I was surprised by a super phone call via Skype from Tiana! It's so cool to talk to someone live who is in Burkina Faso. The quality wasn't great, but it was cool to hear her little sick voice nonetheless. (Everyone spare some of your "healthy thoughts" for T so she can be nice and healthy to hang out with some other Canadians this weekend!)
My evil formerly-twin cousin Shawna (for some reason we look less like each other and more like our mothers every year) bought me "This is Spinal Tap". She thinks she's funny. I laughed, anyway. So every time I look at the cover, I can remember the worst 5 minutes or so of my life!
Last night, Dad, Mom, Bren, Jeffrey and I went to Mongolian (my favourite restaurant) and then to watch Madagascar 2. It wasn't as great as Madagascar 1; however, the first was about animals that escape the cushy NYC Central Park zoo to end up in the wilderness, so it was much more relevant to my life at the time! (I watched it with the kiddies in Guatey.) Tonight, I'll be watching Bren's hockey game all the way out in Orleans with the same crew. Obviously I wore earplugs to the movie and will do the same for the hockey game! Best invention ever. Earplugs have gotten me through living in residence, getting through Greyhound rides back and forth between Ottawa and Toronto, sleeping in the rainforest and surviving this stupid headache!
Anyway, onto the health stuff that people ask about. I saw a neurologist bright and early on Thursday morning. Mom and I were extremely early for once and nothing was open, so I knitted while sweating buckets in the waiting room. Our house is freezing cold so I'm really warm when I'm anywhere else (except maybe outside...stupid Ottawa!). If I do end up going back to Guatemala, I'm going to MELT. Okay, back on track. So she was awesome, asking me tons of questions and doing a lot of reflex and mobility-type tests. It was lovely to be with a doctor who took her time and was generally very nice. I think it's also a great sign that she took out her little supplies from an extremely well-loved little leather case. Makes her seem really experienced, haha.
Diagnosis? Well, she's going to get some radiologists to check out my MRI. She kept my MRI and CT scans and photocopied the results of tests and the list of drugs I was on in Guatemala. If anything interesting pops up, I'll get a call. In the meantime, her current theory is a tension problem in the right back of my neck. Most of the pain is concentrated in the back right part of my head. When she put pressure on my neck with her hands, I could feel the pressure much more on my right side than the left side. I thought she was just pushing harder there.
The current treatment plan is new drugs (Mom has the name...) for my pain and prescribed massages for my neck.
Mom thinks our trip to Belize might have done it. It's probably the first time in my whole life where I was really relaxed. My theory is, after getting totally relaxed for the first time, we experienced this:
We're both mostly kidding, especially since we don't know if she's actually right.
So now I wait 6 weeks to see her again. In the meantime, I'm supposed to take these pain pills daily, bumping up my dose once a week if they aren't working. This means Christmas is going to be spent in Canada, which is definitely not what I expected. The best laid plans 'eh.
No update on what is happening with my work/co-op situation at the moment. I promise I'll post on here if anything comes up on that front.
Carola is the best and put a bunch of stuff in my bedroom that was in the dining room area (i.e. the area with 3 walls) and saved it from almost certain destruction from wind, rain and rats. Yay! Let's hope my journal survived. I think it'll be great to read back on everything that happened. My goal for my 21st year is to start writing something, anything, in a daily journal. Maybe it'll keep me from rambling so much in my blog!
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