health

Pull, poof!

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 17:26 on 3 July 2007

So, there's the bump on the back of my right leg. It's on the outside of the back of my knee, in the place where, to be perfectly honest, I've been sunburned a lot. Something about that particular location that just begs to have sunscreen just slide right past it, missing every bit.

I've been worried about this particular bump since I came across it about a month or so ago. I hadn't noticed it before, but it didn't seem to be growing particularly fast. It looked like it could be a wart, I've had those on the bottom of my feet. Worse, it looked very, very similar to the bump that was next to my eye last year, and we all know how that one turned out.

Because of the similarity in size, shape and texture to the bump near my eye, my worry level has been increasing and increasing. I worried and thought about this bump like a dog on a bone, never quite stopping the gnawing. I asked friends what they would do. I asked doctors-in-training what they thought of the spot. I asked Kris, who responded something like, "Eh, ask a doctor."

After gnawing on this bone too long, I did something you're really not supposed to do. I picked at it.

I know, I know, don't pick at your skin. Bad, bad, bad. But I did. I wanted to see if I made it small, would it come back? And, if so, how quickly? I had a spot on my right index finger when I was 14 that grew incredibly fast. It grew to about a 1/4" before I took an xacto knife to it and cut it off. Not the smartest thing to do, especially using my non-dominant hand on my dominant hand, but the spot, which turned out to be a wart, annoyed me so much that I had to remove it.

Turns out, warts form a kernel that doesn't quite attach fully to your body. If you peel along this edge, you can literally extract the wart from your body. The tricks are, of course, getting it all and dealing with the pain. I have no idea if Dad ever noticed the blood in the bathroom sink from that little bit of surgery.

So, yeah, the bump on the back of my leg. Tragically, I picked at it. It bled. This is not good, because that gives an entry point for cells to travel to other parts of my body. If this bump is cancerous, I just introduced another avenue for it to spread.

Can you believe I graduated in the top 0.1% of my graduating high school class? No? Me either.

Eventually, I told myself to stop it. Stop worrying about it. Stop playing with it. Deal with it the right way: make an appointment with a dermatologist and have it removed to be tested. Simple enough. Scary, sure. But I'd rather be 1 for 2 in finding my own skin cancer than having skin cancer again and dead.

Today, looking at it, I noticed the spot had changed. I wasn't sure what had happened, but it looked like a tag of skin had come off the top of it, probably from all of my scratching. Well, can't have that, can we? I pulled on it, as I'm wont to do with random pieces of flesh with neon signs pointing to them that read "Pull me! Pull me!"

I felt no resistance as something came out of the bump. It ended up being about 3 millimeters long and just under a millimeter wide. It was white, and I have absolutely no idea what it was. It was soft, and that's about all I could tell about it. When it was out, the bump was gone. There is now a small hole in my leg where the bump used to be.

After putting away my confusion with the bump extraction, I can honestly say that, for today, there are few things more enjoyable than discarding the worries of a cancer return in the trash.

And a hole in the leg is a small price to pay for that relief.

Figures

Blog Posted by kitt at 20:25 on 21 June 2007

Well, bound to happen.

Better sooner than later.

As I reached with a double fisted claw catch for a disc thrown by Will, the wind jerked he disc just over my outstretched hands, and pushed it down after passing over my arms.

CRACK!

I stood still for a moment before I realized the sound I had just heard was about to be followed by the sound of my wailing. The disc had landed squarely on the bridge of my nose, and it hurt. A LOT.

I sat down, as Will rushed over. "Are you okay? Are you okay? Did that just hit you in the face?" he asked.

"I don't know. Let's see," I responded, clearly still in surprise. I took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully out my nose, my hands blocking my face.

The handful of blood immeduately showed me that, no, I was not okay.

I sat out during the first drill and waited until the blood stopped running from my nose. I was able to run a little bit, but not much, which was probably good, as my legs ached a bit from yesterday's workout.

I'm thinking now, sure, I should have pancaked that catch. It was windy, and I was standing directly in the path of the disc (a habit I've been trying to develop, actually). But this isn't the first time a disc has hit me in the face, where other people can go an entire career without any discs in the face.

I guess if I'm going to have injuries this season, better to get them out of the way early in the season, rather than late in the season.

No time for this!

Blog kitt decided around 18:28 on 13 May 2007 to publish this:

I so way do not have time for this.

My weekend is completely full. As I looked over my list on Friday night for what I wanted/needed to accomplish this weekend, I thought, "there's no way I can get all of this done." There were about 25 items on that list, and writing about that list wasn't on it.

This morning, I woke up late, around 7:30 am, and wondered if I wanted to get up, or just lie there next to Kris longer. I decided to lie there, but continue reading Expendable, one of two books Andy had loaned us a couple weeks ago. I was about half way through it, zipping along when I had a few spare minutes here and there. It was the first fiction book I'd picked up to read in over a year, all the other books I've read being either technical books or non-fiction good for me books on gardening or mental toughness or PHP.

I blame Catch 22. It made it to the top of my pile, and I've tried to read it so many times. It's about some guy who's incredibly lazy in a screwed up world. Kris likes it. Mark loves it. Tyler thinks it's great. Why do all the boys like it, and I can't stand it.

It's still at the top of my book pile, which has continued to grow bigger.

So, I skipped it to read Expendable, since Andy specifically brought it over for Kris and I to read. And I was reading it.

I read for a couple hours, though how it took me a couple hours to read it, I don't know. I thought I read quickly, but I was on only page 225 when I noticed a bright light on the right side of the pages.

Now, I hadn't looked directly at a light source yet that morning. I was nicely lying next to Kris, inserted gently into the Doggie Matrix, casually reading a book quickly. There was no reason for that bright light in my vision.

Except.

I knew what that light was.

"F---!" I exclaimed, throwing back the covers, taking a small tan dog with it, waking Kris from the light sleep he'd been in while I had been snuggling him.

"What is it?"

"A migraine. Another migraine. Another f---ing migraine. Third one in less than a month. What's going on? Why is this starting?"

I marched into the bathroom, cranked the shower on as hot as I could stand the water, popped two Advil and climbed into the water. I may have drained the water heater standing in that water, as hot as I could stand it, as long as there was hot water.

See, for the last quarter century, when I have a migraine headache, I become immediately stressed. It's a learned response: I know what's coming, I panic, I down the painkillers and rush to bed as quickly as I can, praying I can be asleep or otherwise oblivious to the avalanche of pain and numbness and nausea and blindness that's going to hit me in the next twenty minutes.

This learned response has not helped me at all. I still have the pain. I still have the numbness. I still have the nausea.

I still go blind.

So, I jumped into the shower, water as hot as I could stand it. I read recently that increasing the blood flow to the extremities can alleviate the worst of a migraine. I can't stand the aura, I can't stand going blind, or realizing that no, I can't trust my own senses, I can't trust my own sight. The blindness is the worst part. I'm not sure if the suggestion to heat my hands was going to help, but I was going to try.

I'll approach this as scientifically as I can. I can't affect the blindness if I don't stay awake for them. I can't see the effectiveness of the different processes I try if I'm not awake to see the effects.

After I ran out of hot water, I dried off, went back into the bedroom and crawled into the bed to watch the lights. Must to my surprise, they disappeared after about 15 minutes, while I was still awake. I was thrilled, picked up Expendable again, and started reading. I managed to finish it, then fall asleep for the afternoon. I managed to miss practice, as well as time to finish a dozen things I wanted to do today.

Today is totally shot. Maybe I should just go to sleep again.

Fartlek, my foot!

Blog Instead of being asleep at 23:11 on 1 May 2007, kitt created this:

Tonight's track workout was all of forty minutes of fartlek running: around the track for forty minutes sprinting the first forty yards of each straight and jogging the remaining 320 yards of the track. I managed fifteen minutes before my insides turned to intense jelly balls of pain. I stopped for a minute to let the balls disappate before running around the fields and finding a couple dogs to chase for my sprinting - much easier and far more fun to chase.

I'm not sure what's so special about the first fifteen minutes of a long distance run. I had a very similar problem last week, running the dish: bad cramps at the beginning of the run, only to have them disappear after a minute break, and a good run following. This has to get easier. I can't keep running like this and not have it get any easier.

Back to that again?

Blog kitt decided around 10:44 on 22 April 2007 to publish this:

As I exited the shower this morning, Kris looked at me and asked, "Did I do that?" pointing to the quarter-dollar sized bruise on my back side where I couldn't really see it.

After some amazing acrobatic maneuvering, I finally saw what he was talking about. "Probably not, they're all over the place. Here, look here. And here." I showed him my slew of bruises.

"Back to that again, are we?"

"Yeah, I guess so."

I wish I knew why things like this happened. I have times when it seems I'm nearly covered in bruises, where touching something makes me bruise, and other periods when I can practically break ribs and not have a mark on me.

I wonder if it's diet related.

97.6

Blog kitt decided around 23:08 on 19 April 2007 to publish this:

Normal body temperature is 98.6° The problem with "normal" however, is that normal is a guideline, and very, very few people are truly normal. I never truly wanted to be normal except for a couple of seriously misguided, adolescent years, when "normal" meant having friends. Being extraordinary means you have a life worth living.

There are, however, expections to the desire not to be normal. Body temperature may or may not be one, I haven't quite decided.

My normal body temperature is 97.6°, where "normal" in this case is defined as the temperature I get most often if I check my temperature when I'm not sick, not exercising, not just waking up and not eating. Having done this measurement a half dozen times, all with the same result, I feel comfortable in saying my normal body temperature is 97.6°

So, when I had my second migraine of the month today, I thought about raising my body temperature to see if that would help speed the thing away.

I arrived home from class around 3:30, and noticed the light in the living room was a little odd. I didn't think much past that thought about it, which cracks me up in retrospect. How many times have I gone blind with these things, each one starting the same way? How many times have I thought, "Huh? The light looks odd?" or "Everything is in really sharp focus?" or "WTF? The door is f***ing open!" Oh, wait, that last one was just one time.

At 3:45 I was half blind, sending a note to Kris that I wouldn't make practice that evening, and stumbing to the bed, dragging Bella with me. If I was going to sleep, I damn well sure was going to have a warm dog in the bed with me.

I woke up two hours later, and tried to do something, anything productive, only to have spots reform at 6:45. My first thought was, go to sleep, avoid what's coming. My second thought was, stop, this is a learned response. The shivering, the chills, the shudders, all of these I've learned over the years suffering through migraines. How about trying a proactive approach?

One of the beliefs around migraines is that the headache is caused a constriction of blood vessels which causes blood to leave the extremities, only to rush back into the head when the blood vessels later dialate. If I can heat my hands and feet and head, the theory goes, the blood won't rush back, and the pounding headache won't trigger.

Of course, lots of pain killers can do the same trick.

I took a bath as hot as I could stand the water, then turned it up higher. I started with a shower and a closed drain, sitting down and switching the water once I was standing in 4" of water. After staying in the water, only half of which I could see at this point, for about fifteen minutes, I stood up, toweled off, and left. The visual symptoms didn't disappear quickly, but I had successfully stayed awake through an entire aura.

I'll take the small victory.

When I checked my body temperature again, I was feeling feverish. Clearly I had succeeded in raising my body temperature, but by how much? Did I manage 100°? How about 99°? Even 99° would be good, I thought.

My temperature?

98.6°

I was finally normal.

Of course, a lower body temperature has been linked to a longer life span, so maybe I should stop worrying and accept my body is helping me in my quest to live to 120.

I really wish, however, we could figure out the true cause of the aura. Those are what I hate. I can't trust my eyes. Seeing is not believing for me. If it were, then I have front row seats into regular rifts of the space time continuum.

And people, they're pretty for only so long.