Markus’ Blog

It’s been almost a full month since my last post. Bad me. I guess that means not too much stuff was going on.

Apparently, the latest cold spell not only brought snow, yet again, it also brought at least two colds. A major one for my poor sweetie and a quite minor one for me — my nose is not even properly stuffed up (yet), but it can stay that way as far as I am concerned.

Let’s hope we’ll be feeling better soon, especially Brigette, who’s recuperating in bed right now. And I have to go on another San Jose trip this coming Wednesday. I’d rather not suffer from a cold while on my trip.

We’ll hole up on the weekend, I am thinking, drink hot tea, eat fruit and drink juices with lots of vitamin C.

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I learned on Friday, from my Dad, that my Grandma’s leukemia apparently took a rapid turn for the worse. She had been first diagnosed last summer, but it turned out quite quickly that her illness was quite stable and not progressing. Also, it didn’t cause her any symptoms or discomfort, except in rare instances.

I phoned her Saturday morning (Saturday evening her time) to find out how she’s doing, first hand. This is what she told me.

As her symptoms worsened, it was found that her platelet count hat dropped to 65,000, which is not good at all. One should at least have 100,000. Normal would be 120,00-130,000. (Just checked Wikipedia, and there they say a healthy person has between 150,000 and 400,000 platelets per mm³.) Now she has to go in and get several transfusions which take 7.5 hours each (because they have to drip very slowly) in an attempt to get her platelet count up to 100,000. I also found out that one such transfusion costs EUR 6,000.00. That’s CAD 9,230.49 according to XE.com. Yay for a good health care system that takes care of that kind of stuff. Once that works, it’s on to chemotherapy for her. Not much fun, for sure, but better than the alternative. If her platelet count doesn’t go up, it looks like there isn’t much that can be done.

Her routine checkup had been scheduled for this week three months ago. As it turns out, three months may have been a little long of a wait, since it got to the point where her symptoms worsened considerably the week before she was scheduled to go in.

Her physician suggested she may have been suffering from this blood disease for longer than just 8 or 9 months. It’s just, she didn’t have any symptoms, so nobody looked for a blood disease before then. It has also been found that her heart and her spleen are enlarged, which makes her abdomen hard to the touch.

I am holding my thumbs and crossing my fingers that the treatment works. She sounded calm and confident when I talked to her. She’s a tough girl.

Way to go, Grandma. — Zeig’s ihnen, Omi.

My mouth sure did ache more than the last time around. It’s still a little sore — and swollen. All in all, I think I am not doing too badly, though.

A couple of Advil always did the trick, I never had to revert to Tylenol 3’s. I’m going to take some Advil tonight before going to bed, but that should be it. No more pain medication after that. The swelling has gone down considerably as well, today.

In a couple of days my mouth is probably going to be almost back to normal, and within the next week and a half or so, it should be completely healed.

It started in January: I got the wisdom teeth on my left side taken out. The second stage, taking care of my right side, should have happened four weeks ago. That didn’t work out, though, because the dentist anticipated he’d more need time than he had booked for me.

So, the procedure got re-scheduled for today, 8:00am, to be precise. So it was getting-up-early day today, combined with some hearty breakfast: two poached eggs and toast. This combination is known to fill me up for quite some time, which is very much needed, considering I won’t be eating much for the rest of the day and most of tomorrow.

It went quite well, even though the right side was definitely tougher than the left. The upper right tooth was jammed against another tooth, the lower right tooth was jammed against the jaw. That made the whole endeavor more complicated, time-consuming and uncomfortable.

It wasn’t too bad, though, because I was done in less than an hour and a half. Although that’s roughly twice as long as the first extraction, it was still less than the two hours the dentist had set aside.

The remainder of the weekend — I’m off work today, so it’s weekend for me already — will be devoted to taking it easy and recovering.

It was four weeks ago that I got my left wisdom teeth removed. To day it’s time for the right side. Everybody “hold their thumbs” from 2:45pm-3:30pm or so.

The first time around it went really well, so now I’m not so scared. I hope there won’t be any bad surprises. I don’t think there will.

What sucks the most is that I won’t be able to eat properly for a couple of days. Saturday will be the worst: getting by a full day on not much solid food.

Oh well, it’s not the end of the world, just a minor pain in the rear. It could be so much worse (more painful, etc.).

UPDATE: It turns out that my upper right wisdom tooth is almost completely buried under the gums. That means that the dentist needs more time than the allotted one hour to get them both out. Why he didn’t clue into that when I was there four weeks ago, I don’t know.

Anyways, he gave me the option to just get the lower tooth done and come back for the upper tooth at a later time or get them both done later. Since I didn’t feel like dealing with the whole only eating liquids thing, etc. for a third time, I chose to go in at a later time and get them both done then.

That’s going to be March 16 the way it looks right now.

It’s been a week today and I have to say the whole procedure involved less pain and suffering that I thought. It actually wasn’t so much pain that I was feeling, just a certain amount of discomfort and tenderness. Not being able to eat properly for two days or so was what sucked the most.

It’s still a little tender right now, but almost back to normal. I am still being careful to mostly chew on my right side. Let’s hope it’ll progress just as nicely over the next few weeks, because then I’ll need the left side to chew.

The part I like least about having the right side done three weeks from today is: two more days of jello, yoghurt, ice cream, soup and not much else. At least, this time around I know what to expect as far as extraction and recovery are concerned.

The extraction yesterday went pretty well. They did the left side this time around.

First thing they did was look into my mouth and say: “Oh yeah, all four are erupted. That’s going to be an easy extraction.” And it was. No digging around in the gums to find them or anything like that.

The upper tooth came out no problem, the lower one he had to cut in half and take the two pieces out separately. The reason for that was that the roots were not going straight down, but a little sideways, and it was pretty close to the neighboring tooth.

After the procedure he explained to me that he decided to leave a tiny bit of root in my lower jar. Again, because the root of the lower left wisdom tooth was going sideways, taking all of it out would have been too risky. A nerve runs through there and could have been damaged. The piece of root will just stay there forever. It won’t do anything.

Recovery is going well, I think. The only downturn (so far) came at about 11:45pm yesterday night. I had been perfectly fine from 4:00pm till then. Lying in bed, however, I suddenly thought I tasted blood. I got up and checked. Sure enough, my mouth was all red.

The following half hour I spent trying to stop the bleeding — without much success. Finally, after having gone through three pads of gauze in record time, it seemed to be slowing down. I kept pressure on for about 45 minutes, just like they told me when they first finished. So, by 1:00am there was no more bleeding. I stayed up for another 45 minutes to make sure it’ll stay that way. It did, so I went to bed again at 1:45am.

I still don’t know why it started bleeding again all of a sudden — more in fact than it had right after the procedure. I’m just glad everything as been fine since then. And fortunately there’s hardly any pain.

I’ll have to go in and get my wisdom teeth removed today. Two of them anyways. The other two will follow in four weeks.

The fact that I never had any dental work done except for scaling (there has never been a need to do anything else), doesn’t help right now. I am a little (lot) scared. Getting wisdom teeth pulled is not the prettiest thing in the world. Also, I am not exactly looking forward to the swollen mouth and the pain for the next few days.

Anyways, I keep telling myself that millions of people went through this procedure before me and they are still alive.

Please cross your fingers and “hold your thumbs” between 3pm and 4pm today.

It’s not the easiest of times right now. It seems like one thing piles on top of another. First there was wedding stress, then there was condo and moving stress. Now it’s grieving stress topped off by Air Canada being utterly stupid and inhumane.

I am really starting to feel the need for some vacation time, some time to just relax and enjoy life.

Oh, and BTW:

A good friend of Brigette’s mom passed away today. She was only 57. Thursday night she had a stroke, out of the blue. Apparently she suffered from multiple more strokes after she got to the hospital and passed away early Sunday morning. How scary and sad is that?

I met her only twice. Last Christmas and at our wedding, which she attended only two months ago. A very happy and good person. She was involved in community work and helped other people. Never got a chance to take it easy, retire and just enjoy life, always concerned about the well being of others. She will be missed by her family and friends as well as the people she took care of.

This tragedy also raises two points (and it’s surely not the first time they have been made):

• Why do bad things like that happen to good people?
• Life’s too freaking short.

Rest in peace, Heather. My condolences to her family and friends.