Crap Ear

So I still haven't recovered any hearing at all in my right ear. I had little idea how much this would affect my life and moods. I get so angry at my stupid body. I hate it really. It has always crapped out on me at so many turns in my life. I have not asked that much of it. Its let me do some great things. I have hiked it, camped it, jumped out of a perfectly good airplane in it, made it consume weird stuff in Cambodia, helped produce two darling children... But it is celiac, prone to sickness, never that strong, weak at the knees, clear of hair on its head (although this doesn't really bug me, oddly enough), a myriad of crappy things. I do hate this body. I probably should have died in childbirth a century ago. And that's just the way of things; how medicine helped me live to see ten when by Survival Of The Fittest I should be worm fodder and long, long in the ground.

Here are some picsh from a few days ago. The RSS, XHTML, and CSS textual links aren't working yet, but the rest do. Click on the first image and then use the textual links such as 'next' to progress through. I am beta-testing a PHP photo-blogging package to see how easy or difficult it makes life to post images on-the-fly.

Last Leg

Back to work this morning. While it feels like I have had enough time off from work to be reflective of the season, most of that time has been taken up with just trying not to lose the contents of my stomache and keep taking my antibiotics on time. As a result, I feel enormously unprepared for the holiday coming up. I will be getting out Christmas cards this year, which is a leg up from previous years, but the one thing I tried to locate for my wife for Christmas proved difficult to even find despite its commodity value. I don't know, I was pretty dopey that Friday after work anyway with my sinus and earache fun coming on then, although I didn't know it.

Last night I made the preparation for Norwegian 'Sirop Snipper' using gluten-free flour. It sits chilled in the fridge now until the kids and I can roll some out and make some cut-out shapes to use in trimming the tree (Carrie is back at work these few nights, and I wanted to test the flour before we head to Kingston for Christmas). It is a lovely thing to bring these memories of creation around this holiday back to life - so long laid dormant in my adult life. This is more manifestation of my earlier post regarding message-creation for our children.

I actually have to go prepare to leave and catch a GO train - that's been awhile since I had to do that. Gotta really warm up the car now as well. Although its a balmy -10C outside right now, it was -21C the morning I escaped to do some ice crystal images (one seen above here), and if you're caught at the side of the road in -10C, -21C ain't much different.

Perhaps more later.

IV in, IV out

So this has been my friend for the last 48 hours. Five visits to Emergency for 'top-flight' antibiotic treatments - one every 8 hours since Saturday afternoon. I thought I wasn't getting much sleep before then (having been off work now since last Tuesday), but this has been no barrel of monkeys. Treating a severe middle ear infection.

This has brought on all sorts of delightful side-effects; such as nightmares and morbidity, threat of arterial puncture as I sleep (needle stays in 24/7), heartburn from the drug, the usual. Its been real, and its been fun, but it hasn't been real fun. To amuse myself during the visits I started counting holes in the acoustic suspended ceiling tiles and wondering why its so damned difficult for the human eye to differentially identify multiple, adjacent items of similar nature. Try to count 30 or more things that are in a row, for example and you'll now what I mean. That's just plain weird. I wonder whether its software, or hardware (that is, brain or mechanical function) that is preventing this happening easily?

Off now for the final dose. Last visit to ER for awhile I hope. They put me in a small plastering room off reception. Its a bit unnerving to have waiting people appear not to notice me, but nevertheless surrepticiously peek in while I lay there with my IV. Here are a few more images from last night for your delectation: