Well, it's Sunday night, after 10 PM and another work week will be starting in a few hours. At least this will be a short one, with the July 4th on Friday. And it HAS to be better than last week. Here's the saga......
It started last Sunday afternoon. I had gone to church, stopped at the grocery store on the way home, fixed some lunch and sat down to read the news paper. I don't know what happened or how it started, but my right eye started itching and I rubbed it. MISTAKE! Within a short period of time, it got worse and worse, and by morning, I looked like someone had punched me in the eye. It was swollen on both the upper lid and underneath my eye, making it very difficult to see. I had taken some Benedryl before going to bed, and used allergy eye drops, but they didn't seem to help much. I went to work Monday morning, scared a few people, told them I didn't know if I would make it thru the day, but I did, with some difficulty. The combination of a limited vision field and my bifocals didn't exactly make it easy to see the computer screen! But as the day went on, it started getting a bit better. I kept putting ice on it, and taking Benedryl at night and by Wednesday, it was barely visible. I still don't know what started it but speculate that I may have touched something at the grocery store (produce with some pesticide residue perhaps), and then touched my face.
Ok fast forward to Thursday. I went with friends to the last Beach Music concert in downtown Greensboro - a "take your own chair" type of thing. I had to rush to meet everyone and was a bit annoyed about some of it but it was actually very nice. However, my hands started itching and I realized I was breaking out in hives again. I've been so careful about the soap at work, so it's not that. I got home late that evening (more on that follows below), rubbed cortisone cream all over them and got some Benedryl going again. The next morning, they were even worse. I went to work but was miserable, so wound up calling my doctor and running to show him. His opinion about both the eye and the hives is that I've developed some new allergy, and probably the fact that I'm on medication already has kept it from being any worse than this. So I'm on prednisone for a week, which has helped tremendously, on a different allergy medication to see if that helps and if it doesn't, I'll be sent to an allergist to help figure out what's going on.
Ok now about Thursday night...
When I arrived home, I was surprised to see that my laptop was on. I was pretty sure I had shut it down when I left in the morning, and it should have been in hibernate mode even if I hadn't. Thinking that perhaps Matt had stopped by and used it, I brushed it off as nothing. After checking email, I shut it down and went to get ready for bed. While brushing my teeth, I THOUGHT I heard the start-up music, but then decided it was something on TV and went to bed. HOWEVER, around 4:15 AM, I woke up hearing that same sound and knew something was up. Sure enough, my laptop was on. I shut it down, and it came back on. I repeated that several times with the same result. What the HECK was going on. I unplugged it and finally shut it down again, flipped it over and removed the battery. That broke the cycle and it stayed off. I tried turning it on, and then shut down again and it stayed off. Whew!
By that time, it was 5 AM and I needed to be up to head to the homeless shelter to help prepare breakfast as I do most Friday mornings. Usually we have a volunteer staff of 15-20 people, which is a good number to prepare food for up to 120 guests. HOWEVER, this week we had only 10 volunteers show up, and we had 65 guests. I got the sausage cooking, helped get the bread buttered for toasting, cracked 4 dozen eggs and scrambled them ready for cooking, turned the sausage, put the pans of bread in the oven to toast, cut up a dozen or so oranges into quarters, got the sausage and toast out of the oven and into pans ready for serving, and helped finish up the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the lunches we also distribute. We ALL had to really hustle to make the meal happen. We got it served and started to clean up. I wound up cleaning out and scraping the cooked-on grits from the warming pan, which is an ugly task. I had grits on my face, all over both hands, even in my eyebrows. I was hot and sweaty and just wanted to go home and take a shower - but instead I went to work. I had a clean shirt and washed up in the bathroom with paper towels (mental note - put a towel and washcloth in the car for such incidents), and spent the day at work. No wonder the hives on my hands got worse.
By 5 I was exhausted, and just wanted to home and crash, which I did. The rest of the weekend was much more relaxed and peaceful, although we've had some nasty storms. And a beautiful rainbow!
See what happens when I don't post often enough - I write a book! Ok Monday, here I come!
No comments:
Post a Comment