Note to self: if you are having a very bad day and you forget to take your meds in the morning, it will turn into an even worse day when your hives sneak up on you. Also, if you are on steroids that make you hungry, and then hang out with people who are doing certain things that give you the munchies, you will want to eat the entire universe. I really hope the doctor I’m seeing July 26th will have a solution besides steroids, because I am finding it impossible to drop the weight I gained on the cruise a month ago.

Ugh, I am just so tired today and tonight. I woke up with hives and swollen eyes this morning. In fact, I basically fit Cute Overload’s Rule #21 - eye capsules - but in a kind of gross way.

Yesterday I interpreted at Kings Dominion, at the guest services office. It was actually kind of interesting - all the complaints they have to put up with! Only a couple of deaf people showed up and they didn’t want anything really hard, so I didn’t have a lot to do. I did get to go on some rides with sajego - we even got in the front seat for Hurler and the back seat for Rebel Yell. I didn’t get to add anything to my Coaster Track Record this time, but it was fun going on coasters with somebody who knows more about them than I do!

I just want to vent about my feet.
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I don’t know why, but I like to watch the show “Intervention” on A&E. On this show, addicts are told they are being filmed for a documentary about addiction, while their families are filmed telling how their loved one’s addiction has affected their lives. At the end of the hour, the addict is brought into an intervention with a professional intervention specialist and their entire family, and they are always asked if they are ready to go to a rehab center right now. Most of them say yes, but I have seen a couple of episodes where they refused.

What I wonder about the show is who pays the fees. The intensive therapy required for inpatient service at drug treatment centers (the show features other addictions too, but usually it’s pills, alcohol, drugs, etc) is very expensive, no matter where you go, but the places featured on Intervention are frequently rather posh. While they undoubtedly do great work, and there are plenty of rich people who need help too, I still wonder about all the lower-class people who are addicted to drugs and simply can’t afford to get help or attention from a national television show.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’m starting a swimming class! This actually began when I found a very pretty swimsuit, and I wanted an excuse to buy it and wear it. I looked into water aerobics classes at my local recreation center, but they were over $200 so I figured I would just do my own laps to get some exercise. I really do need to exercise, but I don’t like using the elliptical machine or the exercise bike we already have, because both are hard on my knees. (I have symptoms of arthritis in most of my joints, but my knees are especially bad.) So I figured that swimming would be a very good no-impact workout.

My wife convinced me that $80 was too much to pay for a swimsuit, and the swimsuit I ended up getting was just $15! I got this style, but the accent color is magenta rather than orange. Then I was checking out the website for my local rec center, and I thought I’d look again at the class offerings. It turned out they have a four-week “Lap Swimming” class for $75, so I signed up for that immediately. They will teach us how to create a proper workout, how to use the pace clock, and probably things like turns and etiquette too. The first class is tonight and I am really looking forward to it - even if we don’t do a whole lot of swimming, it will be a good start.

Well, last night I threw up from alcohol for the first time ever - I didn’t have a drink until I was 21, so it took 5 years. I am kind of surprised at what did it - I had a very weak screwdriver, a stronger screwdriver, and then I think I started to make a third one, but I don’t remember past that. Apparently for some reason I felt the bathtub was a better receptacle than the toilet. And then I passed out on the bathroom floor for three hours - sigh. When I woke up, I cleaned up the mess I had made, and I was okay. I woke up this morning with a hangover, but liquid Advil and an hour or two of additional sleep fixed it.

I think something must have been unsettled to start with, because I’ve never had such a bad reaction before. Maybe I hadn’t eaten enough? Anyway, that’s the first time I’ve thrown up in 7 or 8 years, so it was a funny feeling.

There’s a new search engine for health information: YourHealthSearch.com - Community Driven. In addition to providing general, condition, and insurance searches, they also offer search engines that are targeted to a specific condition or symptom. I gave the system a test run by searching the ADHD search engine for “diet” - sure enough, it came up with many suggestions for altering a person’s diet to affect their ADHD. I’ve never put too much faith in this method myself, though admittedly I don’t really know very much about it so I probably shouldn’t say it doesn’t work - I just don’t think it’s for me. Just for fun, I also tried putting “Michael Jackson” into the vitiligo search engine, but there wasn’t anything especially amusing there.

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.

I have always had great eyesight - I was rather surprised this past Saturday when I was straining to see the speaker from the back of the room. But for the most part my eyes are great, and yet everybody around me - my parents, my wife, her sister and husband who live with us, my in-laws, pretty much everybody I interact with regularly - wears corrective lenses. Some of them wear glasses exclusively and some of them sometimes wear glasses and sometimes contacts, but they all wear something.

I don’t know if anyone in my family has ever considered the option of Lasik, a type of eye surgery that is done in an outpatient treatment center. Performed using a laser, Lasik alters the shape of the cornea - what shape depends on whether you are myopic or hyperopic to begin with. There is a Lasik website that has more information on what the surgery is all about, has a list of doctors that are qualified to perform it, and a discussion forum for those considering having it done. Perhaps the most useful part of the site is a list of “50 tough questions to ask your Lasik doctor,” which empowers patients to choose the best doctor to take care of their precious eyesight!

I decided to take this PayPerPost opportunity because I tried it myself, and it’s legit. The company originally known as Healthia (as seen on ProgrammableWeb and Silicon Beat) is now known as Vimo. They want to build up their database of doctors, so they’re inviting people to rate their doctor in exchange for free songs from eMusic. I rated the ENT I saw recently, because I didn’t like his bedside manner very much - I’m sure he’s good at what he does, but I didn’t appreciate how condescending he was. He wasn’t in the Vimo database, so I added him and submitted my ratings and comments.

You don’t have to give them ANY real information to get the free songs. You can put your name down as Anonymous, and you can probably fudge the address too. The only thing that must be real is your e-mail address…but any one will work, you only need it to get the eMusic redemption code. You’ll get an e-mail immediately thanking you for your contribution, and then after your review has been reviewed by a human, you’ll get the redemption code. I used my five free downloads to get songs from The Science Fiction Album. What will you get with your code?