So, let's try this again.

Thursday, May 20, 2010
Random life updates:
  • Aharon's health problems have been narrowed down to two possibilities:
    1. A spinal column injury (this all started in his back in July) that did possible nerve damage.
    2. Ankylosing Spondylitis
  • Back in December, I got a promotion at work. I went from the accounting department to the marketing department. I'm now the marketing coordinator which mostly means I have to keep people organized.
  • The admin assistant Raechal (at work) talked management into giving us more flexibility over our schedules. She now works 9 hour days and gets to leave at noon every Friday. I now work a normal week every other week and then a four day week of ten hour days, so I get every other Friday completely off. Plus I'll be here almost 2 hours before the rest of the marketing department shows up, which gives me time to get started on projects without interruption.
  • I finally graduated from college with a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in business. (The applied means I took a lot of business classes and less "general education" classes.) Either way, it's good to be finished.

Tired

Thursday, May 6, 2010
I don't get enough sleep.

53 Days

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
I have exactly 53 days of higher education left in my life. (Unless I go to law school, which looks less and less likely as the days go by.)

I would just like to say that I feel that these past 2 years have been the biggest waste of my time. I got really good at knowing how to use unlimited practice quizzes to get 100% on final exams that counted for 75% of my grade, thus ensuring little effort had to be put into learning.

And I recently sat down and figured out that as long as I get a C- (70% - the required grade to pass) in my last ever (and current) class, I will still graduate magna cum laude and on the Dean's list. So the little motivation I had to do well is pretty much gone.

I am such a major slacker.

New Year's Resolutions

Monday, February 1, 2010
Now that my crazy, insane January is over, I feel that it is time to get started on my New Year's Resolutions.

It takes 2 weeks to make something habit. I had planned to get organized and get going on all of this starting in January, but things got in my way. For starters, I find it's easiest to begin something new on a Sunday or a Monday. So, starting with the month on a Friday was out of the question. Since it takes 2 weeks to form a habit and I was going to be out of town the 12th - 16th, I figured it would be a waste to get started the first full week of January. Once I got home, I spent a week trying to catch up on housework, homework, and laundry. Then last week, I was pretty sick.

But now, it's a new month. And although I went back to bed this morning after Aharon left for work instead of doing Wii Fit, I still feel like I'm going to get the hang of this.

My goals for the year include the following:
  • Keep track of every penny. After we got married, we stuck to a budget. However, it was easy to not record some income and transactions and use the extra money for whatever. I found that this didn't give me the snapshot of our finances at the end of the year that I had hoped for. So this year, it doesn't matter where the money comes from or where it's going...it is getting recorded. My system is improved and ready-to-go. At the end of the year, I will know to the penny what we earned and where it all went.
  • Plan for meals better. We spend too much money eating out because I haven't shopped properly or don't want to come home from work and spend an hour working on dinner. So this year, I'm planning ahead, shopping accordingly, and cooking whatever I can in advance.
  • Exercise. I have put on 25 pounds since 2007. This makes me very unhappy and unfit, so those 25 pounds are going bye-bye. For real this time. Wii Fit is going to help me!
  • Organize and prioritize. We need to finish the church library quickly and keep the website updated. Those are things we volunteered to do and we need to do them in a way that reflects well on our church and on our commitment to these projects.

January (Actually, Almost February) Already?!

Wednesday, January 27, 2010
I cannot keep up with myself.

Aharon hasn't been back to any doctors lately. His last appointment, the one where the doctor told him it was Fibromyalgia, was two days before Christmas. Things obviously got very busy at that point and then New Year's was here! I had to go out of town for work the second week of January. (To the Archery Trade Association 2010 show...wow.) After that, I came home to an apartment that hadn't had the slightest amount of cleaning done to it in almost a month, and about 7 loads of laundry needing to be done. I spent the next week getting things in order, getting doctors appointments for me to check my problems out, and trying to establish a routine.

Just when I felt like things were getting in order, I get hit with probably the worst week of female problems ever. I can barely move and I haven't ate much since Sunday. It's absolutely killer. (Sorry if any guys are reading this!)

I would really like to get a good routine going this year. I know that an entire month is pretty much over, but that doesn't mean that I should just give up on the entire year. I just feel like everything is against me. It's my final semester of school - at last- and I just found out I'm going to be a credit short. Luckily I can test out of English Comp at SC4 and still graduate without too much effort, but it still throws a brick in my plans. My best friend, Kadie, is getting married May 1st. My commencement is May 9th. So starting May 10th, I pretty much have a brand new life to adjust to. A life where I don't have to come home from work and do homework or spend weekends frantically writing papers.

So I feel like whatever routine I establish between now and May will end up changing after graduation. But then down the line we'll have a house and kids and routine will change again. I don't like change. Well, I do and I don't. It's too much to adjust to.

I already can barely fall asleep at night.

The Crazy Catchup Post

Monday, December 28, 2009
Life has been out of control lately. Here's the update:

Back in August, Aharon was having severe back muscle spasms. He was almost constantly in pain and could barely move. He went to a nearby doctor who told him he was just overworking himself and that his muscles would eventually adjust to his new job. In the mean time, she recommended that he take it easy after work and maybe get the occasional massage to help the muscles relax. She prescribed him flexeril and motrin 800. Neither even made a small difference in the pain. Eventually, his back started to feel better except for some occasional pain that he had experienced before. We figured it was all because of long hours at work and adjusting to a new mattress.

Then, one Sunday in September, Aharon woke up with terrible joint pain and a low grade fever. He said he felt like he had the flu, although he had no stomach pains, congestion, or sore throat. Although the fever went away later that day (and then occasionally came back only to leave again and never hit 100 degrees), the joint pain only got worse and worse. He would wake up in the morning unable to move. After a couple hours, he'd have some mobility back, but he just wasn't his normal old self. This continued all through September and into October. Finally, when the pain made its way into his knuckles, shoulders, and returned to his back, I took him to my doctor. (I've been seeing her for almost 10 years...she is great!)

After almost an hour of gathering family history and talking about all his different symptoms, we had a few suspicions, including the following:
She decided to do blood work looking for all of those possibilities and really for anything that blood could reveal. In the mean time, though, she decided that polymyalgia was the most likely culprit and started him on prednisone, saying that a fast, complete disappearance of his symptoms would most likely confirm autoimmune. She also gave him meloxicam in case the prednisone didn't help. Within 2 days on predisone, he felt almost completely better. The back pain was still there, but we figured the back pain was its own problem and not related to his other symptoms.

A few days later, his blood work came back. He was negative for RA, lyme, and antinuclear antibodies. He didn't even have a high SED rate, indicating that his body wasn't suffering from any type of inflammation. The only thing unusual was a high count of strep antibodies. Our doctor decided to change her focus away from autoimmune (which she'd started treatment for) and instead consider rheumatic fever or a strep infection in the joints. She instructed him to finish the prednisone and then begin a full round of penicillin. She also gave him a higher dose of flexeril for his back figuring that it was work-related instead of another symptom.

Within three days of coming off the prednisone, his pain had completely returned. After a few days, he returned to the doctor because the pain was worse than before and he had been having bouts of small chest pains. She gave him another round of prednisone, this time keeping him on an extremely high dose for almost a week, and drew more blood. Those tests would show that the strep antibodies had decreased, but weren't gone. She decided a echo cardiogram was necessary to rule out rheumatic fever. (The echo revealed nothing unusual.) She also referred him to a rheumatologist, and told us she figured polymyalgia but wanted a rheumatologist to make the final call.

Last Wednesday, Aharon went to the appointment. He had been sent a packet of paperwork to complete before the exam. It had gone into extreme detail about family health history, current symptoms, medications that had been tested and how he had felt with the different medications, and all of his blood work results.

The doctor spent under 10 minutes in the room with Aharon. She flipped through his paperwork and asked him a few questions about being depressed. She then poked his knees, chest, and back in a few areas. She then announced that he had fibromyaliga, gave him a script for an anticonvulsant and for an antidepressant and told him to come back in 3 weeks. When he questioned her diagnosis and pointed out the strep antibodies in his blood and his fast reaction to prednisone, she told him that strep antibodies aren't ever a cause for concern if you don't feel sick, and that any problem will react well to prednisone for a short time. (He was on prednisone for almost a month! That's not a short time.)

I'm very skeptical. While there is some medical documentation of "fibromyalgia" responding to prednisone, I believe that to accept that research you also have to accept that fibromyalgia is, in fact, an autoimmune disorder. If it is an autoimmune disorder, why do doctors almost exclusively prescribe medications that work with your brain and not with your immune system the way prednisone does? There are too many issues here. Secondly, how often do you hear of males in their 20s being diagnosed with fibromyalgia? And on top of that, how often do you hear that diagnosis after the first visit? Fibromyalgia is notoriously difficult to diagnose. It seems to me that she just didn't want to put any work into his case.

Long story short, we did not fill the prescriptions. The next few weeks will be spent gathering all of his medical records from the various doctors he's seen about this problem, and then we will be attempting to get an appointment with a rheumatologist with Henry Ford Hospital. I'd trust Henry Ford Hospital over Port Huron Hospital any day.

Unfortunately, this all falls at a terrible time. We are almost to our insurance deductible for the year, and the year is about to end. That means more bills next year. I have to attend the ATA show for work in a couple of weeks, and I'll be gone for a full week. This pushes the time frame for a doctor's appointment back farther, because I insist on attending with him.

So hopefully we'll have a concrete, believable answer soon enough and a treatment plan for Aharon. Our busy season at work is quickly approaching, and Aharon will go from 27 to 32 hours a week to 45 to 54 hours a week. This all began when he was working short 27 hour weeks. I don't know how he'll make it through long weeks.

I'm ready for the new year to get here.

Really?

Thursday, November 5, 2009
I do not understand mothers who feed their children organic food and soy and who have never let their kid have even a drop of sugar, but if their kid gets a cough, they rush to the doctor begging for antibiotics.

Really?!