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One health crisis after another

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This has been a busy week for me. I’ve had two doctors appointments, one medical test and a ton of computer work to do! I’m glad the week is almost over.

I guess it doesn’t help that I’m not feeling well. (As usual). My Crohn’s is just in a constant flare and my back … well that’s another story … it had been feeling a lot better over the last few weeks, but I must have done something to it yesterday morning before walking to one of my doctors appointments and the next thing I know my lower back is spasming and aching. It’s still acting up, but not as bad as yesterday.

For some reason my pain doctor weighs me every time I see her (usually once a month). I hate it, but for the first time in a while I got some god news when she did her weigh in – I’d lost 8 pounds since my last visit! Yeah! Maybe I’ll be back in fighting form by early summer. Yeah! I even ran into a nurse that I worked with in the ER and she asked me if I’d found a diet pill that works. LOL Nope – just eating healthy (as per normal) and trying to be a little more active. It’s probably the slight increase in activity that helped.

Of course I could be losing weight due to the Crohn’s disease. I once lost something like 35 pounds in one month and it was at a time when I didn’t need to lose an ounce! I could have also lost a few pounds because of my thyroid … I only have half my thyroid due to a precancerous tumor that I had removed – oh … 20 years ago, but the other day I noticed that the right side of my neck, where the remaining half of my thyroid is seems to be slightly swollen so when I went to see the doctor yesterday I asked her to take a look at my neck. She thought it was a little puffy too and sent me for an ultrasound.

The talkative ultrasound tech let me know that my remaining thyroid tissue has several nodules in it and that’s a kick in the ass ’cause I take synthetic thyroid replacement medicine and that’s supposed to help keep a tumor or nodules from reoccurring. So .. I’ve got new nodules in there … so now i might be looking at more precancerous or cancer growths and I might end up having to have surgery to have the rest of my thyroid removed. Fantastic. NOT.

It just seems that it’s once thing after another with my health this year- the constant Crohn’s flares, a slipped disc in my back and now growths in my thyroid that might mean I’ll have to have surgery. What else might happen?





I have a feeling that we’re going to need a new car soon

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the other day, as Chris pulled out of the driveway to go to a store for me I noticed that our car was making spluttering sounds as he drove away. I gave him a call on the cellphone and asked him if he heard the car making funny noises but he didn’t think that it did … still … our car is getting kind of old. It’s a 1996 Ford Contour. So it’s 13 or 14 years old.

I’m actually amazed at how good it looks. It has a few tiny rust spots but other than that you’d never know the car was as old as it is.

I have a feeling, given it’s age and the spluttering sounds I heard the other day (no matter that my husband didn’t) that we’ll be looking for another car in a year or so. Hopefully not sooner! I mean it’s bound to start having some kind of serious problem – right?

Hmm maybe I’ll check online to find out which cars have the best safety ratings, best mileage etc. That’s what I did last time when we were getting our current car. I also spent some time looking for insurance online where I could compare or get quotes for car insurance prices for the cars we were interested in.

I’d love to get a Hybrid, maybe a Smart car … but I think they are too pricey for us right now unless we get a “mildly” used one. As it stands, unless Chris or I start making a ton of money our next car will probably be a used one, no matter what kind we get.

Are you driving an older car? Have you been thinking about getting a new or used car soon to replace your current one?

My dog is hooked on Rawhide

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My Lab Midnight loves to get treats.

We sometimes give her a tiny portion of our dinner – healthy things like small plain piece of boneless skinless chicken breast, raw carrots, green beans or other veggies- cooked or raw.

Of course she also likes chewing on real bones (beef bones purchased at pet store) and fake bones (nylabone for power chewers) and rawhide.

We actually like it when she’s busy chewing on one of her bones or a piece of rawhide because that means we have a few minutes of peace. Midnight really loves being, playing and interacting with us .. so it’s nice when we find something that can take her attention off of us for a while!

We started giving her a rawhide in the shape of a bone almost every night a few months ago. We never let her eat the whole large rawhide bone in one sitting though … it would be way too expensive to keep her stalked up in rawhide if we had! Instead we’d let her chew one end off and then take it away, then the next night the other knob and so on.

The only problem was that for most of this year her appetite for her regular food seems to have gone down a lot. Now she’s a Lab and they love to eat … so that’s a big problem! We started to wonder if she was sick, but she seems fine otherwise and she still will eat our human food treats or her cookies with the same excitement that she’s always had.

What I really think was happening is that the rawhide takes longer to digest than her regular dry dog food so she might have had a full feeling when presented with a big bowl of her own food. Also … she definitely likes our food better than her food … so that might be why she started to turn her nose up at her own food.

Over the last few weeks we’ve slowed down on the rawhide treats. We purchased small rawhide bones (about the size of your palm) and she only gets one every three days or so now. Her appetite for her regular food has picked up too.

Of course she still begs every night for her chew treats. She’ll actually sit and stare at me for hours with a look like “you’ve hurt me” on the nights that we don’t give her a rawhide. Darn dog!

Our bedroom is freezing!

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I’m so glad that winter is almost over! Yesterday it reached 18 Celsius (64 F) in the afternoon … but in a few days we’ll be back to the usual cold March weather. Hopefully this March won’t be as bad as last year! I remember a few snow storms and one of the worst of the year happened in March of last year.

Other than going outside in the cold I dislike the cold winter months because our main bedroom, upstairs, is the coldest room in the house. I wrote a post about it recently on my main blog – talking about how I hate getting ready for bed in the room because it’s so chilly that I end up covered in goosebumps! Some of my readers on the other blog suggested a variety of things but the main suggestion was to use a heated blanket. While that’s a great suggestion for once we get into bed, it does nothing to help with the too cool room.

When we first moved into our house in June of 2001 we noticed that the main bedroom – at the end of a long hallway far away from the stairs, didn’t have any cold air return. So we had some duct work done and had a cold air return added to the room. I’m sure that helped, but we still had drafts in the room once winter came.

A couple of years after we moved in we decided to tear down two of the bedroom walls … well the plaster anyway, to find the source of the drafts. We plugged up a few cracks that we found in the triple brick in the top of the wall near the ceiling and some near the base of the wall and then used drywall to close up the wall again. That fix made the room quite a bit warmer than it had been, but it’s still cooler than the rest of the house.

Since the room is cool in the winter we’ve always used some kind of electric heater to warm the room for an hour or so once we got to bed. We turn it on for a while prior to going to bed and since it has a timer on it we set it to run for about an hour after we’ve gone to bed. That helps quite a bit, but unfortunately our heater stopped working so we now need a new one. Believe me … that heated blanket is becoming more and more appealing!

We obviously still have some air leaks in the room because the room is too warm in the summer as well. Maybe we’ll have to tear down all the walls to find any other cracks that we missed.

Do any of you have the same problem? Is your bedroom a lot cooler than the rest of your house?

Our messy basement

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We haven’t set an exact date yet, but sometime in April we’re going to have our oil tank replaced. Prior to that we have to clean out our basement so that the work can be done.

I’m not looking forward to the clean up!

We’ve lived in our house since 2001 but because we started doing renovations from the first day we owned the house we still have a lot of stuff stored in the basement that hasn’t even been unpacked from our move! Plus there’s tons of renovation materials – extra wood, paints, sanding stuff – way more than a normal household would need, but enough for one that’s undergoing renovations.

When my Mom died in 2004 we divided up furniture and other things from my parents house between my three brothers, my sister and I. Since I’m the youngest and being a fairly new home owner I got more furniture than my siblings. Of course, as I said above, we’re still trying to renovate our house, so most of the items I got from my parents house are stored in the basement as well.

All of this has resulted in a very jam packed basement! I really should take some pictures just to show you the furniture and boxes piled up on top of one another. It’s so bad I really hate going into the basement to do laundry, get food from the freezer or use the washroom down there.

We have a lot of cleaning to do over the next month! I think that once we start going through all the stuff down there we’ll end up throwing out or giving away at least half of it. Hmmm … if the weather stays nice maybe we could have a yard sale.

What I’d like, once the basement is cleaned out and hopefully half the stuff has been disposed of, and once the new oil tank is in, is to have a useable area in the basement. We don’t have money to renovate it just yet, but eventually I’d like to set it up like a den with nice home theater furniture and home theater system down there. Now that would be nice.

It’s a shame … our house is fairly small, and we have all this space in the basement but we can’t really use it for anything because we’ve been using it as a storage area for things that we’ll probably never use.

Do you have a place in your home that’s like that too .. maybe the garage, the basement or a specific room? Or maybe it’s your attic that’s jam packed with things that you put away years ago thinking you’d use them again sometime in the future?

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