Animals

This turkey was hanging out in the tiny park attached to the Inn at Harvard. 

A petting zoo helps lower our blood pressure on Thursdays.

No Turkey

I've been searching for the turkey reported to be in Harvard Yard.  No luck.  But today I spotted a lovely crane.

In more serious news, JB has both a dried lime and a dried grapefruit at work.  It doesn't make for a pretty picture.

Our special germ-detecting camera proves that this is a case for the Health Department.

This is one toxic fruit sculpture!

More Gifts!

 From Rosemary, a kitty-cat mug with a tail handle and different sunken pictures on both sides.

 From Dad, a foot-spa to soothe my aching feet.

 Also from Dad, a new bag to soothe my soul!

Foot Fix

At last the mystery of my foot pain has been solved!  I turned my right foot in Rome, but kept walking on it until I got back to the U.S.A.  But all the R.I.C.E. only worked for a bit.  I'd try to do a triangle in yoga class, and the owie would come back.  Today the physical therapist manipulated my foot until she found the trouble spot, illustrated below.

The ouch bone was too mobile, and its excessive moving around caused the hurt.  The PT taped my foot in such a way to give the battered bone a rest.

Next I get to got to ankle class.

Menopausal Misnomer

I see from my PubMed searches that the medical community is now calling hot flashes hot flushes.  I approve the change.  I didn't recognize my first hot flashes for what they were, because of that word flash.  Flash, streak, lightning, glare, dazzle, instant, split second.  This is what hot flash implies.

Sela Allen

But what actually happens is a gradual heating-up and cooling-down of the head and chest lasting a few minutes.  When I first noticed the change, I thought I was getting a fever, since my face got flushed, "But, no, it's better now.  Uh oh, it's back."  Finally I had the hot-flash-ah-ha moment. 

 

The above graphic makes the process clear:  hormonal flux trips the on switch of the Heating Element, which slowly heats to its maximum, then turns off.

You can buy all sorts of items claiming "They're not hot flashes, they're power surges."  I don't know why a power surge is better.  Perhaps the word power is felt to be so good, that it hardly matters that power surges blow out your electronics, and that you buy surge protectors against them. The promoters of that slogan probably are thinking of something like Sela Allen pictured above; but real menopause is not like that.

Menopause tchotchkes are fine; I have several myself.  But they shouldn't  be too silly.  We are old enough to know better!

Mechanix Monday

Finally, the back cover of the August, 1933 Modern Mechanix and Inventions.  We close Mechanix Mondays with some clever devices for enhancing our health.

Snookums's Ultrasound

It seems she has a kidney infection and will have to take antibiotics for 5 weeks.  But this is much better than having stones in the bladder, about which the vet was worried.

I'm a New Woman!

So I got my abscessed tooth removed, and my transformation is comparable to that of the protagonist of Shirley Jackson's story The Tooth.*

Now, if you haven't read that story, I wish you would.

The dental surgeon tried to sell me on an implant, though it will probably cost $4K and not be covered by insurance.  Rosemary, my neighbor, has had several molars removed and still has no trouble eating.

* Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1949 pp. 265-286.

Health Update

In my last exciting post, I was waiting to get a CT scan that would confirm or deny rumors of an aneurysm.  Since then, a big chunk fell off one of my back teeth.  The dentist said it was abscessed down to the nerve, so that probably was the cause of my face pain.  (I'd had my teeth checked a year ago when the pain was only mild discomfort, but she couldn't find anything wrong then.)  Then today I found out that my CT scan was normal.  This was a medical mystery worthy of House!

A Look Inside my Head

As previously reported, I was suspected of having trigeminal neuralgia.  The Harvard Health Service's main neurology guy had recently left, so it took a couple of months to see a neurologist.  He didn't think it was TN, and I got an MRI.  The MRI confirmed that I didn't have TN, but I may have an aneurysm.  The aneurysm could be pressing on a nerve and causing my facial pain.  However, the suspected aneurysm could be merely me moving in the MRI machine.  So tomorrow I get a CT scan, which is fast enough to avoid wiggle misreads.
 Since trigeminal neuralgia is rare and difficult to treat, and aneurysms are common and simple to treat, this is good news.  In the meantime, enjoy my brain.

The Pain! The Pain!

It looks like I have trigeminal neuralgia. That seems the most logical explanation for a bout of right-side-of-the-face pain.



It had been disguising itself as dental pain for many months. Then one evening it attacked! Ibuprophen alone could not win against this rogue nerve.


So my doc gave me some Tylenol laced with codeine. Now I know why I so enjoyed having a cold when I was a kid: it wasn't the missing of school that so delighted me; it was the codeine.