The Crazy Catchup Post

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:

• Rheumatoid Arthritis
  
• Lyme Disease
• Lupus
• Polymyalgia Rheumatica (rare in someone in their 20's, but it has happened before)
  

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?

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?!

Attention world!

Perhaps Aharon and I would like to enjoy our holidays and weekends at home.

Just a thought.

Adventures in Sarahland

This weekend, from Friday through Sunday, I was blessed with not having to deal with school. I didn't even have to think about it. Nope, not even a little tiny bit. So to celebrate, I stayed as far away from my laptop as possible. This is when the fun sets in.

I'm sure most everyone is familiar with distribution lists. If you have a job with email or attend a school with email, you are no doubt part of a distribution list. In case you aren't familiar, I'll explain: a distribution list is an email address within a domain (in this situation @sienaheights.edu) that an administrator can add certain contacts to manually or by using specific criteria. In this case, the distribution list in question contained all of Siena Heights University's seniors.

We still haven't gotten an official announcement yet from the school as to what exactly happened, but here are the facts as they occured:

• Thursday Night: I get an email to join a group in Facebook for SHU seniors. I'm in the network and my graduation year is set, so anybody in SHU's network on Facebook can see that I'm a senior. Not difficult. I don't care, so I delete the email. No doubt this request/email goes out to other Facebook users.
  
  
• Saturday Night: Somebody, presumably an employee at Siena Heights, decides to use the seniors' distribution list email to create a Facebook account, perhaps to have something to do with the previously mentioned Facebook group. This was obviously not thought through, since the emails to said email address will go to every singe SHU senior. This is confirmed when a ton of people get an email confirming that our Facebook account has been set up.
  

Corollary: At this point, a few seconds of thinking (that's not even an entire minute) will lead someone to realize what has happened here, and that the best course of action is to simply delete the email. The person in question will figure out what they did and correct the problem, and life will go on. I delete said email and close the laptop.

• Sunday Afternoon: Although I do not have school to worry about, I decide to check my email. I open my laptop and my gmail notifier politely informs me that I have 43 unread emails. This is amazingly high! I open up gmail and find 43 emails from other SHU students who thought the best course of action was to reply to the email they received from Facebook stating one of the following things: I don't have facebook and don't want it, please remove me from this list, this is a work email and I don't appreciate all the emails, etc.
  
  
• Sunday Night: Someone sends the following email: "Could people stop replying to , I don't need 100 emails a day from people complaining about getting 100 emails themselves." A nice attempt, really, but the general public is stupid and unless they fully understand why, they won't stop.
  
  
• Monday Morning: Case in point, I have 10 more emails when I get to work at 7 this morning. One is from Facebook, confirming the deletion of the account that started this whole disaster (this marks the milestone of 2 emails from Facebook sent to this address and thus all of SHU's seniors). SHU has obviously corrected the problem. However, the distribution list still exists, and as people arrive at work on Monday and start checking their emails, they start replying all the way back at the beginning of this disaster. After receiving about 20 more emails, I send out the following:
  Subject: Everybody stop replying to any email you get
  "Look, this isn't a hard concept. Somebody created a Facebook account using the email address which is an email address that forward to SHU students. Every time you reply to these emails or to anyone who replied to one of those emails, you're sending the email out to other people. Actual emails from Facebook accounted for 2 messages. The other 50 some were because everyone wouldn't just ignore the messages. They've obviously corrected the problem because the Facebook account has been deleted. So if everybody could just use their brains and ignore the emails and STOP REPLYING, then nobody would have a ton of unwanted emails in their inbox.
  Simple concept. STOP REPLYING!!!! Delete and carry on with your life."
  
  
• 5 minutes later on Monday Morning: One lone email, sent to me only, stating the following: "You should run for President."
  

Money Matters!

I have been thinking a lot lately. About two things. One's no big and deal and the other - I think - is a very big deal.

First of all, I am appalled by Obama's Nobel Peace Prize. However, I am not surprised. Former winners include Al Gore and Jimmy Carter. Seriously? As far as I'm concerned, it's a terrible insult to win such an award since it seems to favor misinformed individuals. And also socialism. That's all I'm saying on the matter.

Secondly and more importantly, why is everyone treating the phrase "Everyone's on a budget now" like that is a bad thing? Budgeting is good. Money management is good. Why does America have to act like this is such a terrible thing that Americans are budgeting and saving and paying down debt?!

My parents put a lot of effort into teaching me about money. We had these cool little banks from Money Matters (Crown Financial Ministries) that were divided into three sections. The first was a church for us to deposit our tithes. The second was a bank for us to deposit our savings. The third was a store for us to deposit our savings. When we got our allowance or babysitting money or birthday money, my parents would show us how to count it, how to figure out 10%, and then would make change for us if necessary so that we could deposit the appropriate amounts. When we were going shopping, our parents would get the money in the "store" section out for us to take with us. Sometimes, we spent it. Sometimes we didn't. When we didn't spend it, we'd get the option when we got home of putting it back into the store or putting some - or all - of it into the bank. It was a lot of fun.

Once we started to get older, mom would take us into the credit union with her so we could deposit money into our accounts. When I turned 16, mom took me to the credit union to help me open a checking account. For the first few months, until I got the hang of it, she would sit down with me once a week to make sure I was balancing correctly and then we'd go over the entire month when my statement came in the mail.

At 18, she made me an authorized user on her credit card. A few months after that, I got my own credit card and started fully taking responsibility for my finances.

Before gas prices skyrocketed to $3 and $4 a gallon, Aharon and I were making pretty good money. We didn't have car payments or car insurance to pay. Just cell phones, gas in our cars, savings, tithes, and spending.

I wouldn't say I had a shopping problem at that point in my life, but I definitely spent more than I needed to. Never too much, though.

And then, I had to buy a car. And with that came a car payment and car insurance. Shortly after that, Aharon had to buy a car, too. So we sat down and did up nice individual budgets. Aharon always stuck with his much better than I did. Mainly, though, because he was 99% cash and I was only about 5% cash. I prefered keeping my cash in the bank and a credit card in my purse. Aharon hated that idea, so he did the opposite.

When we got engaged, Aharon was unemployed. We sat down and worked out a budget that we could get by on with him on unemployment. That budget is the one we use now with just a few modifications. (Our rent is less than we planned; we set up a health savings account and contribute to that weekly) We are also making more money than we planned on. The extra money at the end of the month is certainly a welcome blessing.

Combining two people who were raised very differently in regards to money makes for some interesting opinions. I've definitely enjoyed it.

I guess the point I'm driving at here is that Aharon and I have been incredibally blessed lately. And I think part of that reason is because we're being careful and responsible. We have a budget. We use it.

So why does most of the world see that as unfortunate?

And the worst mother of the year award goes to...

On her son, who is suspected in 50 break-ins over the last 18 months and is now suspected in three small aircraft thefts:

His mother said she doesn't see anything wrong with what he's suspected of doing.

"I hope to hell he stole those airplanes — I would be so proud," Pam Kohler told a reporter, noting her son's lack of training. "But put in there that I want him to wear a parachute next time."

I don't like making decisions

The owner of the company I previously worked for called me yesterday. He offered me a twist of my old job back. Apparently their IT system has collapsed since I've been gone. I can't say I'm surprised at all. Their outside company really didn't know what was going on, and when I left they had nobody internally who knew anything about computers. So they definitely want me back to work with the network system. Also, Bill, the marketing guy who I totally miss working with, has taken on a lot of government projects and needs help with the organization and logistics of it all. So where my old job was IT/Office Administration/Design & Marketing, my new job would be IT/Design & Marketing/Government research and paperwork.

I have to say I did not expect them to ever try to get me back. I had made up my mind about leaving and I left for very specific reasons, such as the following:

• Drastically underpaid for 2 years. While I don't have an IT degree, the State median for a network administrator is more than double what I was being paid.
  
• Despite telling my boss that I had commitments in Port Huron that I could not change, I was forced to work in Madison Heights every Friday. And by work I mean sit at a desk and answer maybe 3 phone calls. This required about 80 additional miles of driving on Fridays because after driving to and from Madison Heights I had to go to and from Port Huron anyway. Oh, and they reimbursed mileage at $0.32 a mile. When this was all going on, gas was hovering around $3.75 - $4.25 a gallon.
  
• Stress. I only had one single vacation/sick day where I did not receive at least one phone call from work. And ironically enough, it was on the day I interviewed for the job I have now. Even after going home from work one morning with a terrible migraine, I got 2 phone calls and 14 text messages from work. Different people, different problems. None of them urgent. And I was sick!
• Unfair policies. The other office had a receptionist. (That was originally my job at the office I was at.) She made twice what I made and did about a tenth of the work. She also wore whatever she wanted to work to sit behind a desk all day. I once wore jeans because I knew I'd be on the floor under a computer most of the day, and I got yelled at for my "unprofessional-ism."
• A ton of overtime. I once worked 65 hours in a week. Twenty-four of those hours were straight. Thirty-five of them were either between 5 pm and 8 am or on Saturday or Sunday. I received not a single penny of time and a half. Straight pay only. Because they had me classified as "administrative" and they are exempt from required time and a half. [Side note: I'm "administrative" at my current job, and I get time and a half for overtime.]
  
• Holidays. We worked Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve, the day after Thanksgiving, and Good Friday. I don't work any of those days now.
  

The job did have a few perks that my current job doesn't, such as the following:

• Christmas bonus. We don't get them here, but I got one every year at my old job. And it doubled every year. If this year were to follow that pattern, it would be two weeks' pay.
• More vacation time. If I was still at that job, I'd be 8 months away from being entitled to 4 weeks of vacation time a year. Right now, I get 1 week. I'll get 3 weeks in another 2 years.

They did offer me a pay raise with the new job. It's a 20% raise, but even that is still about 50% less than the State low wage for the job description.

Plus, my current job has a lot of perks that my old job didn't have such as the following:

• Much better insurance. I'm currently paying out of my check half of what I was paying for health insurance at my old job. At my old job, it was for health insurance only for me only. And it was crappy health insurance at that. Right now, paying half of what I was paying, I have outstanding health insurance for myself and Aharon with a contraceptive/fertility rider (which has already saved us over $2,000 since April), vision and dental for myself and Aharon, and disability and life for myself.
  
• Discounts. We get outrageous discounts on our products. Such good discounts, in fact, that Aharon is going to take up bow hunting and we are helping my Uncle get a new bow for a very low price. We also get free sweatshirts, t-shirts, and hats. Which is awesome. Especially since...
• The dress code here is relaxed. We are encouraged to wear our G5 and Quest clothing. Jeans are acceptable. Tennis shoes are everywhere. I've never seen a single skirt, tie, or suit coat.
  
• Every quarter, if we didn't call in at all (vacation days don't count), we get a $50 gift card. It's not much but it's a pretty easy $200 a year.
• The cool factor. Among my friends, it's cooler to work for G5 than an environmentalist group.

I do have to admit, I really miss the design work. I loved having something that I spend hours or days on be admired by so many people. I totally miss that. But would I give up what I have here for that little bit of happiness? I mean, without that, I can focus my design energies on church stuff. I really like working on that.

On the other hand, I love working here with Aharon. It's nice having the same office politics to discuss and both knowing what's going on with the company. Plus, they hired him at my request. He's a great employee and they like him, but part of the incentive to keep him is gone if I leave. Then they only have him to upset, not him and me.