all the ice cream I wanted was because my fever was so high that even with the A/C as high as possible (this is July mind you) I was in serious danger of having seizures. The doctor advised ice cream to help, same with the 'cool baths' I recall. They were actually full on stick-the-kid-in-a-bathtub-full-of-ice-cubes. I guess at one point my grandmother tried to count my pox and stopped at about 800. Luckily my family had just about all had chicken pox before, so my grandma just had to suffer me.

I swallowed hard and got the Boy the vaccine whether or not people deemed it necessary. I took some crap for it, and was actually a little worried I'd over-reacted. When the Boy was about 18 months I took him to Montana to visit the in-laws. Ex-Hole was deployed at the time, and his family does a huge Fourth of July. We stayed about 10 days, and not 4 days after we arrived back the Boy gets an odd spot in the bottom of his foot. At first I thought it might be a flea bite, and brushed it off. Then came another, and another, then came the fever. I called my mom (who hasn't called their mommy in times of crisis?) and sent her a few pictures from my phone, which was enough for her to tell me to "Get off the damn phone, and call the Doctor".

I called the doctor, who said "Yep, sure sounds to me like chicken pox". I was livid! I got him the vaccine! This is why I got the vaccine! The doctor talked me down, and actual ending up doing a great job explaining it to me. That particular vaccine isn't a end-all cure-all, but it is designed to fight the most dangerous of the strains of the virus. The Boy didn't just have chicken pox, he had one of the nasty strains that was strong enough to overcome the precautions. I did some more research on my own, and found that had the Boy not been vaccinated, he might have had to be hospitalized, and possibly had long lasting effects.

We never found out where he got them. We drove instead of flying, and none of his cousins had any signs of anything despite some of them not having had chicken pox before. A few people have told me they either purposely avoided, or exposed, their kid to chicken pox. I didn't have that option. I never ever saw it coming, it just showed up and camped at my house for 2 weeks.

Yes, I got my son vaccinated. With all the shots they recommend, at the times they recommend them. Is it the choice for everyone? Probably not. But I did my research, weighed my options, and made the choice I felt was best for my son and my family.