Pain

[liralen]

Pain is a weird thing. Especially pain that I feel helpless to avoid or fix. It's definitely making me feel more depressed and unhappy with everything.

I had a great day for most of yesterday. Nothing hurt when I got up. I had a really fun morning with Jet.

Jet started by wanting an Ant Farm. He'd seen a friend with an ant farm from the Discovery Channel Stores, and really wanted one for himself. So we went to the local toy store and peered around at all their bug paraphenelia, but there was nothing cheap enough that he really wanted. He had $20 he'd saved from saving all his allowances for the last month and from picking raspberries for Granny, but that wasn't quite enough for the really good ant farm he saw. Plus that farm didn't have the transparent ant ladders on the sides, so he wasn't sure he wanted that, either.



So we wandered on and he ended up just buying himself a fifty cent paper fan that he's been using all he can, now. It's hot enough to warrant it any time. I bought myself a little cut lens kalidescope that makes anything you look at into a myriad of pieces. It's great at looking at a pile of yarn to see if the colors will go well together and at what ratio. The more I look at any single color, the more it dominates the image. It's nice and cheaper than the "Magic Marble" from Knit Picks.

We then went to Silly Scissors, the real reason for our trip and Jet got his hair cut, colored, and gilttered. He loves doing that and the stylist is always amused when I say, "Do whatever he wants with that."

So we were very happy going home.

Lunch was with the work gang. It was good to see everyone again and talk and eat and have it not hurt. There was some hesitation in my jaw at all the biting, but it didn't seem to *hurt* at all.

From there we sent Jet to his swimming camp, and then John and I went to see Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. It was a cool movie, in and of itself and for its medium. I liked the story it told. I haven't ever liked the book, I'll admit. When nearly a third of it is about how bad and dreary it was in Sirius Black's house, it just wasn't that fun a book. I liked Luna. I remembered that much, and that she was far more likeable in the book than in the movie. But... other than that, the movie was shallow, pretty, flashy, hit most of the few high points of the book, and I liked Fawkes very much. It might be fun to just write a line from the book on my Phoenix sweater, but I'll have to see which one to write.

It ended just in time for us to try and hang all our laundry on our new tree in the teeth of what looked like was going to be a very long, real rainstorm. Then I drove off to get Jet from camp. When I came home, I made dinner, a kind of casserole thing with Rotel tomatoes and green chiles mixed with condensed soup. I'd read nearly a dozen different recipes for something called King Ranch Casserole on recipezaar, and finally got enough data to come up with something we might actually eat and could make from the things I had in the fridge and pantry. It ended up being something of a monster, but, it ended up a tasty monster.

I cooked up garlic, a chopped onions, a chopped sweet bell pepper, and then one of the medium zucchini from our garden, quartered and sliced. Sauteed things in order until there was very little liquid left and it smelled good. Then I mixed a can of RoTel tomatoes and green chile with a can of cream of chicken soup. Then I grated about half a pound of cheddar and cut about a pound of roasted chicken from earlier in the week. Then I layered veg, gloop, cheese, and chicken between layers of tortillas and then, when I ran out of corn tortillas, blue corn chips. *laughter* I ended with a layer of cheese on top of the chips, and then baked everything in a 350 degree oven until it smelled good. We ate it with salad.

Just before we ate, though, I got attacked by my teeth and jaw. The pain was so bad I started crying and Jet came over and hugged me. That made me cry more. *sigh* I took two ibuprofen, and approached the meal with paranoia and some depression, but I knew that if I didn't eat anything I'd get worse. Still it took a while for the pain to settle down and I was shaky and unhappy for much of the evening. Completely forgot about the charity knitting group meeting at the church... and just vegged at home. Then Jet wanted to go to Tanner's to play and John was busy out of sound and sight.

There's been a really high incidence of West Nile Virus around here, lately. The heat and the mosquitoes have been very bad. And I am paranoid about it getting to my kids. So I pulled myself out of being so unhappy and instead of yelling at Jet to stay home or do something else, I just said, "You have to have mosquito spray and you have to take a shower before going to bed." "Sure, Mom," he said, "Will you please walk me over, too?", and I had to get up off my butt and do something.

So I did. I sprayed him. I sprayed myself. I walked with him over to the neighbors. And I noticed, as I walked, that I wasn't exactly hurting. Tonya was out pulling weeds, which reminded me that I had to pull up all the spent peas from my garden, badly. So without thinking about it too much, I just went over to the garden and pulled up the peas, their supports, and the bird netting that had only provided perches for the birds. I then spent a lot of time by the Mosquito Magnet and cut all the dead vines and netting from the supporting bamboo, put the bamboo into the pile we had, and then I threw the rest away. I left the pea roots in the soil, as they're the things that fix nitrogen for the other plants.

Then I watered the self-watering pot. I pulled weeds. I peered more closely at the zucchini. I sprayed tomato blossoms with blossom set spray, and got a lot of things done that I'd just been too self-preoccupied with to do.

My pink eye is not getting much better. I seem to be waking up with a cold every morning only to have it go away a few hours into the day. I am having those monthly cramps. I am loaded up with straws when I should just be enjoying my life. My jaw and tooth seemed to be the final straw. That's what infuriated me. So I just ignored it all for a while and just did what I could do something about.

And that was good.

Jet came home again in about fifteen minutes with a very happy Tanner, who swung with Jet for a bit until I reminded him about his bed time. He said, "Oh! Sure." and the two boys hugged, back to back, laughing while they did it ass-backwards, and then Tanner ran off.

Jet sang in the shower, and then John took him to put him to bed, and that was fun to listen to.

I knit some, read some, took my own shower to get the DEET off, and had a little tapioca pudding. I'll admit one thing the tooth thing has done, it's taken another five pounds off of me in the last month. Not a terrible deal, I guess. I'm just not snacking or eating sweet, cold things like I used to. I went to bed and got to talk with John for a bit, which was good. I didn't sleep well, as there were just tremors going through my jaw. Not pain, but like the pain killers were just covering up the pain, but everything else was still reacting to being hurt. The toothguard helped a lot. I'm glad of that.

I woke up with my bite rearrainged by the toothguard. Enough that I couldn't tell if there was anything wrong at all. But I called the dentist and said that I had to have another adjustment. I also woke up with green-yellow pus coming out of my left eye instead of the clear, white, or crystallized brown discharges that weren't so bad, and my left eye was sore when I touched it with the cotton ball to clean it off. Not a great sign. So we got me a doctor's appointment. I called the contact lens department at the optical place I go to to tell them that one of the lenses that I'd taken with my on vacation had been damaged in handling when being packed. I got an answering machine, and let them have the information they needed along with my phone number.

I guess once I get going, I stay in motion.

The dentist office called back to ask when I could get in and I said, "Within fifteen minutes." I was there in ten. The assistant with the lighter hands, used the contact paper and we discovered that the neighboring tooth was getting hit *hard*. So she did a light adjustment of the teeth above that, and more than half of what she touched was still achy and sore, probably from yesterday. And it all felt so much better. Still, I also found that they'd adjusted the new crown so much that there's now a bald spot on it, where they'd adjusted away so much of the 'enamel' it's now completely black in one patch. Says something either about how they take impressions or about the lab they use. I'm not sure I'm going to this dentist ever again, but I thought I'd let them at least fix what can now be fixed.

It still hurt after eating breakfast back at home. I took two asprin. Lunch was much better. Things are still achy in my lower jaw, but given how badly it hurt yesterday, I think that the tendon damage and other things are taking a while to settle. Plus, the tooth that was getting impacted was an old crown with a root canal that had taken months to recover the tendon health around that tooth as it wasn't getting the circulation it used to get. So it's prone to hurting when other things are having problems around it. I'll give it the weekend and we'll see how it goes.

Jet and I played Legos, Hot Wheels on his mountain track, and just enjoyed each other today, too. I also told Jet that I was having teeth trouble, which was causing me pain, which might cause me to be more "poinky" than usual. I wanted to say that if I got mad at anything, that it wasn't his fault, it was likely because I was in pain and that he should know that. Jet listened carefully, then gave me a hug and a kiss on the arm "for the owies" and then gave me a dozen Hot Wheels to push over the mountain's cliff. He really does know how to treat a girl. *laughter*

He went with John to camp. I like having him at camp, as he gets his Kid-time in and isn't bored by us by the time he leaves, and we have a good time in the time we have together. This has been very, very good, I'll have to remember this for next summer, definitely. John did a bunch of errands, including dropping off all the garlic chives at Mei and Bob's. So I'm glad that they'll get used. So I have a few minutes to write and paint and think and then I'll get to go to the doctor's and present my new health insurance and make sure my eyes will go back to normal. Another step that I actually can take care of.

So I feel mildly better now than I did yesterday. Thought it better to write now rather than yesterday when I was feeling so bleak.