I received a postcard in the mail from my urticaria doctor’s office saying:

This is to notify you that Allen Kaplan, MD will be retiring as of December 31, 2007. Please contact your local physician for further recommendations. Dr. Kaplan extends to you his best regards.

This is a major blow to everyone who has urticaria and hasn’t already seen him. Kaplan is The Man when it comes to urticaria. I first saw him in April 2002 and I saw him again in July 2007. When I was there the last time, there was a girl there from Turkey - that’s how good this guy is, people come from all over the world to see him, and I’ve heard that he travels all over the world to see patients, too.

But now he’s retiring. I can certainly see why, he has had a long and distinguished career, and he’s probably well past the age that most people retire. But a doctor can only serve for so long, they have to retire too. When I was there in July there was a med student observing him, but as far as I know there is no replacement. It’s a shame, because I’ve recommended Dr. Kaplan many times over the years, and I know many urticaria sufferers who need his services. I hope they will be able to find relief with their local physicians.

Enjoy your retirement Dr. Kaplan - it is WELL deserved but you will be missed!

This is going to be about pee. Read on or not, the choice is yours.
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I had a mostly positive experience with my doctor this morning. I walked in there knowing exactly what I wanted, and I walked out with what I wanted. The purpose of the visit was to discuss my chronic urticaria and see what the options were, but what I really wanted was a prescription for 5mg of prednisone. I have a three-year-old prescription for it, and I have found that if I take one when the hives are really bad, they will settle down for a while. Most doctors won’t hand out steroids like candy, but I think my doctor understood that I knew what I wanted - I’m not sure if she realizes I know more about chronic urticaria than she does, but she did give me what I wanted.

My appointment was at 7:30am, which was not fun because I was out very late last night meeting an online friend who was in town from Minneapolis. I am probably going to take a nap after work, because tonight I have to drive to New York. We have tickets to a special showing of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which we got because A is involved with a perfume group online. So yes, a nap is definitely in order before all that driving.

Well color me surprised! I had no idea the entire United Kingdom had banned smoking in “all enclosed or substantially enclosed areas within the work place and public.” According to www.nosmokinglaw.co.uk, the Scottish ban is already implemented, Wales and Northern Ireland are following suit in April, and England will be joining the rest in summer 2007. There’s information on that site for all of the different regions, because apparently they each have their own rules.

The smoking ban in Washington DC takes effect 2 January 2007 and personally I cannot wait! I wonder if a U.S. site will pop up with information similar to this - there have been complaints from some DC businesses that the smoking ban will send their customers to the suburbs, and the UK site has good ideas for all businesses, but it would be awesome to see a site specifically targeted to DC conerns.

Congratulations to the UK on their smoking ban, I’ll enjoy visiting there even more now!

Ladies…you’re never too young for cancer. I read MyDeathSpace.com for morbid entertainment, and today I spotted China Stogner on there. She just died of cervical cancer - and she was 24 years old. I can’t believe that someone younger than me had to write her own obituary (or at least she seems to have written it). She was diagnosed less than a year ago, which means she left this world quickly. It also means that she probably didn’t hear that some forms of cervical cancer can be caused by HPV, which is a sexually-transmitted disease, until it was too late - that news has only come out recently.

So to all the young women who are reading this, myself included…get yourself an annual PAP smear. To everyone else, make sure the women in your life are getting annual screenings. It’s sad that someone just 24 years old had to die of cervical cancer…don’t let it be you next.

Added: sskipstress has additional information on HPV and cervical cancer here.

My chronic urticaria is flaring. It was bad yesterday but today it’s probably a little worse. Oddly enough it’s not along the corset lines, which is good. But it’s affecting my hands, and I hate that. This whole thing makes me so tired. I did a bit of cleanup today but not yet out front like I need to.

• I have had a headache for two and a half days now.
• I forgot that I had put my tiny diamond earrings on the bed, and then I went and slept in the bed. They are not lost, they are just missing - either on the bed or the floor. But it’s going to be a pain to find them.
• Although 25% of voters have voted for deafjournal.net, I realized that I don’t want to be solely responsible for providing support for however many users I get! So that one is probably out of the running. Really, right now, it’s between corsetworld.net, geekygrrl.net, and meredithonline.org. I still don’t know what I would do with the latter two, because I already have amanita.net where I keep all my stuff. CorsetWorld would have a purpose, though, so I’m kind of leaning that way - but I still like the geekygrrl.net too.
• The ATM in the building where I work is no longer making us pay a surcharge! Yay! (I use a credit union with exactly one location in the metro area, so I am used to paying a surcharge at all ATMs.)
• I am on a million Gallaudet-related mailing lists right now. I am getting several blogs (People of the Eye, Elisa Writes, Mishka Zena, and RidorLIVE) by e-mail and I am also on the GallyNet-L mailing list which is very active. I also continue to get two copies of every USA-L News mailing that goes out (can’t figure out how to deactivate either of them!) and I signed up for the GUFSSA alert list this morning. My mail is full of Gallaudet-related stuff.
• I am no longer sad when the scale hasn’t gone down. I have been at 160 for a couple of months now, give or take a couple of pounds now and then. I am going to continue on my diet, so I will be elated if I lose weight, but I will still be happy if I just maintain.
• I still have a headache. I have no Advil at work.

This morning I called my primary care doctor and asked the receptionist if I should go there first, or straight to a specialist. She said to come there, and gave me an 11:15am appointment. So I left work and went over there, and my doctor was pretty surprised by how big the hole was in my right eardrum. She couldn’t see anything on the left side because the blood had “formed a film” over everything. She said I should see an ENT doctor right away, and I ended up with an appointment in Manassas at 3:30pm. I’d left things at work (expecting to be back) and I hadn’t turned on my out-of-office, so I had to go back to Fort Belvoir first. I spent about an hour there and then left for the appointment.

The specialist looked at my right eardrum and said it was about 25% gone. He said that might seem like a huge hole to a primary care doctor, but “we see that kind of thing all the time.” Well gee, 25% sounds like a lot to me, too! He looked in my left ear and confirmed that there was a big blood clot there, and he said he could fix that right away. So he brought me into another room and sat me in a big chair next to some big machines, and he proceeded to fix it. This involved ear drops, peroxide (which sounds like Rice Krispies in your ear), vacuuming, and a bit of pulling with skinny tweezers. At one point I said ouch, and he said “sorry, it’s like pulling off a scab, it’s going to hurt a bit…see, there’s the blood clot!” And silly me, I looked…sure enough, it looked like a tiny scab - ew!

I asked about the possibility of a loaner hearing aid, having explained first thing that I was an interpreter. (He asked if I worked for an agency; when I told him which one he seemed to recognize it.) He said there was no possibility of that kind of thing because they don’t make hearing aids for such a mild loss. I should have told him that if I could notice difficulty hearing, and I had to keep asking people to repeat themselves, then it was enough to need correcting for my job…but I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t do any interpreting at work today (I was barely there), so I will find out tomorrow if my work is truly going to be suffering as a result of this. If it is, I will contact fairerhiannon to ask if she has any advice, since she deals with assistive technology for the deaf in her job. I found some possibilities on eBay - my mother had suggested this kind, but it’s too obvious; there’s also this kind, which might not stay in the same way my earbuds wouldn’t stay in, and there’s this kind which has a nice long piece that goes inside your ear (and thus might not fall out). I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do…do I want to wait until I’m in a situation where I have trouble interpreting, or do I want to have help in my pocket just in case? Is it worth it for only 2-3 months? I don’t know.

By the way…is there any doctor in the world who is not running late 80% of the time? I had to wait half an hour past my appointment time at both offices today. And of course for the second one, I had just sent a message to Grescha asking that very question…when the guy walked in the room. Oh well.

I had my hearing tested today. I have flaccid eardrums; the audiologist recommended seeing a physician to make sure nothing is wrong (she implied that sometimes there’s a cause, and sometimes people just are that way). Flaccid eardrums mean that it’s harder for sound to make my eardrums vibrate - the eardrum moves with the sound, rather than vibrating and passing the information along to the cochlea.

My hearing is “borderline normal” for all of the sounds of speech, which means I’m essentially just fine. I do have a sharp drop at about 6kHz - a 60dB loss there and a 70dB loss at 8kHz. Those numbers indicate “moderate to severe” hearing loss, but because no speech sounds are in that range, I’m fine. It does, however, explain why A can hear when the TV is on and I can’t.

Well, this is interesting. I have a mild hearing loss at high frequencies, apparently. This was prompted by an NPR story about the “Mosquito” teen repeller, which plays a 17kHz tone to drive away unruly teens hanging around stores and other establishments. I had been able to hear the sample tone played on the radio, which was less than 17kHz, but we couldn’t hear it when I played the story on the computer. We figured it was just the computer having a hard time playing it, so we tried the Online Hearing Test at LloydHearingAid.com. I was the one clicking the buttons, so we were really only testing my hearing, and it came up with a mild hearing loss. It said my loss was greater at the lower frequencies (assuming I was interpreting the little chart right), but I figured that it only said it was a mild loss because they wanted to sell me hearing aids.

We still couldn’t figure out if my computer could play a 17kHz tone, though, so I searched around trying to find out how. I discovered that the Audacity software (which I downloaded to record Spoken Wikipedia articles) could generate its own tones, so we started playing with that. I was rather surprised to find that I couldn’t hear anything at 11kHz or above! A could hear up to about 15kHz. So now she knows why I sometimes don’t hear her when she’s calling for me from elsewhere in the house. I’m vaguely considering going for an actual audiologist test, even though I can hear human voices with no problem…just to find out what my actual loss might be, if any. I’m not actually worried…it was just a surprise to me to have A saying “yes, I hear that” for tones that I could swear weren’t even being played.