indessed roscivs

The potato is my favoritest food ever. I eat potatoes in some form nearly every day. I haven’t met a way of preparing potatoes that I haven’t liked. Shredded, sliced, frenched … baked, fried, steamed, boiled … with meat, with cheese, with spices, with ketchup, or just by themselves … no matter what, I feel happiness when I eat a potato.

I, like approximately a quarter of the population, am a multiple sneezer. The above link defines this type as “the sneezer that keeps sneezing one right after the other until he begins to look like Count von Count from Sesame Street.” My average is probably around five, with a range from two or three (rather rare) to six or seven or more.

This occasionally disturbs people who have not heard me sneeze before. They often ask if I have allergies, or if I’m all right, as if some terrible thing has happened. After moving desks recently, my new cubemate handed me a box of tissues after the first multiple-sneeze incident. I proffered my thanks, but noted that I already had several boxes sitting on my desk and that this was a normal, expected occurrence.

At a previous job, I had a coworker who followed the Latin American tradition of wishing the sneezer “Health” for the first sneeze, “Money” for the second sneeze, and “Love” for the third sneeze. (Wikipedia has a list of responses in various languages.) Apparently if you sneeze more than three times in a row, it throws them off. (This particular coworker insisted that the correct response was to hit the sneezer for each sneeze past three, a cultural peculiarity I have been unable to confirm via Google, but thankfully he never actually followed through.)

I’ve had friends who delight in counting, with much gusto, each individual sneeze, as if encouraging me to go higher and higher. Another individual wanted to statistically analyze my sneezes to determine whether they were predictable, and write a computer program that used past behavior to forecast when future sneezing fits would occur, as well as the estimated number of sneezes that the next batch would consist of.

Recently, during my usual spates of sneezes, I’ll get to around four or five sneezes and then suddenly think to myself, “Hey, I wonder how many I’ll get to! Wait, how many have I already sneezed?” which distracts me, and I stop sneezing. Oops.

“Gah! That’s why they’re so light, it’s been turned down!” I was talking about the toaster, of course. The dial, usually at around five or six, was now sitting at two. My English muffins were not quite toasted to their usual crispness. “You know, I never look at the toaster settings before making toast. That’s my only weakness.”

DW began to guffaw. And by guffaw, I mean laugh. Uproariously. For about twenty minutes.

Seriously, she laughed through about four rooms in the house, collapsed on the bed laughing, and returned to the kitchen still out of breath from laughing so hard. Her side began hurting from laughing so hard, and still she kept on. Finally, when she managed to sneak in a few breaths during the pauses, she crowed, “The saddest part is I think you think it’s true!”

She then proceeded to injure herself even more due to excessive laughter. I must say, I don’t feel one bit sorry for you!

I’ve been to so many doctors and dentists in the past few weeks I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a hypochondriac. I was never raised to visit the doctor on a regular basis, much less for every little ailment that comes my way. But in the last month, I’ve seen my regular doctor, an allergy specialist, my regular dentist, a sleep apnea specialist, and an orthodontist! That’s quite the gamut.

The results of all that? My dust and cat allergies have been scientifically confirmed, nobody has any idea what’s causing my winter cough, and … I’m getting braces!

Yup, it’s official! I have an appointment set up for January 8th. I’m going to get clear brackets on the top first—they won’t be able to put brackets on my bottom teeth for a while, because I have such a severe overbite that I’d shear the brackets right off my bottom teeth if they attempted to put them on now.

The expected length of treatment is 24 to 30 months, which is pretty normal for adults. It seems like a long time, but now that I realize it could provide me with more than just a prettier smile and easier-to-clean teeth, it definitely seems worthwhile.

Of course, when I was initially setting up the appointment, and they said they have openings this coming week, I said, “You’re just taking a cast of my teeth on that appointment, right? You’re not actually putting anything on my teeth?” “Oh no!” they laughed, “We’ll be putting on the braces on that very first appointment.” Eeep! It definitely seems worthwhile, but … next week … seems so sudden … I need a while to adjust to the idea of roscivs-with-braces. So January 8th was the first opening they had in the new year. Apparently procastinating until after Christmas was quite popular.

I’ll post pictures as soon as I’ve got’em!

I have this persistent cough that refuses to go away. I’ve had it for a couple of months now and, while annoying, it’s not the end of the world, but I decided to get it checked out anyway “just in case”. The doctor thought it might be allergy-related, so she sent me to the allergy specialist to get pricked and prodded. What did I get? Forty-four tiny red dots, each an inch apart.

They shaved the underside of my arms and, with a gigantic collection of tiny plastic containers with a tiny scraper on each end, poked me forty-four times with various different allergens. I told them before the test that I figured I was allergic to cats and dust, but wanted to know if I was allergic to anything seasonal, perhaps something specific to the PNW. That might be the reason for getting a cough as the seasons were changing.

So they pricked me and sent me out to the lobby to wait twenty minutes to see what developed. And boy, did something develop! I pulled out my Nintendo DS and played Tetris, as I figured it would be the most distracting thing I could do, since they said “absolutely no scratching!” Even then I spent most of my time gritting my teeth and dropping blocks in the wrong places because the itching was so terrible! Here’s what it looked like:

(click for close-ups)

The left arm was 22 dots of PNW allergens, tree pollens of various sorts and so forth. No reactions at all. You can see all the tiny little dots quite clearly in the photo.

The right arm had some definite reactions. That top red spot is histamine, the “control” dot. Your body’s supposed to react to that one. Then there’s a dot under that that has no reaction, another “control” dot, this time with no allergens at all. Then under that is a huuuuge mark—the main bump was over an inch across, and the red surrounding the bump spread three or four inches in diameter. It was a monster. “I want to know what that one is!” I exlaimed to the specialist when they called me back in. “Dust mite,” they said. No big surprise that I was allergic to them—what surprised me, though, was how violent the reaction was! I’ve been living with dust allergies for years but they don’t really bother me (or so I thought) unless there’s a lot of dust being kicked up, e.g. from vacuuming or dusting.

The smaller spot below the dust mite spot is cats. I was suprised at how small that one was compared with dust mites, since I feel like I have a much more severe reaction to cats—but I guess I’m just more accustomed to the dust mite reactions since I have them all the time. And finally, the spot at the bottom is one type of dust itself (different from dust mites). There’s another similar spot just below it that didn’t make it into the picture, which is yet a third dust-related particle. So, I’m allergic to cats, and really allergic to pretty much everything dust-related.

So the specialist gave me a bunch of information about special bed covers and HEPA filters and vacuum cleaners and told me about getting rid of down comforters and washing the sheets every week in hot water and all the other things that you’re supposed to do to stay dust mite free. Well, that was all well and good, but I’ve been managing my dust allergies pretty well for the past twenty-some-odd years, thank you very much (usually with a pocket full of kleenex). But where did this sudden cough come from?

Still no idea. The specialist thinks (of course) that minimizing the allergens I’m exposed to will help get rid of the cough, but prescribed me a few things to try if things didn’t get better. I think I may try taking some antihistamines to see if they make any difference (my guess is they’ll reduce my sneezing habits but do nothing for the cough). But I don’t think I’ll make another visit to the doctor unless it gets worse.