Update on My Health

Ok. Update on my health status.

The blood pressure grey zone....

Last night we went to labor and delivery and were there for 3 hours for observation. After my doctors appointment on Monday, my doctor said to come in immediately if I had a headache...sure enough I developed one. They hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff and monitors for Charlie. My blood pressure bounced all over the place but seemed to be consistently above 130/95. I've had readings around 141/109 and so therefor I am kinda in a bit of a dangerous place. The problem is that I am too high risk to be just a regualr OBGYN patient, and I am not at risk enough to be in labor and delivery. So, here we stay.

Being pregnant is a lot of things. Glamorous is not one of them. Due to the increased blood pressure, the docotor ordered a 24 hour urine test. Let me explain what this is...You get a bucket to put on the toilet, and a huge bright orange jug. Every time you pee for 24 hours you catch it and put it in the jug. Since we had to go to labor and delivery, I had to bring my jug with me and continue doing the test if i had to pee while at the L&D department. It was to remove any last shreds of dignity I had left before Charlie comes.

So, test results have come back and my liver and everything are good and Charlie is good...but my headache is WORSE. I feel selfish for being concerned about my own health. But, in all honesty this headache is so bad i can't imagine pushing and delivering with it. I am on bed rest and i just keep crying because my head hurts soooooo bad. I want relief but I dont want to go back to Labor and Delivery just to be sent home after 3 hours and being EXTRA uncomfortable for nothing.

I am just miserable.

I feel guilty for feeling worried about myself.

Charlie is VERY healthy though.

So, if my blood pressure stays how it is. I will be induced next Friday. I go in tomorrow for more blood pressure tests, and then next week pretty much every day leading up to Friday. That's all I got. I am not proofing this because my head hurts. Deal with it.

Just a Quick Note

I am going to compare the end of my pregnancy with a car.

That car would be a 1983 Fiero with 231,987 miles on it.

Things are breaking on me I didn't know could break.

I take myself in to the shop and they fix one thing, and then something else goes.

I have had a cold for like 4 weeks now.

I got a hangnail, and now it's infected. I've never had a finger infection before, and all I can think of is when my friend got one in her thumb nail. She didn't eat solid foods, and her immune system was shutting down. I'm just fat and pregnant. I don't want to have ANYTHING infected when I go into labor. Then again, what better time to have gaping flesh wounds? Not like there won't be any other point of entry for germs to come get me. I think I may be overreacting about the hangnail.

Out of nowhere my blood pressure has gone sky high. I kind of thought this might happen as I have been all sorts of Mel Gibson lately. At one point while shopping I just looked at these two women and honestly hated them enough to consider how I would kill them. OMG! Seriously what is wrong with me?!? Plus I get super irritated when people look at my face then look at my belly then look away. I want to go nuzzle my belly on them and say, "Yeah! What now bitch?!?" If this baby doesn't come out soon I might start lighting things on fire.

That's why I've been quiet on FB and with my friends. I don't want to offend anyone but my leash is short. REALLY short. When I am not busy being annoyed by the strange odd pain i have in my upper stomach and back, and by people in general, I am thinking about the HUGE dome my kid is gunna have because of his father. Then, I am thinking how's that gunna fit. Pictures of him as a kid show his head being almost square. It's enough to make any girl have a panic attack.

We got this stuff to calm down Gigi for when Charlie comes home. I am fairly certain it dog weed. She totally looks like Cheech right now. Put on some Floyd and she would be golden.

I think I might try Gigi's dog treats.

They will be checking my blood pressure again tomorrow. If it's not good, they will induce me. I am full term so there are no worries. Except about the size of the head that will be coming out of me and the normal worries of child birth complications.

I am going to go eat Gigi's dog treats now.

6 Months of Voodoo Allergy Treatments

When I was 18 I totally went to a Voodoo doctor...

Well she may not have been a voodoo doctor, but she was a hack.

I can't believe I didn't think to tell you guys about this sooner.

As I have mentioned before I have long struggled with the ups and downs of depression. As a parent, my mom didn't want to place me on antidepressants while I was still "forming." So, instead I went to therapy for a little while and found the COOLEST therapist ever...like one of those once in a lifetime people that I had like 1 session with this lady, and still wonder about her to this day. My mom also believed that a lot of the symptoms of my depression were possibly related to allergies. (I slept a lot like every 18 year old) My depression just wasn't responding to things like allergy pills.

One day she came to me with information she had found on a local morning news program about this "doctor" (I can't even capitalize it here) that does non-traditional allergy treatments. Her name, I shit you not....Dr. Tenpenny. Ugh. This lady's office was also about an hour and a half from where we lived, and in order for the treatments to work you had to go once a week.

Let me walk you thru a "test" and a "treatment."

The "test" consists of them pulling out this wooden block filled with tiny little glass vials that have all kinds of different substances in them. You name it they had it in a vial...If they didn't have something you thought you might be allergic to they told you to bring it in and they would "scientifically" place it in a vial for use. You would lay down flat on your back on a flat table, and they would place a glass vial in your right hand. Then, you were instructed to raise your left hand with your fingers together pointing at the ceiling. The "doctor" would then take her hand and push against your raised arm. If you were able to resist her pushing you didn't have an allergy. If your arm went down easily, you had an allergy. Which brings us to phase two.

"Treatment" consisted of placing that vial in your hand and using surgical tape to tape your hand shut while you sit there quitely for 20 minutes in the dark and then she comes in with a little clicker type thing that feels like a bic pen and clicks it up and down your spine. Then she unwraps your hand and you are suppose to avoid said allergen for 48 hours. Then, you are CURED!

Holy shit balls this was crazy!

I did this for 6 months.

What on Earth made me go for so long? I think part of me liked the weirdness of it. How many people can say they had these allergy treatments? It was totally upscale voodoo. I can't believe that woman charged people money for that crap. Let alone where the hell did she do her medical training? A recycling center? That's where she got all the little glass vials? Exactly how high does one have to get to come up with this idea? Where in the world is this considered a legit treatment? What part of the world did this crop up? I can't even come up with a place because I don't want to insult any group of people this way.

I still suffer from both allergies and depression.

Dr. Tenpenny hired another "doctor" into her practice.

I assume she met him while he was digging thru a dumpster at Chili's.

He was super creepy.

When he took a turn doing the clicker on me and started telling me about his new Jag and recent divorce we stopped going.

It took creepy old man seduction to convince me that this was not worth our time.

Allergies and depression have nothing to do with one another.

Always Look Both Ways

Yesterdays old lady assassination attempt got me thinking about cars....

I didn't drive for the two years we lived in England.

Well. I drove once. "To hospital" because Chad was fairly certain he was going to die via blooples.

I have really bad "car luck."

I am not exaggerating when I say that left hand turns (like in Zoolander) scared me, so I would actually go different routes to avoid making left hand turns for the first 6-8 years I drove a car. I know it's not normal. Not much about me is.

My first couple of years of college I commuted up to school. It was a 45 minute drive (53 minutes with only 2 left turns instead of 6), and I spent more than my fair share of time in the car. It was terrible when snow season came around as well because Kent was in the snow belt. Anyway, one month I got rear-ended 3 times. IN ONE MONTH. Insert your creepy jokes here. So, I started hating driving a little bit more then.

Then, I got in a pretty bad car accident skidding home from school one night. It totaled my car. Then, I got my next car. I had to LEARN to drive it. It was a stick shift. For like the first 5 months I drove it I would get out of the car and high five myself for not having a nervous breakdown for fear of stalling out or rolling back into someone. I loved that car. Unfortunately, it didn't love me. I couldn't see out the back window because of the spoiler. There was a month that I didn't drive it at all because the engine wouldn't turn over and no one could figure out why...then we realized I was trying to start it with the glove box key. A mouse sacrificed itself in the heater and made my car smell like rotting fried chicken for months. And then the other thing....

Right after I graduated from college I had to find a job. ANY job. I ended up getting hired to be a bank teller at a local bank chain. I had to go to 2 weeks of training and the drive was a little over an hour each way...I wasn't used to waking up early. It was hard on me. During the second week of training I was heading to class early one morning and had been running late. I was making my way thru the streets of Kent, and sipping coffee out of my Thermos. It was one of those early morning haze days and it was wet and kinda dull outside. I remember seeing the light above me turn yellow and figuring I shouldn't stop since the roads were wet.

Let me preface this story with: HE WAS FINE. EVERYTHING WAS FINE. DON'T JUDGE ME.

So, I proceeded thru the intersection while simultaneously hitting a kid on a bike. I remember seeing the bike jump and his hip hit the hood of my car. His helmet bouncing off the windshield as I slammed on the brakes. His skin made that streaky noise as he slid off the hood. I got out out my car as people all stared in disbelief. I start asking him if he's ok. I ask if he knows his name... his response is a snarky "YEAH!" Then he says to me, "THE SIGN SAID WALK LADY!" I look a little more closely and realized this kid was around 14. AND HE JUST CALLED ME LADY. I was like 23. Go F yourself kid.  I ask if his mom is home and if he knows her phone number...He was so irritated by my questions. I hear sirens in the background as I get on the phone and make the MOST AWKWARD phone call ever. "Hi, my name is Liz. I just hit your son on his bike. He is talking and seems ok." Silence. She then says, "Did he forget to look both ways again?" Wow. Just wow. You basically just said your kid gets an F in self preservation.  He gets on the phone with her and says he's fine, but the ambulance has already been called. So, we wait. I am replaying the whole thing in my head and the witnesses are saying the exact same thing as me...the kid just flew out of the middle of a cemetery and didn't even check to make sure cars weren't coming. I found out later he was late for soccer practice. He must have also been late on the day they discussed looking both ways before crossing a busy street. Meanwhile, the cops show up and try to bully me. They tried to tell me I wasn't paying attention because I was sipping coffee. They took my license away from me that day. Told me I could come pick it up at the station the following week once they found out if the kid was injured. The cop told me to come alone, after 6 PM on Tuesday. I remembered thinking how odd that sounded. Ummmmm, how's about no. Last time I heard you aren't supposed to just "keep people's licenses" either. I mentioned my mother was an attorney at this time, and that I would be bringing her along as well. That's when he told me I could still drive my car and that I wasn't in any trouble, they just didn't know how to proceed from here. Right.

I get back on the phone with the Mom and she says to me that my voice sounds familiar. I agreed with her. She then asked if I went to school at Kent. I said I did, and that I just graduated. She was totally one of my Professors.

My insurance paid for a new helmet and bike wheel for her failure of a son.

I got a ticket for "running a red light."

It was yellow.

Her kid rotates tires for a living now.