Singing my heart (burn) out: part II

It turns out there's no easy test for heartburn.  That really surprises me.  In fact, there are expensive tests for all sorts of other things that have similar symptoms as heartburn -- and I've had a whole bunch of those last fall and winter.  But I never once got tested for heartburn, and in fact the only reason I'm sure that that's what I have now is that (a) I've been tested for just about everything else and (b) the massive doses of heartburn meds I'm taking seem to work.

For something like two years now, I've noticed that my voice has been getting raspy.  I had no idea what was causing that, and my primary physician basically said, "well, that kind of thing happens".  I figured I'd try strengthening my throat muscles by singing (although I've since learned that ENTs say the best cure for a sore throat is to rest, not to keep stressing it).  Still, I had fun singing and learning voice exercises.

About eight months after I started the singing stuff, about August of last summer, I started noticing that I'd occasionally have an odd pain underneath my right rib.  Also, sometimes a bit of stomach pain.

In early September, my raspy voice turned into a sore throat that would eventually bother me for several months.  All of these (I now think) were symptoms of heartburn, but I didn't know that at the time.  I also had a tingly arm (which my physical therapy friend diagnosed as sleeping with too many pillows, curing that condition overnight in mid-September, yay!) and I had a lump on my stomach that was completely benign but wigging me out because of all the other funky issues I was having.

My doctor sent me to an ENT (for Test #1), who declared my nostrils were "perfect" and that my throat looked perfectly fine, too.  I have "cryptic tonsils", he noted, but they probably weren't the problem.  He suggested I'd be fine soon, and it was probably just a cold.

But the rib still hurt, and so at the end of September, I went for a Sonogram (Test #2).   It tickled, my belly looked good; the experts said my problem was probably just the lipoma -- the benign belly lump.

Toward the end of October, the throat still hurt, and the rib pain still bothered me.   Not knowing what the heck was going on bugged me, too, and so I restarted my anxiety meds.  So far, it had been two months and nobody (not even me) had thought of heartburn, but here I was, getting expensive meds and expensive tests for unrelated things.  I'm not complaining -- I'm just still surprised at all the round-about aspect of this.   But there was more to come.

In early November, my throat was bad enough that I was living on cough drops and having trouble falling asleep.  My doctor recommended a sonogram of my thyroid (proposed Test #3).   But just before I got that test, I suggested that maybe the feeling in my throat might be related to heartburn, and I ought to try those meds first.  And what a great suggestion, because the throat pain subsided a bunch.

But the rib pain was still there, and becoming more constant.  And sometimes it would turn into a belly pain that made it hard for me to teach.  At the end of December, I had the lipoma removed (actual Test #3), hoping that somehow that would help (maybe it was pressing on a nerve?).    My doc, seeing that the lump had come back as benign, suggested that maybe I was doing some repetitive action that gave me a pulled muscle.

But just to be sure, at the end of December my doc sent me in for a chest X-ray (Test #4), which found nothing wrong.  And the doctor doubled my heartburn meds and anxiety meds.   I'm so glad they did, but of course we still had no way of knowing whether this dosage was enough, and it turned out it wasn't.

After being on the doubled heartburn meds for a week in early January, the pain started spreading from my rib to my belly, and I was super tender there -- if I crossed my arms in front of me, it would hurt my stomach.  The constant pain was starting to freak me out, in spite of all the tests I'd had saying I was fine.  Because, I didn't feel fine.    That Friday night, my belly hurt so much that I called over to my doctor's office and talked with the nurse on call, who referred me to the emergency room.

So I walked over the emergency room.  They did an EKG (Test #5) and confirmed my heart is fine.   Then they did blood tests, urine tests, and Cat Scans (I'll count that as Test #6), and reassured me that it wasn't pancreatic cancer.   Don't even ask me why I was afraid that pancreatic cancer was causing my heartburn -- I know better than to self-diagnose via the web, except when I don't.   Sheesh.

The ER decided that what was probably going on was that the heartburn acid was spilling over into my belly cavity, and that's why I was so tender.  They put me on a bunch of monster heartburn pills and sent me home, encouraging me to meet with a gastro doctor.

Which I did.  My gastro doctor adjusted the meds here and there, and then ordered an endoscopy (Test #7).   Again, everything checked out fine.  The gastro doc refilled all my meds and told me to hold the course.

What causes heartburn? My gastro guy says it's a weakness in a muscle called the "lower esophageal sphincter".  Me, I'm all about strengthening muscles, and I asked for exercises that might help, but apparently there's no such thing.  It's either meds or surgery, and he recommends meds as the preferred course.

My dad has been on heartburn meds basically his entire life, and at 83 years old he's still climbing ladders, hiking, working out on the treadmill at the gym.  I take after him in a bunch of ways, so I'm adjusting to this life of Many Medicines, glad for his example.

This heartburn never actually felt like burning (except maybe in my throat) and it didn't really ever cause pain in the area of my heart.  It was my throat, my right rib, and my belly.   So maybe it's not really heartburn after all --- I keep being surprised that there's no test.  On the other hand, taking heartburn meds has cleared up my belly and rib pain, as well as my sore throat.  So for me, the way I keep tabs on how well my meds are working is to think about how my throat feels. 

And also, my voice isn't raspy any more.  So . . .  awesome.

Singing my heart (burn) out: part I

A year and a half ago, I made a bold (for me, anyway) resolution:  Sing Daily.  I figured that this was going to be kind of life changing for me . . . and it turns out I was right, but not for any reasons I could have guessed.

Here's how that resolution went:   I sang.  Pretty much daily. 

I was really bad, partly because I hadn't practiced remembering words, so actually coming up with songs to sing was tricky.  For a while, it was a lot of "happy birthday", and two or three songs that I made myself learn again.  (These were, "Be Thou My Vision" and "If I only had a brain", which I kind of giggled at singing in juxtaposition).

Eventually, I started singing more often because songs started coming to me in various situations.  I'd come home and start singing to the dog:  "How much is that Doggie in the Window?", and "Where, oh where has my little dog gone?".  My girl scout campfire songs started coming back to me.  I'd sing to my granddaughter, who begged me to sing again:  "I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck . . . "

Some friends at work heard about what I was doing, and they told me they wanted in on the action.   We attempted to start a singing group: the "Sing Somethings".  We declared the only requirement is that you had to have more enthusiasm than talent (I love that requirement).   But somehow, nobody but me could ever make the get-togethers, and after a few valiant attempts on my part (at their urgings, mind you), I bailed and stopped trying.  That was too bad.

I also learned of a couple of groups that I will probably want to join when I have a bit more time.  My daughter and son sing in a local anyone can join choir (or is it chorus?  I can never remember the difference).  And there's a Sacred Harp group that meets once a month near me, that I might check out some day.  (Thanks, EH, for pointing that out to me).

So, at any rate, basically I sang more and more from January through the summer, and got through the awkward phases into more fun phases, but not quite into the group scene.  Everything was progressing nicely . . . and then September came.

I had started singing daily in 2018 because I'd noticed my voice was getting raspy.  In fact, I'd had a persistent sore throat through the fall of 2017, and really wanted to enjoy my voice now that my throat had cleared up.  But in the fall of 2018, I finally figured out the cause of my sore throat and raspy voice:  heartburn.

That -- the figuring out that I had heartburn -- sounds like it ought to have been easy.  But it wasn't easy, and that's a whole other story, with all sorts of twists and turns and a lot more excitement than doggies in the windows.  So I'll save that for later, and end Part I of the Sing Daily update here.

From quilt to dog bed, with photos!

Even if the dog beds in the pet shop didn't cost tens and tens (sometimes almost a hundred) dollars, I wouldn't buy one.  Because, I'm getting to the point where I think of everything I buy as an eventual disposal problem, and who-the-heck knows what kinds of non-biodegradable things are in the foam of dog beds?

But the dog beds in the pet shop do cost a bunch of money, so that's my official excuse for not purchasing one.   And yet, Prewash likes curling up in the dog bed my step-daughter (and self-declared Dog Nut) bought her.  So I'm not averse to dog beds in particular, just averse to buying something from a store.

And so here's the description of how/why I made a dog bed out of an old quilt.  It's a quilt my mom bought for me many decades and decades ago, as I was heading off to college.  Over the years, the quilt pieces started fraying, and finally I declared it Not-Fit-for-Human-Use, but still Perfectly-Acceptable-For-Dogs.

The first stage of making a quilt into a dog bed was just to fold it over with the fraying side inside and throw it on the floor.

Prewash is not particularly picky when it comes to dog beds.  She thinks any kind of fabric on the ground makes a great bed: my husband's sweatshirt, a folded quilt, my husband's jeans, her official dog bed, my husband's t-shirt . . . (sense a pattern here?).

She loves lying on the quilt if there are no piles of laundry present, although she tended to unfold the blanket, and then the quilt became a tripping hazard.   So the second stage of making a quilt into a dog bed was to fold the quilt into fourths and sew it into that shape.  The sewing machine is my friend, even through four layers of worn-out quilt.

I could have left it that way, all flat, but I think it's totally adorable when Prewash curls up into a little ball inside her store-bought bed, looking like an egg in a nest.  So I wanted to give this dog bed walls that she could curl up inside.

Enter the third stage of making a quilt into a dog bed.  The sewing machine couldn't make its way through eight layers of quilt, so I got out a heavy-duty needle and some button thread.   I sewed a triangle at each corner . . .

And then folded the triangle flat against one of the new walls, and stitched the pieces together.

When it was done, the Former-Quilt-cum-Dog-Bed looked a bit like a rectangular nest.  Voila!

A very floppy rectangular nest, all ready for my dog egg.

Let's see how well this works for holding a dog . . .

Well, her *paws* fit in the bed at least.

Okay, now half her body fits.

 Maybe if we wait a while, she'll take to the bed?

Oops, no back to the front paws only.  

Oh, well, it was worth a try.  Maybe someday I'll figure out how to make a dog bed she actually likes curling up in.

Someday.

Dawwwww . . . 

Miser Family update: growing up version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family Household.  We've been reveling in the glorious May weather.

For example, on Tuesday my husband and I both decided to do something that hardly anybody dares to do anymore: we voted in the primaries!  Woohoop!  The lines at the polling place were . . . well, they weren't very linear.  We zipped in, zipped out.  Voting, man.

J-son and a friend dressed as adults
for a play at my college
many years ago

N-son seems to be having a lot of fun at school:  he helped repair and clean up a bunch of places in the town after this past week's storms brought a tornado that touched down in four places. 

But I'm not as up-to-date on what he's doing as I'd like;  his phone died a week or two ago, and so we ordered him a new one and shipped it his way.  And then some of us got to learn a new lesson:  if you forget your email password, don't create a completely new email account to set up your new phone and then forget the new password, too.  Because (a) the phone doesn't get set up that way, and (b) undoing the bad email account on the new phone takes multiple car trips, parental cursing at inexplicable web-site instructions, and a bunch of help from kind people at various telephone companies.   At any rate, N-son now has a working cell phone again, PLUS a restored password for his former email account.  Phew.

J-son and a mom dressed as adults
for a Certificate Ceremony at his school
a few days ago

And as long as we're on the topic of car trips to rescue and return cell phones, it worth mentioning that this has been a week of travel for my husband.  Not only has he driven to see N-son and the infamous phone twice, but he returned a Miata that a friend had sent to winter over in our garage (driving to Long Island to reunite the car with its owners).  AND he Amtraked his way back and forth for Tuesdays with Toomey.  AND he rode far enough on the bicycle that he came back home and wondered aloud whether he'd "overdone it" (which sounds like he's back to normal, to me).

Also, this week I got to go see J-son walk across the stage at the ceremony where kids (I mean, young adults) in the Career Training program got their certificates; he got his in Sports Therapy.   Man, he looks like he has trained a lot; he's got muscles on his muscles.  I introduced myself to all his friends showing them my muscles, and saying he got his muscles from me.  (Which is kind of true, if you stop to think that I bought our home gym that he started using when he got into boxing.   So, yeah).

I also got to spend a bunch of time with my granddaughter, and not much time (yet) with my daughters (although that's coming up soon).  At school, I'm working on grant proposals and referee reports.  At home, my pile of summer reading keeps going up and down; I returned two books to the library, and found five more I want to read . . . life is good.

A blurry J-son and others up on stage. 

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

storing papers by date

David Allen, the personal productivity guru of Getting Things Done, talks about organizing papers (etc) by whether they are active files or reference files -- keeping the former close by, and the latter filed separately a bit further away. 

For me, that resonated quite a bit.  I don't have a filing cabinet at home, and so I've stored my papers mostly by year in a multi-pocket binder like this.  I file bills and papers into separate pockets for utilities, medical bills, auto repair, etc.   When a new year starts, I start a new binder.

A binder labeled to hold one years's worth of household records.

Here's one huge advantage of this system, now that moving time has started rolling around:  I don't have to sort through all of my paperwork to figure out which things I can ditch.  I just got rid of something like 20 pounds of paper --- all of it goes to shredding/recycling without having to wonder whether to keep it, all because it's older than 7 years old.   Whoop!

As I move forward, I'll have less paper to store in each of the future binders.  Back in 2010, 2011, 2012, I hadn't switched over to electronic billing so much, so I had lots of envelopes and records to tuck away.  Nowadays, not so much.  But I'll still store whatever I have by date.

I use a similar system for email folders, by the way.   My committee folders get a name like "2018-assessment".   If the committee is active and I'm using the folder a lot, I add a symbol to bring the folder up to the top:  "@-2019-hiring".   If the project is over and done with, I add a "z" to push the folder down toward the bottom of the list:  "z-2016-colloquium".   This system really makes my life a lot easier as I try to keep track of the various tasks I play around with.

This summer, I'm going to try to rearrange my computer research folders along this method.  I've named all my research folders by the topics that the papers were looking at, which makes it surprisingly hard to find exactly what I'm looking for.  I'm going to try to go through and relabel everything by the date it got published -- or at least the date I abandoned the project.  

As I've worked on organizing my family heirloom stuff, I've found that labelling things by date has been really helpful there, too.  You'd think that labeling something "Sam Smith" would make it easier to find -- but if there are several photos of good old Sam, then this gets complicated.  "1872-Sam-Smith" or "1902-Sam-and-Francis" turns out to make sorting and filing a heck of a lot easier, and it makes finding the right picture in a giant list of many pictures WAY easier.  So.  Dated organizing it is.  

I *finally* made a drill bits holder (old t-shirt version)

I guess different people lust after owning different kinds of things.  For about two years now, I've been admiring the homemade Root Simple drill bit organizer (made with a 2x4 block of wood and a sharpie).   I haven't made it for myself partly because I didn't happen to have a right-sized block of wood hanging around the house, but also because I tend to use my drill on the go, not in the shop.  But I really, really admire the elegance of this holder, which seems obvious in retrospect but clearly eluded me most of my life.

Mr. Homegrown of Root Simple made his organizer because his drill bits kept rattling around in his drawer.  I lusted after a better drill bit holder for myself because I hate my metal drill bit holder. The bits slide down and mess with the hinges to keep it from opening the whole way, or else -- once I've finally pried it open -- they slide down and mess with the hinges to keep the contraption from closing the whole way.  I spend way too much time wrestling with this holder.

Drill bits in an awkward holder

So.  I made a drill bit holder out of an old t-shirt.  Figuring out how to fold this over so that the heights of the pockets would work out okay was a small geometrical challenge, but a bit of fiddling helped things to come out right, and then I pinned the heck out of everything so I could sew all the pockets in the right place.  The sewing was easy and even a bit therapeutic.  In homage to Mr. Homegrown (and also because, labeling!), I used a sharpie to mark the sizes of the bits.

Drill bit holder made of an old t-shirt, with labeled slots

I also attached a velcro strap to one end, so now I can roll the whole baby up and close it, so that I can chuck this in my portable drill bag without worrying about losing my bits.

Sewed-on velcro strap to keep it closed.  

This is a small happiness in the land of Miser Mom.  yay.

Miser family update: old house, new house, fish house, stair house

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.  It's the week of house-related things, for sure. 

First of all, we've done the walk-through inspection of the new house and asked the owner to do a few safety fixes, and that's all been agreed; the other repairs the inspector suggested went into a giant list that my favorite construction guys have agreed to tackle in early August, right after we move our stuff in and I head out of town for math meetings.  It's going to be an exciting time!

Three drills: one for the regular holes, one for counter-sinking,
and one for screwing in in the screws.  What a great set-up!

Second of all, we are now under agreement on our current home, with a family who has four very active kids all set to move in just as soon as we move out.  So packing begins in earnest, even though the move date is still a bit more than 2 months away. 

N-son, off at school for building maintenance, is involved in a different kind of house:  he told me with great excitement that he made fish houses with his class.  I'm not sure whether a fish house is (a) a restaurant, or (b) something Minnesotans take out on the ice, or (c) something you stick in an aquarium, or what.  But he's happy -- and with any luck the fish are, too.  On the other hand, his phone burned out and stopped working.  So my husband drove out to see N-son today and help him get a new phone set up. 

Not a fish house.  My daughter's porch stairs, upside down.

Old stairs upside down near us;
new stairs under construction at the porch.

Speaking of my husband, he's closer and closer to being back to normal.  His flexibility is now beyond target (instead of merely flexing 0-120, he can flex 0-125).  He's on the bike, and he's back at yoga, and traveling to and from Philly for chemical conferences and protests. 

I've had a wide assortment of activities this week:

• a day-long workshop on inclusive learning, 
• a trip to Philly to give a talk, 
• a bunch of work around the home,
• a fabulous theater performance of Sophisticated Ladies with my daughters & husband, and
• a bunch of grant proposal writing, and
• making stairs at my daughter's home.  

This last bit was an extension of last year's birthday present to her, which was to stabilize the stairs to her porch.  We did a good job with what we had on hand, but agreed that this year we'd purchase some new lumber and make the steps much more sturdy.  This year, I came prepared with my giant green wagon full of tools and pencils and drill bits, and also a set of plans from last year.  My daughter helped out by standing on boards that I was sawing and by handing me screws, and I got to cover myself in sawdust.  So much fun!

Last thing: clean up carefully. Thanks, A-child!

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.