Hubs Update

We found out yesterday that hubby probably has sarcoidosis. The docs are sending the samples away to yet another expert just to be sure. It's a weird rare autoimmune disease. There's no cure and i believe they mess around with a variety of drugs to try and treat it... mostly steroids. I think it's more life altering than fatal. So now we wait to find out how they want to go about trying to save the eyesight in hubs one remaining good eye.

SARCOIDOSIS

Sarcoidosis is a rare multi-system, auto immune disease that is known for its long remissions and wide variety of symptoms. Sarcoidosis symptoms vary from person to person - no two are exactly alike. It is a granulomatous disease in which inflammation may occur in lymph nodes, lungs, liver, eyes, skin, joints, kidneys, liver and spleen, and other tissues.

Some patients (60%) have Sarcoid for a period of 2-3 years and never have it again, but others have it chronically, some with periods of remission.

taken from The World Sarcoidosis Society

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Me Me Me

I've been feeling pretty down lately... worse the last day or two. That's probably why i haven't been blogging much and also because i don't have as much time with hubby at home and summer hols etc. Strange really because the weather is perfect and i've been swimming almost everyday... usually i'd feel great. :) Anyway, i probably won't be blogging much in the next couple weeks but hopefully after that things will get back to something close to normal.

posted by susi 9:24 AM

The carpet looks great. I'm surprised... was starting to think i wouldn't like it at all. Haven't put a damn thing back except for my pc. :))

Did the deep water running class again yesterday. It is so great to be out swimming... wish our summers were longer. The synchro class was yesterday night too... it's a lot of fun. There's a class that runs from sept to june too only it's in one of the indoor pools of course. I think i might go to that in the fall. It's in the afternoons but that could be good cause my parents are more reliable than my hubby. :P

We're still hitting highs of 33C this week. They forecast a high of 36C which has only ever happened twice before in Calgary.

posted by susi 10:12 AM

Another baking hot day. :)) Did the swim lessons again this morning and then took my 8 yr old for breaky cause she missed the pancake breakfast at the pool yesterday. I couldn't be bothered to find another stampede breaky partly due to the heat and partly cause i'd rather eat oatmeal and fruit than pancakes and sausage two days in a row. Swam laps this aft... was about the only workout possible in 33C weather.

It's still 26C/75F and nearly midnight... we so rarely get weather like this... it is soooo kewl. :)) Went for a walk on the hill around 9ish with my 8 yr old and one of the pups. Wasn't too bad... it just about did my girl boxer dog in though... my pups can't take the heat at all. The dogs won't always drink our water when we're walking but she was sucking it back pretty good tonight.

I'll be offline for a short while after tonight. We're getting new carpet in the family room tomorrow sometime... everything has to be outta here by the time they show up... which means i gotta rip apart both pcs... ugghhhh... one down one to go. I could be up for awhile yet.

posted by susi 10:44 PM

DO YOU KNOW?

Your body is made almost entirely of 27 chemical elements (though it may also
contain traces of some of the 78 others in the periodic table). The chief ingredients,
however, are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Which of these four elements
accounts for most of your weight?


Oxygen=2/3 of the body's weight


Carbon=18%
Hydrogen=10%
Nitrogen=3%

posted by susi 12:26 PM

Great day today. Lotsa sun and water. Did an hour long deep water running class at the outdoor pool i've been taking my daughter to every morning for swim lessons. A friend i run into at the end of the swim lessons decided to go too. Half way thru she looked at me and said, "I'M NEVER CALLING THESE OLD LADY CLASSES AGAIN"... lol... that pretty well sums it up. I'd never done any deep water exercise classes before either so i was kinda surprised at what a good workout it was too. Granted there are a few older people that obviously use it to maintain some mobility and socialize but it can definately be a decent workout too.

Dragged hubby with me to the pool. As an added bonus they were doing a free stampede breakfast this morning. During stampede week in Calgary businesses all over town do free breakfasts. It sorted sucked cause for me the pancakes and sausages defeated the purpose of the swimming... :P Got to hang out with some friends at the pool after for awhile. Had the afternoon off from the kids cause my parents took them to Calaway Park again today. Almost too hot for it. Calaway is a little amusement park here in town.

The first episode of Big Brother 3 was on tonight... woohooo. :) I can't help it... i love it. We'll be glued to it all summer 3 nights a week for sure. Went for a run after... got dark between ten and eleven tonight... was still nice and warm though... around 21C.

posted by susi 11:08 PM

The Tour de France is on.

Lance Armstrong and his team are favored to win. I've never paid much attention to the tour until i read Lance Armstrong's book last year...It's Not About the Bike. It's one of my favorite books. It's about the tour but it's also about how Lance beat one of the worst possible cancer scenarios you could be diagnosed with... i believe he had a 3% chance of surviving altho they never told him that at the time. Since then he's won the tour 3 times and is going for his 4th this year. It's just an amazing story.

Daily Report Phil Liggett

2002 Tour de France Preview
7/1/02

I can find no one who does not think Lance Armstrong will win the Tour! What a terrible burden if you are Lance Armstrong. Sure, on paper, Lance has never been better with wins in the Midi Libre and the Dauphine Libere. His build-up preferences this year, compared to victory in the Tour of Switzerland last year.

He also has the best US Postal Team ever around him. The team has been the story this year, and with wins in their own right and without Lance, they will scare the pants off the rest of the field.

Lance himself will handle the time trials and should win his fourth Tour de France. After he rid himself of cancer, he shocked by winning his first Tour in 1999. He returned to confirm his feat a year later, and last year, made up over half an hour to conquer the field for a third time.

posted by susi 6:43 PM

It's been almost a week since hubs surgery and he's doing well He's still swollen in the face especially around his eyes. He's sleeping a lot but otherwise he's up and about. Hasn't left the house of course. Guess we miss the stampede this year... that'll save us a few bucks. I'm off to swimming lessons again with my 8 yr old. The weather is back up into the 30's starting today supposedly. :)

posted by susi 8:41 AM

The weather was yucky today. Not very good for taking swim lessons at an outdoor pool. Managed to squeeze in a walk on the hill with my 8 yr old in between rain.

Been thinking of getting reregistered as an RN lately. Not really because i'm dying to work... quite the opposite really... but i may need it and wish i had it one day so i may as well think of doing it now while i have the time. I figured why do the refresher course to reregister when i can do the 2 yr postgrad BN degree. As a result I found out you have to be registered to enter the postgrad BN program. So if i want to do it i'm going to have to do the RN refresher program afterall.

The thought of doing the refresher in order to get my degree is a lot more appealing than doing the refresher in order to actually work... lol.

posted by susi 11:13 PM

Northern Lights video

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There are some of the most amazing northern lights photos here at Nori Sakamoto's Aurora Photo Gallery

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Aurora Facts(Northern Lights)

THE AURORA has a curtain-like shape, and the altitude of its lower edge is sixty or seventy miles, about ten times higher than a jet aircraft flies.
AURORAS OCCUR along ring-shaped regions around the north and south geomagnetic poles. Fairbanks, Alaska, is a good place for aurora watching because it is under this region in the north. where people see aurora borealis, or northern lights: the southern aurora is aurora australis.

LIKE A NEON SIGN, auroral light is produced by a high-vacuum electrical discharge. It is powered by interactions between the sun and earth. The light is glow from atoms and molecules in the earth's upper atmosphere.

THE SUN IS a ball of gases that is so hot its outermost part blows away as the solar wind. Consisting of charged particles. this tenuous gas travels to earth in about three days. Because the earth's magnetic field prevents the solar wind from penetrating our atmosphere, its solar particles stream around our planet, encasing earth and its magnetic field within a comet-shaped cavity called the magnetosphere.

THE SOLAR WIND powers the gigantic electrical discharge process, causing the magnetosphere to behave as a generator that produces up to ten million megawatts of electrical power.

THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE contains, at the lower edge of the aurora, a thin and partly ionized layer called the ionosphere. Reflected by the ionosphere, radiowaves can propagate great distances by bouncing between it and the ground.

AURORAL DISPLAYS INDICATE that the ionosphere and our protective atmosphere are being energized by the electric power generated in the magnetosphere. As these electrical currents are discharged in the ionosphere. many phenomena are produced including the visible emissions we recognize as the aurora and magnetic storms.

taken from alaskascience.com

posted by susi 11:53 AM

Taking my 8 yr old to swim lessons today. It runs everyday for a week which is better than say every saturday cause it would interfere with going camping etc in the summer... not that we'll be going anywhere this summer but just in case.

Saw the northern lights a couple nights ago from my bedroom window. That doesn't happen too often here. Was pretty kewl. Wish i had a decent camera. It was green and covered the whole sky at times. Not half as bright and spectacular as some of the photos on the webpage addy i put out of course because we're so far away.

posted by susi 8:27 AM

Hubs

Hubs came home today...a day earlier than expected. He's doing good. He's even more swollen in the face and neck today. Both his eyes are half swollen shut. He's kinda headachy and tired but otherwise not too bad.

posted by susi 3:07 PM

Thanx JE :) ... it has been rather quiet with a few of the regular bloggers being busy with vacations etc. I thought you might notice my YACCS comment location...*grin*. I figured while i was updating i may as well adjust it's positioning.

The kids seems to be handling it all very well. Thanx for asking. :) The 3 yr old is really too young to be greatly affected and i think last summer was a lot harder on my 8 yr old than this summer. Hearing i had cancer was a lot scarier for her. Maybe she is just used to all the surgery/hospital stuff by now too. I think as long as it's not her going for surgery she is pretty happy... ;)

posted by susi 2:47 PM

Random Ramblings

Joined a synchro swimming class yesterday evening for the summer. It's a pretty laid back class for adults... it was alot of fun. It runs every friday 8pm-9pm. It's at one of the local outdoor pools which made it more appealing to me. I spent way too much time at indoor pools as a kid racing etc and i haven't liked the atmosphere in them for years.

It's nice to spend as much time outdoors as possible while it's nice especially swimming. It's a little cool by 8pm but not bad. Supposed to warm up again by monday... in the high 20's. The timing was a bit weird cause of hub's surgery being the day before but it was either go or miss it all summer so i went.

Hubs

Went to see hubby again with the kids this afternoon. He's still doing well... even more swollen than he was yesterday on the one side... head, eye, face, and neck. He's got the typical big horseshoe incision on the right side of his head. The eyebrain doc was in this morning to see him... his opinion was a little diff from the neurosurgeon's yesterday. I wasn't there but it sounds like he said something about cells being in the tissue they removed. Whether this means it could be cancer or not we don't know... but it doesn't sound like he thinks it's just a chronic neuritis. Oh well we're used to this by now... more waiting.

About 45min ago i hated the entire world. Just as i was leaving the hospital and entering the parking lot i walked in front of a woman backing her van out. Yes IN FRONT of someone backing up... not BEHIND someone backing up. I had both kids with me and we were heading for our car and this woman thought she'd make my day by screaming out her window at me... something about why the hell i couldn't wait. Wait for what???? OMG i was so pissed off. I screamed something back at her. My temper these days is somethin else... i coulda hit the woman if she hadn't driven off. To be cont. Gotta run.

posted by susi 1:38 PM

Hubs surgery went well yesterday. No problems... they got what they wanted. The neurosurgeon called in the afternoon when it was all over. Apparently the tissue they removed neither looks like tumor or inflammation at first glance. We were able to see him shortly after he got to the neuro icu. It's the same unit his little sister died in when she was 23 about ten years ago. It's a good thing they've renovated the whole floor so it looks nothing like it used to. I had visions of him ending up in the same bed but it's entirely different. Anyway, hubs said brain surgery was a piece a cake... not half as bad as he thought. He was a little sore... a little swollen and now has a little less hair but was lookin and feelin pretty good.

Today hubs was a little more sore than yesterday but was up walking around and eating etc. He's a bit more swollen on the one side too. His eye is swollen shut and he can't hear too well. Me, my mom and my 8 yr old went to see him today. The neurologist said it looks like some inflammatory process going on. They are calling it a chronic neuritis for now.... which i assume is no different than what they originally diagnosed him with over a year ago when he first lost his eyesight. Hopefully we will find out more in the next week or two.

posted by susi 10:04 PM

Well i'm having so many problems publishing to blogger i'm thinking of giving up. It's not just blogger but bloggar as well... i just keep getting error after error or it's so slow i could wait all day for it to load. I've had enough the last week or two. So i can either find a different weblog service or go to something like movable type... which could take me awhile to figure out seeing as i haven't been spending a whole lotta time in front of my pc lately.

posted by susi 11:05 AM

Friday Five (.org)

1. Where are you right now?
At home sitting at my desk... sorta freezing my ass off cause i have the patio doors open and it's probably not much above 60F outside... 61F to be precise... beautiful and sunny though.

2. What have you lost recently?
My hair. :P

3. What was the first CD you ever purchased? Does that embarrass you now?
I have no idea. Probably some techno remix from 1992 when we got our first CD player or some movie CD like songs from The Big Chill. Embarrass me?... nah.

4. What is your favorite kind of writing pen?
Probably gel pens cause of all the neat colors they come in. :)

5. What is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Stracatella mostly. (?spelling) Although the pralines and cream hubs has in the freezer tasted pretty damn good last week when he forced me to eat it...lol.

posted by susi 10:43 AM

Went to the hospital at 6am this morning. There wasn't too much waiting around. We were down in the OR area by 730ish and they took hubs in by about 8am. They have one of those MRI OR's so they can do scans before, during and after surgery to make sure they are biopsying what they are seeing on the MRI. The surgeon is gonna phone me this aft when it's all done.

Saw an orderly today i worked with in trauma for 8 yrs... he was working up on the floor they admitted my hubby on. It was kinda nice to see someone i knew and somewhat surprising since i've been gone 8 yrs now.

posted by susi 7:42 AM

Tomorrow's the big day. We have to be up at 5am and be at the hospital around 630am. Surgery at 730am. Hubs has had a cold/cough the last week so they will decide after they put him out whether to do the surgery or not. If he doesn't cough too much they will do the surgery.

posted by susi 10:34 PM