Drugs (+/-)
Personal Log, Stardate MWSEUSE27Jan2007AD*
First the pig weigh-in from this past Thursday: 151. Ta-da, no increase, no decrease. BTW, these weigh-in's are witnessed, else the Pig Clug won't count them.
A bit of Catch-Up
I was flustered at not knowing how to find Joanne Schubkegel's family, so I started learning a bit more about finding people online, and eventually found them via an obituary notice.
The wealth of people-related info in the obit led me to think I could apply that to finding my some of my own relatives, and I did. That led me to documenting some family tree info. That led me to assessing software/web service options for documenting family trees. That led me to creating a family tree on ancestry.com. That led to spending most of my waking hours last weekend to working on the famly tree, and I've come up with over 400 people so far. Some go back as far as before the War for Independence, and as far away as England and Germany. And yes, I appear to have another hobby.
You can visit my tree here. A link has to point to an individual, apparently, so this link goes to my Dad. You have to create a free account to log in an see anything, and you can't see living people such as myself. If you want to see the names of the living family members, send me an email so I can turn that on for you.
The Attack of the Drugs
A couple of weeks ago, I went to my dentist to get a large old filling replaced in a molar. He had to drill it a bit more to get rid of some decay that had occured under the filling, taking the hole very close to the nerve. He filled it up and put a temporary crown on it, so I could go back this past Thursday and get the permanent crown.
But... it had been very sensitive since the temp was put in, and getting worse, so he decided to wait another week before finishing to see if it would calm down. Not only did it not calm down, but the whole side of my jaw was hurting to the point of fighting tears. So, I call the doc, the doc calls in a perscription for pain and gives me a referral to an endodontist (specialist in tooth nerves and root-canals).
Carla picked up the pain medicine, vicodin, and when I got home that evening I took a dose and went to bed. Now, normally, I avoid pain medicine, because even though it's very nice to have less pain, they always cause trouble. After I had surgeries on my sinuses and prostrate (not at the same time), those docs gave me perscriptions for narcotic pain relievers. Carla and I decided we'd wait to get them filled and see if I really needed them. I didn't. I guess because I've had a lot of practice with pain, and the surgeries didn't really add much to my "standard" pain. Besides, I had scheduled those surgeries and could take a few days off work.
Well, this was unplanned, and I had a lot of work to do, so I took the vicodin thinking that would help me get a good night's sleep, and I could go to work after the endodontist fixed the tooth. Except that didn't work.
My back muscles had been bothering me all week (possibly a reaction to the increasing tooth discomfort), and I've been taking muscle relaxers for that. But I forgot to take that before going to bed, and my back muscles kept me awake. During the night, I took another dose of vicodin (yes, it was after the minimum time between pills, according to the bottle), and I took a dose of muscle relaxers. Big mistake.
That kept me awake for hours more, because it worked too well -- I didn't hurt. At all! I couldn't sleep because I didn't hurt at all for the first time in about 20 years. I didn't realize how much pain I've been in for the last bunch of years until it quit last night, and the absence of pain was too dramatic a change to let me sleep until I was exhausted.
So, I got up and Carla took me to the endo-guy at 9, and left there a little after Noon having had a successful root canal. Boy, did that get rid of the tooth pain! The whole side of my face was numb, including my ear! I came home to take a nap, hoping to go to work after that. Unfortunately, all the other "regular" pain and muscle spasms were in full swing, so I've pretty much been a mess since then.
No, I haven't taken any more vicodin. Sigh. There sits the bottle with lots of little pills that will make all my pain go away. Ah, but it only makes the pain go away temporarily, and if you keep using it, it takes more and more to do the same job, and the side-effects get worse and worse. Since I'm still acutely aware of how nasty it was withdrawing from Cymbalta, I'm not about to start something like that again.
Oh, well, someone else from my company has taken over the writing task that I tried to work on today (God bless you!), so I have the rest of today and tomorrow to get used to my old self again.
I guess my medical problems would be good for a soap-opera character, except they'd have to leave a lot out to make it believable...
In lieu of pity, I, Quantum John, would request that you make a financial contribution to some worthy charity. 'Cause there's lots of folks way worse off than I am. Besides, I'm already readjusting well enough to blaugh again!
* Star-date abbreviations as follows:
MW=Milky-Way (Galaxy)
S=Sol (star system)
E=Earth (planet)
USE=Eastern United States (local planetary continental area)
27Jan2007 (local planetary date designation)
AD (local planetary date-era designation)
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