Dog days

I have been dead in the water since Monday night.  One of the perks of living on Cape Ann is that most of the time the miasma that hangs over most of New England during the Dog Days of summer is held at bay by cool ocean breezes, such that I can leave work in Cambridge with it 90 degrees and humidity to arrive back in Gloucester to find it downright chilly.  Consider it one of the silver linings to a 2 1/2 hour commute!

Every once in a while, however, this magical coastal meteorological phenomenon fails to manifest itself and we are stuck with a land breeze or no wind at all.  This Monday was one of those days.  Compound the dead air with my legendarily bad sinus problems (Wil Wheaton knows my pain-- check out his blog for an extremely graphic description of the joys of living with seasonal allergies, if you dare!) and I spent all night trying not to feel like I was drowning, leaving me totally wrecked for Tuesday.

Last night was marginally better, but I've still been struggling with my sinuses nevertheless.  Help is on the way the way, though-- as I drove down the Boulevard on the way back from the Walgreens I couldn't help but notice that all of the flags along the seawall were flapping unmistakably in a strong ocean wind...

For what it's worth

So the CT scan of my sinuses came up clean, which means... well, I don't know what that means. After a week of feeling pretty good after running the 21-course of antibiotics and getting the good news from my Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist my post-nasal drip seems to have re-established itself and my lymph nodes are going back to being sore again. Are these just my allergies, or am I going to need an exorcist to cleanse these damned sinuses? At this point, I have no freaking clue.

I go back to my retina doctor this Wednesday to have my diagnosis of CSR (Central Serous Retinopathy) in my left eye confirmed, after a wholly unsuccessful attempt to have the test done last week. I knew I had been cutting the test close by trying to schedule it before my Second Life class, which was meeting later in the afternoon, but when I arrived early to find a room full of patients who obviously had been there for quite some time I realized that even what little cushion I had budgeted in probably wasn't going to cut it.

After having my pupils dilated I sat in the waiting room for an hour and a half before learning that my doctor wasn't even in the building, but still in Boston performing laser surgery on another patient. So given the fact that the test itself would take about an hour and a half and there were about half a dozen patients who were ahead of me in the queue I decided that I'd just have to come back another time. So I apologized to the receptionist, made my make-up appointment, and drove home in the blinding midday sun with still-dilated pupils so that I could squint my way through my online class.

So all in all, the medical frustrations continue. Well at least the Second Life class is going well...

(More on that later!)

The drugs, they do nothing

So more than a week into my third course of antibiotics I'm beginning to suspect that mere pharmaceuticals are not going to be able to dislodge whatever it is that has decided to take up semipermanent residence in my sinuses, and that surgery is probably going to happen in my near future. Yick.

Break out the big guns

So my long-awaited meeting with the Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor went as well as one could hope, I suppose: he took one look at my nostrils and declared that mine was one of the worst cases of sinusitis that he'd seen! So now I'm on a 21-day course of Avelox (a powerful antibiotic that is a relative of Cipro, that drug everyone was stocking up on shortly after 9/11 when the anthrax scare was going on), after which I'm doing to have a CT scan done in order to make sure there's no long-term blockage problems. The cool thing is that when they do that they use a special mask that allows them to create a 3-D digital map of my sinuses, which the ENT would then use to navigate via GPS if he had to go in and do anything surgically.

The crappy thing is that the Avelox is totally kicking my ass. Twenty more days of feeling like something the cat dragged in doesn't sound like my idea of fun, but if it can exorcise the demonic slime eels which have taken up residence in my sinuses I'm all for it. I'm slightly annoyed with my primary care physician, however, as it seems that if he had prescribed either of the two courses of antibiotics I had taken before for longer than 10 days I wouldn't be in this mess right now. I suppose this should be a lesson for me to be a less passive patient when it comes to advocating for my own health - I probably should have pushed to see a specialist months ago instead of coming back for successive levels of treatment that didn't do a bit of good.