A Rough Few Days

It’s been a rough few days for us, which is why I have been re-posting old blogs about our travels as fulltime RVers for the last couple of days. But I do that occasionally anyhow because lots of new readers missed all of those travels and tell me they like hearing about them. And some of you who have read the stories before say you like to see them again.

Anyway, for at least ten or fifteen years now, I would occasionally get a sharp stabbing pain in my right temple. It felt like someone jabbed an icepick in there and would last anywhere from ten seconds to occasionally as much as a minute, and then it was gone. The VA did CT scans and an MRI and never could find anything, though one doctor thought there might be a possibility of a tiny piece of shrapnel from my Army days pressing on a nerve someplace. Since the shrapnel consisted of both metal and pieces of broken glass from an improvised mine, they were not able to figure out what was actually causing the problem.

At any rate, some you may recall that in September of 2019, I had an incident where I had pain in that area and then dizziness and disorientation. It lasted for several hours, but by the next morning, all symptoms were gone. The first thought was that it was a stroke, but that was ruled out by CT scans and MRIs. Then the doctors thought it might be something called temporal arteritis, which can be really nasty. So they took biopsies from arteries on both sides of my head and did not find any evidence of it.

In the last couple of months, that quick jabbing pain has become more frequent, sometimes lasting as much as five minutes. Tuesday evening, after coming home from dinner with friends, it hit me again, but this time it was much more intense and radiated up into the top of my forehead and my right eye socket. I think I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for pain, but if I had to judge this, I would say it was at least an 8 or 9, and it lasted all night long and into the next day. Over the counter pain meds like acetaminophen and ibuprofen did no good at all.

I went to the doctor the next day and he thought it mighty possibly be a migraine. That surprised me because everything I’ve ever heard about migraines is that you are sensitive to light and sound, neither of which were affecting me. He put me on a five-day course of Prednisone, and by Wednesday evening, it was down to just discomfort, not the intense pain. I had hoped to get some writing done, but I was so wiped out that when we got back from the doctor’s office I spent the rest of the dah napping in my recliner. They have me scheduled for another CT scan of my facial bones and brain next week (yeah, I know, they’ve got to look real close for a brain), and we’ll see what happens from there.

And now, onto Miss Terry. For a couple of years now she has been seeing specialists with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville to deal with aftereffects of the intense radiation she had to go through 20 some years ago to save her life when she was battling stage 4 cervical cancer. She had an appointment there yesterday afternoon, and we left early to give ourselves plenty of time. I’m glad we did because somewhere around Palm Coast, we ran into heavy rain that continued all the way into Jacksonville. At times the traffic on Interstate 95 was down to about 45 mph and vision was terrible.

We arrived at Mayo with just about three minutes to spare, got checked in, and they took Terry right back for a rather invasive procedure. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, in my opinion, there is no medical facility in the world better than Mayo. Besides being experts in their fields, everybody there is kind and caring, and they go out of their way to make the patient and the patient’s family as comfortable as they can and reassure you every step of the way that they’ve got your back.

Our friend Deb Dlugosz had suggested meeting for a bite to eat when we were done at the hospital, but I told her I wasn’t sure how well Terry would feel by then, and I’m glad we took a rain check, because she was rather uncomfortable. The good news was that the rain had passed over headed west, and the trip home was much easier. And, of course, when we got home, it didn’t look like a drop of rain had fallen here.

So that’s my blog for today. Don’t you hate it when old people don’t have anything to talk about but their aches and pains and their medical issues? I’ll try to have something more positive to share with you tomorrow.

Be sure to enter our latest Free Drawing. This week’s prize is a four-book set of audiobooks from my pal Carol Ann Newsome’s popular Dog Park mystery series. To enter, click on this Free Drawing link or the tab at the top of this page and enter your name (first and last) in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing, please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening. Note: Due to the high shipping cost of printed books and Amazon restrictions on e-books to foreign countries, only entries with U.S. addresses and e-mail addresses are allowed.

Thought For The Day – I’m a groan up. I groan when I get up.