thankful thursday

The week has flown by but on the other hand, it seems like time is standing still. I can’t believe it’s Thursday already – and I surely can’t believe it’s already been a week since I had my wisdom teeth out. Austin leaves on a mission trip on Saturday and all of a sudden what seemed like a long way away is here…. And I have so much to do. And feel like doing nothing.

My teeth – or gums rather – are healing fine. I haven’t had nearly as much pain as I expected. It still hurts to smile and it hurts to talk a lot. I’ve been talking a lot today. I haven’t worked a full day yet this week and won’t today either. I have my follow up with the oral surgeon in less than an hour. I am dreading the drive down to Gainesville and dreading the hurry up and wait at his office and dreading having to run the errands I need to run while I’m “in town” to get Austin ready for his trip and dreading the drive home and the stop by the pharmacy I need to make on the way home.

I’m still fighting bronchitis and had a kind of weird chest xray earlier this week that set me off on my newest health expedition. There’s something in one lung that shouldn’t be there and it’s not real clear what it is. It’s referred to as “calcified lymph nodes” and it’s sort of a pearl in the oyster kind of thing – there’s something there that’s irritated and so the body calcifies over it. It can be from several different things, the first thing they think of is tuberculosis and it looks like that’s not the case – based on the tb test I had done on Tuesday, that will be read tomorrow morning. It can also be scarring from old illnesses – but I never really have had asthma or those sort of things and since I haven’t had a chest xray in… well, I don’t think ever… there’s nothing to compare it with to see if it’s old illness or new illness. There are other worst case scenario things that it can be and I’m not really going there mentally yet. The long and short of it right now is that there’s this mass of lymph nodes that is calcified and it’s a structure sort of like a bunch of grapes and it’s taking up some lung capacity which makes having bronchitis a little more uncomfortable, meaning that it makes it harder to breathe and stuff like that, which makes doing the routine things that I have to do in the course of a day like… I don’t know… raise a 15 year old, for instance… and go to work… for example… more taxing than usual.

I blogged about this in the other blog but wanted to sort of sit on it and study it and weigh my thoughts on it before I blogged in my “not as friendly” blog environment. It’s not supposed to be there and it’s not comfortable but I don’t want to overdramatize the situation and I certainly don’t want there to be unkind things said about me in this situation. It is what it is and I will do what I have to do and once the radiologist and pulmonologist and whoever and whatever have time to look it over more carefully then I’ll know more about what needs to be done.

There’s some minor validation for me in the sense of I knew that I didn’t quite feel right and I wanted it to be more than just depression and laziness and whatever. On the other hand I would rather it just be some deficient character trait than something not quite right physically. But in the meantime between knowing what I know and figuring out what is really happening, I’m just sort of going through the stuff that has to happen in everyday life as best I can and keeping the wheels on the wagon in the same inefficient way that I always do.

And gosh… I’m so relieved to be one week past that whole wisdom tooth thing… and the mountains are still gorgeous and I’m going to very soon be able to smile again- I mean, it won’t hurt to smile any more. I have lots to smile about. More later. Have to get to the doctor!