Moving, Meds, Visitor

We get rid of clut­ter in order to make room for fulfillment.
–San­dra Felton

I detest mov­ing, but it is a great incen­tive to declut­ter! And per­haps we’ll find some of the things that have sim­ply dis­ap­peared in the last year. I’ve found that I like get­ting rid of extra­ne­ous stuff. I final­ly went by Good­will this week to drop off a bunch of books and oth­er items that have been fill­ing the trunk of the car for a few months. Whee! It was marvelous.

This is encour­ag­ing news:
‘Piv­otal Point’ in Breast Can­cer Treatment
Switch From Tamox­ifen to Aro­masin Low­ers Recur­rence Risk by 32%

While check­ing for pos­si­ble inter­ac­tion prob­lems between var­i­ous pre­scrip­tions, I found that sign­ing up for a free account at http://www.drugs.com/ allows one to save the lists for lat­er ref­er­ence. When you take as many meds as I do, typ­ing them in is a nui­sance, so I like that.

I just fin­ished putting all the meds Katie and I take, with dosages, times, and oth­er instruc­tions into text files that will synch to our PDAs. When I’m at the doc­tor, it’s gen­er­al­ly because I’m not feel­ing good, and my mem­o­ry isn’t stel­lar, to say the least. I’m going to add the names, address­es, and phone num­bers of our var­i­ous health care providers next.

We real­ly need to be wear­ing med-alert bracelets because of Katie’s drug aller­gies and the malig­nant hyper­ther­mia risk. But they’re most­ly UGLY! And they real­ly don’t give that much infor­ma­tion. We have key tags for every­thing else. Why not for this? Come to think of it—hmmm. sam­bear does want a lam­i­na­tor… Unfor­tu­nate­ly, emer­gency med­ical per­son­nel would­n’t have any rea­son to look at keys for info, would they?

Okay — some of these aren’t as ugly as the stan­dard ones. But they still can’t car­ry com­plete info. I found ref­er­ence to one com­pa­ny’s prod­ucts that are lock­ets, and open for access to a piece of paper with all your meds and so on noted.

That reminds me—shad­owkatt is hav­ing trou­ble get­ting her PDA to sync. Need to fix that.

I’m find­ing that tak­ing the Vicodin (left­over from the ER vis­it, and not much left at all) at night lets me 1) sleep well; 2) wake up more refreshed because it con­trols my pain. Ultram, the pain reliev­er I take the rest of the time, keeps me awake. I’m going to ask the rheuma­tol­o­gist for a Vicodin RX so that I can con­tin­ue to do that. (For­tu­nate­ly, gener­ic Vicodin is afford­able.) I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what to request to have on hand dur­ing FMS flares. Oxy­codone seems to be one of the best options, but I can’t get a price on it from any of the online sites and I know there’s lots of freak­i­ness from some health care pro­fes­sion­als due to the abuse of it by some people.

Y’all prob­a­bly get tired of read­ing about this stuff, but I put it here to help me remem­ber that I AM tak­ing bet­ter care of myself, and it is mak­ing a major dif­fer­ence in my qual­i­ty of life.

fae­bouche is arriv­ing today for a visit—YAY! We just don’t know when. I need to get to work. 

We had hoped to see curiousmay9 at some point. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, she has a sinus infec­tion or some­thing of the sort, so we’ve pushed back the sched­ule for pulling cable yet again.