Sorry. that is just what it is going to be today.
By means of catching up, I’ll start with where I’ve been for the past few days, and why i’m very whiny today.
(and then as a special fun treat to reward you for putting up with the whininess, I am going to hopefully go back and fill every open spot in february with a catch up post! yay you!)
I think last time I posted it was somewhat of an update on Kendall’s recent illness/kendallisms with her heartrate and breathing difficulties and the hospital stay, etc. We came home from that stay and still had a pretty sick kiddo on our hands. It absolutely wore me out, because she needed monitoring almost non-stop, but the morning after we came home from the hospital, Ben had to leave for work again, and has been gone M-F since then. Thankfully she started to show some improvement in her breathing and vitals in the middle of last week, so i was able to rest a little bit easier.
During this same time, we’ve been blessed to have been assigned a new nurse to help out our two solid nurses who have been helping us out one and a half days each week. The training and orientation of her has been a lot to have on my plate though, as it is always tough to have someone else caring for your child, but even more so when they are still SICK and you want to explain to someone, “THIS is how you do it for MY KID, so do it exactly like me so I can feel comfortable leaving her in your care” without sounding like a total mean person. She is a very sweet person and I think she will work out well in this crazy house, but it is just one more added piece of crazy stress at the time being.
All of this chaos led to my stupid eye acting up this past Friday. Let me back up. My whole life I’ve needed glasses/contacts. Contacts more so because my eyes are so flat that glasses are very hard to get thick enough throughout the whole lens to provide any kind of depth perception and peripheral vision. I wear contacts most of the day and switch to glasses right before bed. I cannot even really see the (giant screen) TV we have with my glasses on. i “tolerate” my glasses, but prefer my contacts. However, due to allergies and fun hormonal/thyroid issues, contacts are often very irritating to wear also. I get bad allergies in my eyes that make me rub and itch them and then I just turn into a hot demon-eyed mess. I get lectured about this by everyone around me, but I can’t help it. If they itch, I itch them. they turn bright red, watery, look horrible. It is almost always only in one eye over the other though.
Through the past couple of years, this has been happening with some regularity. My left eye will have “an allergy attack”, so i’ll take out contacts for a couple hours, rinse with allergy eye drops, pop a couple benadryl, and call it a day. A few weeks ago this started, but very quickly went from “itchy/annoying” to “oh my lord i’m going to stab my eye out with a dull spoon if this burning pain doesn’t go away!!!!” Within a few hours of that it looked as if I had tatttooed the white of my eye a nice shiny candy-apple-red color and I could see people recoiling in horror as i passed by them on the street. I thought I had pink-eye, and some of you may recall that I was whining about that concurrent with Kendall’s hospital stay. A friend brought some gentamicin antibiotic eye drops commonly used for pink eye, and I started dutifully applying those, even though it felt akin to dropping battery acid on the open wound of my eyeball. After almost 10 days, I started to see some improvement. I wore glasses most of the day during this time, and was proud of myself for having that much foresight to know that taking out my contacts was the right thing to do.
And then it seemed like it was gone! For almost three whole days I had a clear, pain-free eye.
And then it came back.
this time it hurt even worse than before, I could hardly open my eye from all the swelling, and when I did open it, any kind of light was like a stabbing searing knife to my head. Realizing that perhaps it was time to involve a medical professional, I made an appointment with my eye doctor and then panicked that I had no idea how i was going to drive myself and my children the 45 minutes away to the doctor. Thankfully a good friend had the day off of work (it was Presidents Day), so she was able to get me up there, my kids happily supervised at her house by her older daughter.
My eye pressures (glaucoma indicator) have been elevating slightly over the past few years, so when the doc heard my issues he told the tech to check my pressures as he was afraid I could be doing some serious damage to them if the pressures were going up even more. The tech refused to do the pressure test unless she numbed me first because she could see that i was in pretty bad pain. Ohhhhh those drops they were magical! i felt like I could breathe/see/live again! Good news – pressures were no more elevated than my last checkup. They also did some kind of viral test that looked like a pregnancy test and i asked the tech if she thought my eye was going to have twin eye babies. (I guess it was funnier if you were there….)
Bottom line, right now my eye is in a flare-up of what he believes is auto-immune uveitis. Basically my eyeball is attacking itself. Likely set off by some other allergic reaction, but not a true allergy because my other eye is right now 100% fine. I’m on these super fun little steroid drops that are so strong I can taste them through my eye. THROUGH MY EYE PEOPLE. It’s nasty.
Not being able to see makes me insanely grumpy. Not being able to see PLUS being in pain from my eye makes me darn near unbearable. I feel sorry for my children and for anyone who has to interact with me lately. I am supposed to wear my glasses until this coming Monday when i will go in for another followup appointment and hopefully get good news that this flare is calmed down enough to wear contacts again. I am typing this with my eyes closed because my glasses are hurting my eyes even more right now, so i’m hoping my fingers are all on the right keys and that this isn’t just a sentence of jibberish. I mean, most of what i type is jibberish, but….you know what i mean!
I may have to resort to doing a few vlogs again but it will be just a voice video with some even crappier than usual crappiness pictures because in no way am I going on camera in my glasses with a huge eyeball.
I know. i’m vain. and i really shouldn’t complain. My computer which decided to download a fatal error from its updates is back up and running. I have to rebuild my programs from scratch and try to remember all my passwords which were stored in firefox for me. But these are first world problems, I get it. I am lucky to have my computer, lucky my pictures were saved, lucky to even have glasses to complain about. So even though I am whining now, I will get over it. Maybe not til next Monday when my contacts can be back in my eyes, but I will get over it!
I will do more thorough updates as backdated posts very soon. As soon as I can handle more typing. Or figure out how to vlog over cute pictures.
Thank you for coming here to read my whines. And for your prayers and thoughts for our family, as always.
have a beautiful hump day.
terra.