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Tomorrow, another visit with the oncologist to see what the results of the testing say – hopefully, there will be results and this won’t be another trip into town for nothing.
Today, though: planning. Planning for next season and next year. This afternoon, I managed a tour around the rear garden to see the pitiful state of affairs. Blight has taken hold of several frames of tomatoes, and the bugs are munching on the cukes and zucchini like it’s their personal buffet (although I did manage to squash a few during my brief stay outdoors). The corn is dead, for yet another season, and I’m of half a mind to just give up on that altogether. The new round of lima and green beans are not thriving, as they say, and are either dead or dying. Some of the transplants I managed to get into the frames before going into the hospital are still alive, and even thriving, including a new round of Cherokee Purple tomatoes and some bell peppers. The watermelon and butternut squash transplants don’t look horrible, but they’re skinny things and I’m hoping they make it through.
The other part of planning involves chickens. We decided before I went in for surgery that next year we’re going to raise our own chickens for meat in addition to those we keep as layers. This is not without logistical issues, of course, and it’s likely that only my brother and myself will be able to actually butcher the birds, but that’s fine. Other family members can handle the less gruesome parts, like packaging the birds, whole or pieced out, once they’ve been dressed. That seems like a fair enough division of labor to me.
Since the birds are generally processed at about 12 weeks, and the chicks are available year round, we could do multiple groups per year if it turns out to be worthwhile. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be, as how often do most people really get the chance to raise their food almost from start to a very definite finish? We’re not quite on the path to hatching our own chicks here, and probably never will be since that would require a rooster, and that simply isn’t happening around here. I’m content enough with ordering chicks even though it isn’t as completely self sufficient as would be the case in a utopian universe. Now, if it really comes does to the end of the world as we know it, complete with zombies, we’ll rethink that part of the equation. Until then, we plan for stocking the freezer with freshly butchered, pasture raised chicken, right off the property. There are, no doubt, worse things in life.
Yesterday was the visit with the oncologist to go over the pathology report and to decide on what course we should take now that I’ve been fileted and stitched back together.
One out of two isn’t bad.
The pathology report says the margins are clear, the lymph node is unremarkable, and so forth, just as we’d heard verbally previously when the oncologist popped into the hospital room to visit for a few minutes. The question as to how to proceed from here is not quite as clear cut, and revolves mainly around whether this lesion was a (very slow) metasasis from the original cancer five years ago, or a new primary lesion – that is, if it’s a groupie or a new act entirely. His reading of things leans him in the direction of it being related to the first cancer rather than a new primary occurrence. As he pointed out, I already had one very rare thing, and to have yet another very rare thing, similar to the first but in a totally different area – well, let’s just say I should be winning the lottery with those sorts of odds working for me.
They sent my tissue out for DNA sampling to try to make the determination. If it is related to the first, then we’re done: the surgery removed it, the margins are clear, and there doesn’t seem to be any lymphatic involvement. If it’s a new primary, then we’re going to have to chart a course, whether that means going back in and removing the entire upper lobe (since wedge removals for primary lung cancers have a higher recurrence rate) and/or radiation and/or chemo. With the former, we’d go back to monitoring, with CAT scans every three months to see if anything else makes an appearance. With the latter, I’d be out of commission again, with another long recovery in front of me. So, we’re hoping for the easier route, especially since I’m healing very well and recovering quickly from the surgery.
The visiting nurse removed my staples today, and except for a couple of tiny tugs here and there toward the end of the incision, I barely felt any of the 31 staples she pulled out, because it’s healing fantastically. In addition, she indicated she heard breath sounds in the upper lobe, and my lungs overall were clear. Those are great indicators that my recovery is very strong. My mom insisted on putting honey over the incision where the little holes from the staples were, as honey is a great curative, so I have a couple of drain bandages on over the butterflies the nurse put in place. It stung a little at first, mostly near the lower end of the incision, since that is both more sensitive skin and and also a bit more ragged, skin-wise, but that has faded into a dull overall ache as the skin begins to slowly stretch from its release.
Last night I made crab stuffed mushrooms with leftover crab meat from yet another seafood night here on Saturday. Not a ton of work, and quite tasty although I had to give up on the mushrooms themselves after two and just eat the stuffing because I kept getting pieces of mushroom hung up everywhere. Tonight, continuing to use up the leftover meat, I made crab and artichoke dip (cream cheese, sour cream, parmiggiano, white cheddar, salt, pepper, garlic, diced onion, smoked paprika, a couple of shots of hot sauce, lemon juice, crab, artichoke, and a couple shots of worcestershire sauce, mixed and baked at 350 until warmed through). Quite good, and it will reheat well for midnight snacking.
Tomorrow: roasted red pepper soup. I am utterly convinced that getting back into the kitchen does wonders for recovery.
Ever have a day when things are going pretty well? You’re busy, but in a good way, you’ve got a hobby that you’re trying to turn into something more, and by golly, that’s going pretty well too, although with the requisite speed bumps, your family is healthy, you’re eating well enough given whatever particular restrictions you have, works is not completely kicking your tail, and you’ve gone out for a drive, perhaps up tp the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for your next big plan dinner, or maybe even to to the home improvement store for that next little thing for your project. The sun’s out, it’s not blazing hot just yet, you’re feeling productive and indeed you are getting things done, the music is blaring, and overall, you think – well, you’re not thinking much of anything beyond all this, really, because this is a lot to keep in your head all at once.
Then the car runs out of gas and you drift to the side of the road. The dinner guests cancel, a family member calls to tell you a sudden mass of locusts have appeared and have eaten half your plants to the stems, the sun goes behind a bank of clouds so huge it blocks out the entire rest of the sky, lightning strikes right next to the front wheel of the car, the music slides into one of those annoying car ads with the screaming announcer until they get to the fine print. And you run over an egret while getting the car safely off the road.
OK, so it wasn’t that bad. Still, five years to the month from the original cancer diagnosis, here we are again. Those of you who have read the travails of recovery here know pretty much how this came about, but here’s the shorter, mini version for those who don’t: five years again, I was diagnosed with oral cancer despite having no risk factors at all. Surgery, radiation, and chemo later, plus scans over several years, and in July 2009, the date of my last PET scan before all this, I finally got the all clear. Then I started having teeth pulled due to the damage to the jaw and teeth from the radiation, which for me involves hyperbaric dives to promote healing and help prevent necrosis of the jaw bones, to which I am now susceptible due to the aforementioned treatments. As part of those dives, back in October they took a chest xray in addition to an EKG, and saw a slight shadow on the upper right lung, but nothing defined and nothing significant (i.e., it could have just been something on the film, and given my previous scans and all clear, nothing anyone thought was anything). In May, after another tooth extraction, it was time for another xray because it had been six months. This time, whatever unknown radiologist reviewed it noticed a difference between the old and new (a “new nodularity” as they call it) and thank you to whoever that radiologist was! From there we went to a CAT scan, a PET scan, and a biopsy, which turned out to be inconclusive, probably due to the sample size. Upshot: surgery to remove a wedge of the upper right lung, along with a lymph node against the trachea that looked suspicious.
Why, one might ask, go through the pain of lung surgery for an inconclusive biopsy? As my oncologist pointed out, the way things light up on a PET scan like this dime-sized lesion did are often not anything else. Beyond that, we have my terribly strange history as far as weirdo cancers that I should not have. So, surgery it was, on the 6th, and on Friday the pathology report came back: the lesion was cancerous after all. The lymph node, thankfully on the report, was “unremarkable”, so it appears to have been confined to just that one area. The oncologist said the report indicted the margins were clear, but small – and to my mind, that looks like another round of radiation treatment coming to follow up on the surgery, something we will discuss with him on Monday when we see him. I am guessing that for precautionary reasons, that’s what will be happening. I’m not particularly looking forward to it, because I now have such firsthand, closeup knowledge of how it goes, and because it will delay my fuller recovery process (garden!), but we will follow their recommendation, since that’s what needs to be done.
I’ve been home since Monday, and this week has seen some remarkable work outside by an all-female crew, doing the things I normally would be doing: mowing, weeding, harvesting, cleaning the chicken coop, and so forth. Thanks Gabs, Angie, and StacyP for your sweat equity around the homestead! I owe you.
And now, back to plotting for the fall season, as the universe has once again not been cooperative in giving me a full season with which to work, and the rest of the summer is now a wash. August is garlic time, although I’ll probably store it for a bit before planting as it’s simply too hot down here even in late August for fall garlic planting. Other items can be started in flats, like brussels and whatnot, so they’ll be ready to put out into the frames in fall. By then, we’ll also be ready to put in the next round of carrots and peas, amongst other things.
The great rice experiment of 2010 is a bust. We had thought it would be fun to try to grow our own rice, and set up a couple of bins with some dirt, flooded them, then tossed wild rice in one and brown rice in the other. A few days ago, during a lull in the nonstop rains when we had several clear, very hot days of no rain in a row, I noticed the wild rice bin was dry. I filled it again, and it looked fine, but two days ago, we noticed it was once again dry. The culprit? A leak, not previously noticed, allowing the water to slowly and sneakily drain out. The other bin has no hole, but is looking a little fetid – the problem with not having a large, open-air area with natural breezes and circulation, I suppose. There is, however, a solution to both problems: a new bin sans leaks for one, and a small recirculation system for both, akin to a fishtank aerator setup. Just enough to keep things bubbling along and keep the water from getting scummy. That will have to wait until after the hospital.
Speaking of, I went today for the pre-op ordeal, which is less than an ordeal than it is an exercise in patience. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork: a consent form for the hospital. A consent form for the doctor. A privacy advisement. Yet another questionnaire about general health, diseases, and meds I’m taking. I notice that the doctors carry their own liability insurance (I suppose so the hospital doesn’t bear the entire responsibility for whatever lawsuits might arise from something or another). A sheet of instructions about the day of the surgery. All of these things are things I’ve seen multiple times before at this point, so I’m talking along with the nurse who is rattling off the same things I’ve heard before.
Then they took four tubes of blood from me and made me pee in a cup. The latter is, I think, another way of covering their butts to make sure I am not pregnant although I have already told them I’m not.
Barring anything strange, we’re on for the 6th, where yours truly is to arrive four hours prior to the scheduled operation time, in order to sign more consent forms and to get prepped for a procedure the surgeon estimates will take about 45 minutes or so. Then they will hold me hostage for several days unless someone manages to smuggle a file in my jello so I can escape. I am not counting on this, as everyone seems to think it would be grand for me to be in forced inactivity for at least a few days.
The upshot of all of this, as we rocket toward surgery, is that I have a massive number of things to do, and little time to do them. Although the rice experiment do-over can wait, there is something else that cannot: the flats of seedlings that are rapidly becoming too large or their starter flats, and which need to be planted out in the frames. Since the seedlings have been outside since they were started, I’m thinking they should be fine in the great outdoors, but I am still leery of putting them out without being able to be here to keep an eye on them and take preventative action (like partially shading them if necessary, assuming the sun ever comes back, from the worst of direct sunlight until they’ve settled themselves). On the other hand, I know that another week plus in the flats is probably not the best thing for them. It’s something I think on while getting some new servers set up and installed so they will be ready before I head in for my version of a vacation.
Today I picked a beefsteak type tomato called Steak Sandwich (Burpee, hybrid), and sliced it open. It smelled, as most tomatoes fresh off the vine smell, like a tomato, with undertones of green vine. It was juicy, with nice, small define pockets of gel and seed, and not grainy at all, as some can be. According to my taste tester, this one could benefit from a touch of salt, unlike the Cherokee Purples we got before they gave up and died on us. Still, it was great to pick a beefsteak, long season tomato before July 4, given all the issues we’ve had around here.
And now, back to work, to continue the server setups and get as much in order as possible before I’m forcibly separated from my laptop and cell phone.
Why must people be so freaking rude? Let’s assume some things here: let’s assume you’ve been a client for quite some time, that you know how we operate, that every single issue you’ve ever raised has been addressed, and that we’ve gone outside the normal bounds of technical support to assist you. Let’s assume that I am up at 4AM because our monitoring has picked up some issue on your server, and that I go about trying to repair that problem instead of answering one of the five tickets you open, because I am not in a position to update those, and anyway, getting the problem solved is my highest priority. Do you a) say thanks and go away, problem solved; b) say thanks, ask for more details than those provided in the first ticket you opened after the problem was solved; or c) tell me it is “unacceptable” that you have to take the helpdesk’s autoresponse as an indicator that something is being done, despite the fact that you have been around for awhile and realize this means we have received the ticket and are likely already working on it before you even noticed there was a problem? If you answered (c), then you have managed to match the asinine retort we received, before we received a further retort that we were sarcastic and rude.
Good luck finding a host with proactive monitoring who will immediately bounce out at 4AM to fix your server, who owns their equipment rather than leasing it through some third party (meaning no waiting on relays of information, and so forth, cutting out the middle part of all that), and who will go outside the realm of what is normal technical support as we have done in the past, without charging you a dime for it.
Life is much, much too short to be dealing with people intent on being unhappy because Shit Happens. I am well aware – more aware than some others, at this point – that Shit does in fact Happen. You don’t see me being an ass to people around me because I’ve been affected by some random problem happening on a server.
Calzone for dinner, on the last of the pizza dough batch I made earlier this month. No mushrooms (Shit Happens!), but just as tasty with sauce, onions, pepperoni, mozzarella, and three year aged cheddar. It was probably larger than usual, and I ate almost the entire thing, which has now made me feel stuffed, but that’s nothing a good cappuccino can’t solve. Or at least help.
Made a double batch of dough earlier today, to tide me over until we’re in post-surgery and into recovery time around here. I hope so, anyway.
I am certain that my half dozen faithful readers are wondering what cliff I fell off, given my complete lack of maintenance here on ye olde blog front. What, they ask, is she doing? Lolling around, eating bonbons, instead of planting things, cooking goodies, and the like?
I’m not much on bonbons. At least for myself, not these days.
No, dear readers, yours truly has actually been doing things like whipping up batches of pizza dough for the freezer, babying plants along and harvesting goodies (six pounds of cukes the other day!), making bread and butter pickles and foisting them off on anyone within arm’s reach, cooking up some homemade french onion soup (delicious!), and pulling weeds (a losing battle).
But I’ve also been undergoing yet another round of tests, from an x-ray to a CAT scan to a PET scan to a biopsy, and on the 6th your intermittent blogger will be back in the hospital, this time to remove a wedge of lung that has a suspicious lesion on it, along with a lymph node hanging out near the trachea that also looks suspicious. None of this is good news other than the fact that a) it’s very small, and b) it’s very early, so given my overall good health, my total lack of smoking, ever (which makes it all the more ironic this second time around, having some crap I absolutely should not have), and my relatively young age, should be not as big a deal as it would be were I a two pack a day puffer with cardiac issues and high blood pressure.
Still, it’s no fun, and I’ve had enough of medical stuff these past five years to last me a lifetime – in fact, it seems like I’m making up for a lifetime of not a whole lot of medical anything, doesn’t it? And still, the same people ask the same question over and over again: smoker? The only thing I smoke is bbq on my Bradley, thanks. They’re always surprised, and I suppose given their professions, they should be, since it still surprises the hell out of us here that me, of all the people in this family, should be receiving these diagnoses. On the plus side, I’m probably the healthiest person in the family, so my odds are a lot better for recovery than most everyone else’s.
The doctor says a 4-7 day stay in the hospital (let’s aim for four here), and then six weeks for recovery (too long for me), which will put us at the beginning of planning stages for the fall garden. Once again, it seems another prime season has been lost in some fashion, this year from a late start due to an extended illness and death in the family a few months ago, and now an interruption in the height of the season due to surgery and recovery. One of these days, we will have all the pieces together for an actual, planned, well-begun, well-managed season.
The tomatoes are soldiering along as well as they can, although the heirloom Cherokee Purples went down to blight due to an extraordinary run of rain we had. The paprikas, the stars of last year’s garden, and the bell peppers are both a major source of disappointment this year, as neither are producing. The latter is especially discouraging, as I wanted to stash plenty of roasted red peppers in the freezer for those times when I want to make soup. On the plus side, as we’ve been going through all this testing/scanning nonsense, I did get some more flats started, and put in (I think) about 36 starts of a bell pepper called Fat N Sassy. If there is a more appropriate name for a pepper that should be perfect for roasting, I don’t know what it is. On the downside, these will be ready to go out into the garden proper in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll be directing traffic instead of participating fully, what with all the mother hens hovering.
The peanuts are going gangbusters, and we’ve already enjoyed zucchini, green beans, filet beans, and okra from the garden, along with the aforementioned cukes. I have kidney beans, another round of green beans, and limas popping up out of the soil – once again, score one for getting these things in before surgery time!
This coming week I”ll be working like an over-caffeinated squirrel trying to get things in order before I go down for the count. The upside is that I’ll have time, sitting around on my ass, to post some of the pictures that I’ve been taking here and there. One thing I will say is that french onion soup, delicious though it is when homemade, is not very photogenic. It surely was tasty, though.
If you were not here for the big bash, you not only missed the pleasure of my company – what’s not to love about the cook, after all? – but you also missed out on on a good time and all of this.
Would you like a closer look? Of course you would!
Pulled pork, fresh rolls, roasted vegetables (including parsnips right from Lazy Dogs Ranch!), freshly made bbq sauce.
Smoked pork ribs, broccoli gratin.
Potato salad, grilled bbq chicken, baked beans.
Homemade italian bread, lightly broiled and with a DIY bruschetta mix (tomatoes, onions, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, fresh garlic, basil).
Old standbys: dogs and burgers.
If you’d been here, you could have had yourself a sampler platter, much like this one.
 A bit of everything, please. Not shown, because it disappeared much too quickly: homemade strawberry ice cream and homemade peach ice cream, along with both bananas foster and a batch of toffee chip cookies I whipped up at the end of the evening.
If you were here: thanks for joining us. If you weren’t: perhaps next time.
But not in a bad way. Allow me to explain.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, we held a bash that (quite naturally) included a great deal of food. More on that later. A portion of that was some fish we had been keeping aside for some pescatarian friends of the family, ready to stuff with herbs and toss on the grill. They didn’t make it, so we had some nice, fresh trout awaiting something to do with themselves. Or to have something done to them before they went over the edge.
After removing the heads and cutting the filets, then searing them very quickly, we had this.
 Seared trout with buerre blanc and sauteed vegetables It was fantastic: the fish was flaky, lightly seasoned, and the buerre blanc was smooth and silky, with the tang of the lemon juice feeding through enough to give the flavor, but not so much as to overwhelm everything else. What more could you ask than to have empty plates at the end of the meal?
I do not, as a general rule, sleep well or much. My family knows this because they have to put up with my oddball hours. Friends and clients know this because it is not rare for them to receive an email from me at some horrible, zombie-like hour where I, fresh from about three hours of sleep, have logged on to see what is happening in my little corner of the world.
Most of the time, this does not bother me overly much. After all, I have a great deal many more hours at my disposal than most people, meaning I can come up with grandiose plans about various things, and also cement the reputation I have garnered of being a robot rather than a human being. Since the radiation from the cancer treatments still has not brought me any real superpowers, I suppose it’s as close as I will ever get, although I won’t be doing this anytime soon.
Some days, though, the lack of sleep brings out the cranky, especially if I am also not feeling well. Like today. This makes me want to kick someone’s ass right off the planet for tossing a nonsensical legal threat our way about information in a domain registration that she provided, even though we have pointed out what she is saying means nothing and she readily admits she doesn’t understand the “jargon” – and by “jargon”, I mean English. Apparently, she is simply terrified that one of her “fans” (she is an actress, apparently) will find out her address from a years-old cached pieced of information on google, something that we do not control, last time I checked, and do some stalker-like thing, or kill her, or both. Or something. This is the time when I want to state it flat out for people: you are just not that important. You are not fodder for the next American Justice where some crazed, obsessed person hunts you down and kills you. You may tell yourself, actress aspiring to be famous, that someone would care that much, but let’s face it here: you provided your own biographical information to IMDB which is quite handily on your own web site, and it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist or some weirdo even slightly off their meds to find you. I know: I tracked down someone, including their name, date of birth, current residence, current hobbies, other web sites they visit, and the fact that they coached little league from a single piece of information (an IP address attached to a comment they left on a blog we host). With all the information you have provided on your own, deranged psychos could track you down if they wanted. They haven’t. This should tell you something about your place in the greater universe.
A day where you think it would be nice to be able to eat and drink the way you used to. That an icy cold beer and a pile of wings would be great after sweating off a couple of pounds working on the ranch, except that you can no longer drink alcohol due to the radiation burning off the lining of your mouth and you really can’t eat wings any more because the chewing issues make it virtually impossible. That it would be great to settle in with a margarita and a blackened chicken burrito with extra sweet and hot chile sauce, but the spicy foods are offlimit now for the same reason alcohol is, and you know even as you sow the seeds in the garden that you’re unlikely to ever be able to eat habaneros or even jalapenos again any time soon, if ever.
On the other hand, on a day like today, where I’m having some trouble catching my breath and generally feeling like crap – oh, not to mention having a slight bout of anxiety over the fact that the doctor wants me to have a chest CT because of something they saw on the chest x-ray they wanted before I started hyperbaric dives after having yet another tooth pulled – it’s nice to Get Shit Done. Like sow the cukes from seed that I’ve wanted to do for several days now, for a total of about 140 seeds planted, with a little overflow from my nephew helper, who put half a dozen seeds in several holes while I tried to convince him that really, one was all that was required. I also directly sowed some more tomatoes and peppers, because let’s face it: there are rarely enough, and we intend to do a lot of preserving this year. If we have the space, I want to fill it with something. That includes the newest 8 x 4 frame I polished off today in the herb garden, with a little assist by my sister, who hauled a load of dirt and poop for me amongst the five others that I brought over and mixed in. Tomorrow, while we wrangle a scheduled CT from the hospital people and I stay out of the hyperbaric chamber until we determine what the hell is going on – and if I have walking pneumonia, I will, as I have told several people, be pissed – I will begin work on the final 8 x 4 frame for the herb garden. Tonight, I may just go ahead and sow some things in flats that really want the much hotter weather we will no doubt be heading into very soon, and set them up on the heat mats in the garage, turning on the lights for them in the morning.
It’s a day where you also get nice, chatty mails from certain clients, about their newest projects, and about being a test case who found a bad link on our site. Or from someone who understands the information (some of it erroneous) at some random, invisible data mining company is not the end of the world as we know it, which then leads in a roundabout sort of way to a discussion about critters and gardening/sustainability. Or from someone who congratulates us on ten years of putting up with all of this. Or where a pooped out puppy sleeps on the back of the couch while you work from home on a laptop, ass planted on the couch yourself, his tail slapping against the cushion now and then, his nose crinkling as he sniffs out a rabbit or turtle or whatever populates puppy dreams, every now and again his paws wiggling manically, chasing down a bird he will never catch, growling and then squeaking out what would be a bark were he awake. Or where you watch as your nephew, having discarded his swimming diaper at some point, stands on the patio in the shade, fresh from the pool, with only his water wings on, downing saltines with a slab of cheese between them, crumbs falling from his mouth and sticking to his wet chest. Or where you decide, apropos of nothing, that Saturday would be a great time for a spaghetti dinner night, and that homemade pork/beef/veal meatballs in homemade sauce, with homemade Italian bread as a vehicle for carrying butter and garlic, would be a rather fine thing indeed, even as you muse about the possibility of making homemade pasta, just to top it all off.
Or where, in general, despite never having as much time as you think even though you don’t sleep, berating yourself for not writing nearly as much as you would want to (or anything at all, for that matter), and having a list of todo items that is constantly expanding, you think this is a pretty damned good life, overall, and that you wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything.
Three consecutive days of dentist/oral surgeon visits have resulted in forced downtime for me on the ranch. On Wednesday, a visit to the dentist to address the broken tooth slated for a crown. While much of the shearing off was the buildup, some of it was the actual tooth, and what was left after that was one little stub, resulting in yet another unrestorable tooth. Luckily, we had already made an appointment with the oral surgeon for Thursday, because I could tell what was coming: an extraction of what was left.
And that’s what we did on Thursday: appointment at 10, and by 11:20 I was walking out the door, my mouth yet one more tooth lighter. This was a bit more difficult an extraction, as the top stub broke of and he wound up using forceps to dig in and grab the root, but he managed to pull the root out in one piece. No cutting! Gauze, the usual prescriptions, and off I went back to the house. Because of the additional rooting around (no pun intended) this one hurt quite a bit more than the last one, and my lower jaw started to swell fairly immediately. I also felt quite a bit more nauseated this time than last, but sleep plus the various drugs made it all slide down the list of my concerns, even if it did put me behind on various things and make me a bit foggy throughout the evening. My oral surgeon – Dr. Tayapongsak, by the way, if you’re ever in this area and need a very good one – also mentioned to me something I resigned myself to three years ago as I began the never-ending dental work: eventually, all my teeth will probably have to come out. For now, though, I’d like to retain what I can.
Friday, back to the dentist for what was actually my scheduled appointment for crown preps, now on a single tooth instead of two. That didn’t make it hurt any less, as my jaw had swollen further through the evening, but I went ahead with this appointment to avoid having the other tooth meet the same fate as the one requiring extraction. As he shaved away the buildup and shaped the remainder of the tooth, of course some of that work wound up going right along the gumline. Ouch. Then the impressions, and me trying to open my mouth widely enough to get the trays in, which were then jammed up against the teeth and held there for several minutes. Then the even greater challenge of getting the trays out through my limited opening, without destroying what we’d just managed to create. Then the temporary crown, on the tooth, off the tooth for shaping, over and over again, every time jammed up against and into the gumline until it was shaped properly.
After that adventure, off to the hospital and an EKG and a chest xray, so I can begin hyperbaric dives on Monday to promote the healing of the socket where the root had been. While I was in xray, getting lined up for the second shot, a code blue in MRI comes over the intercom. Such is the ebb and flow of the medical world.
All of this adds up to no work outside since Wednesday. My face is still swollen today, although less so than yesterday, and there is no heavy lifting permitted anyway for a day or so after the extraction, to avoid the potential of dislodging the (very nice) blood clot that formed in the empty tooth socket. Since I feel like someone has been beating me with a lead pipe – and look a bit that way, too – this is disappointing, but sort of welcome at the same time.
Tomorrow, though: full steam ahead. Lots to do. Not many people to do it. It’s time to really start ramping things up here on the ranch.
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