Give me something for the pain

Monday, I did something absolutely stupid. I was at Petco, buying a new litter box and some cat litter. Paid for my purchases, and headed out of the store. I put the buggy up and grabbed my items out and turned around to head to my car. So far so good.

The “something stupid” came when I misjudged exactly where I was. I thought I was standing at the top of the handicap ramp. However, I wasn’t. I was standing at the top of the curb…with @ a 3-4 inch drop down. See where this is going? I stepped out, expecting my foot to hit concrete immediately. But, since I wasn’t where I thought I was — I stepped out, and the foot kept going down and twisted slightly before hitting the road below. After some kind of twisting and tumbling and falling, I found myself splayed out on the road in front of Petco, the litter box in front of me, the cat litter exploded all over the handicap ramp, and all the employees rushing out of the store to see if I was okay.

And if you’ll remember, I have very bad knees. It’s incredibly difficult for me to get up if I’m on the ground since I can’t put pressure on my knees. Luckily for me, one of the employees who came out was very nice and ran to get me a VERY thick and nicely padded dog bed when I explained to her about my knees. Getting up wasn’t graceful at all, but that cushion helped considerably and that part of the whole ordeal didn’t do any more damage to my knees.

Before I could leave, I had to fill out an accident report and all that, and they also gave me a new container of cat litter since the first one had exploded (which was very nice of them). My right leg was killing me where I landed on it, but there was no blood, and nothing felt broken or twisted, so I didn’t bother with the clinic. I finally got to leave, went to the Chick-Fil-A drive thru to get lunch and then headed home. Once I got home, I hunted out all the ACE bandages I could find, then headed upstairs with them and an ice pack. Used the bandages to secure the ice pack to my leg. At this point, my leg was VERY swollen, but no bruising yet. I stayed off the leg as much as I could the rest of the day, keeping it slightly elevated.

Tuesday morning, the swelling had gone down considerably, but I was still in a good amount of pain. Very faint blue bruising was starting to show up on the leg. The last couple of days the bruising has gotten slightly darker, but it’s still considerably lighter than I’d expect it to be. I’m sure it’ll get much darker though.

However… something about the injury just doesn’t feel “right”. I’ve had many falls in my time, with loads of injuries and bruises. But this doesn’t feel “normal” for an injury. You know the sensation of blood slowly running down your skin from an open wound? I keep getting a sensation like that, have been since the injury occurred. However — no cuts, no open wounds. The feeling is inside the leg. Sometimes it also feels like trying to move with an uncovered open wound – that pain of the cut skin moving/pulling. But, again, there’s no external cuts, and the sensation is completely inside the leg. It’s absolutely beyond sensitive and painful, but I expect that part. The bruise starts a little more than an inch beneath my knee, but it’s somewhat affecting my knee and how I walk.

Sigh. I hate being accident prone. If this leg keeps feeling extra strange like this, I might end up going into the clinic after all.

Pop my skull, ready to lose control

I was planning on finishing the post I was writing about Canada today. Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I am having one of those “blurry” days, where I can’t stay mentally focused on anything. My work is suffering, since I can’t finish the tasks, I keep wandering off elsewhere. Ugh. Even writing this entry will likely take a few hours, and I don’t even need as much focus for ramblings that I’d need for recounting events of a trip. I’m starting to be tempted to break up that post into segments, and just post what’s already finished and then post more parts as I finish them.

And now, thanks to a new medicine I’m supposed to be trying out, I feel incredibly sick. I have a hunch that will be the first and last time I take that pill. Thankfully the doctor gave me samples to try out, and I hadn’t paid for a whole month’s worth of the medication! It didn’t help any that when I went to the restroom, someone decided to douse herself in an entire bottle of perfume. I had to walk out through that stench, and some of it clung to me and is making my nausea worse. I have a hunch that when I finally get to go home, I’ll be napping until it’s time for LOST.

Speaking of medicines, I have one thing to say. Wal-Mart may be a big evil? But oh my god I love that their $4 generic prescription program came to Texas. Instead of having to pay $75 for 3 prescriptions on my insurance plan, they only cost me $19.90. ($15 for one not covered on their plan, $2.80 for another, and $2.10 for the third.) My wallet has been a little thin lately, thanks in part to doctor co-pays, so being able to save over 70% on prescriptions is a god-send.

I finally got the diagnostic tools set up and run on my PC. Seven failing sectors. Right now, since it’s failing at a very slow rate, I’m going to try to make it last as long as I can. That will give me time to make sure all my data is completely backed up (that’s being worked on daily, in order from most important down to least important). It also gives me the ability to get the new hard drive with money I’ll receive from Christmas. That way, it’s a little easier on my pocketbook, especially since I definitely want to get a larger hard drive than I have now. Hah. Or, if I decide, it gives me the ability to get a new PC instead of just a new hard drive. I am researching to see what’s out there now that I might want.

Not only is my computer going absolutely nuts … so is my cell phone. Two weeks ago, the display was completely backwards and almost colorless; and it had the message “Check SIM” on the screen. Turning it off and on corrected the problem for a little while. Last week I discovered that some of my games were no longer working properly (which sucks when in a waiting room with nothing to do), and the phone wasn’t responding correctly to the buttons pressed. I headed down to the T-Mobile store over the weekend to ask about it. I figured I just needed a new SIM card, especially because of that message and since my card was 5+ years old. The clerk believed I needed a new phone, so we replaced both. She was able to give me the new SIM card right then, as well as transfer all my numbers over for me. YAY!

The new phone is being shipped to me and should be here any day. Considering I’m still having some of the same issues, I think she was right and it’s the phone. It’s sad really. This phone isn’t even a year old yet, and it’s already being replaced. I had my previous phone for over 4 years, and it was still working perfectly when I decided to upgrade. In fact, I kind of preferred that phone to the ones they have out now. But, the new phones have more features than my old one did — like decent games — so it was time to upgrade. At least I still have that phone and can switch back to it if this one craps out completely before the replacement arrives.

More traveling is on my horizon. This Friday, I’m headed to Los Angeles for the weekend. It’s been almost 6 months since I’ve got to play on the west coast, so I’m ready to get back out there again. I wish I could have a little extra company on this trip in the form of my best friend, like I did last year, but at least I got to go to visit her just a few weeks ago.

I think it’s also time for a blog redesign. I’m getting fed up of the current theme I have. It’s nice, I’m just tired of it.

Like asking Niagara not to fall

YAY!!!!! It looks like I finally fixed the feed issues on livejournal! Maybe. Kinda. I did an end-run around the problem, by switching to summaries only. But that means if you read the feed there, you’ll have to come over here to read the full entry. Sorry! Livejournal didn’t like me any more; it was saying my feed was too big. Oops. I write too much. haha. At least I now know that my feed validates as Rss 2.0, though!

Of course, I was focusing so much on that, I didn’t do my facts. I’ve got one to post… I just need to play around with the images for it first. Make the smaller and brighter, even if they will still be crappy. I guess I should come up with another fact for now until I do that one, huh?

I think I figured out the tongue swelling issue from yesterday. It only lasted about 30 minutes, and only about half of it got swollen. I think I accidentally got a tiny piece of seafood on my Slim Fast can and ingested it. It’s the only thing I can think of that I’ve been near recently, and I know I’m allergic to seafood. There hasn’t been anything else in my diet or surroundings that’s out of the ordinary, so it shouldn’t/wouldn’t be an unknown allergy.

Thanks to finally earning enough miles for that free flight, I should hopefully be off to Canada next month. I have 7 vacation days that I have to use by the end of next month, so that will give me a nice chunk of vacation time. Another trip to Niagara Falls is one thing already on the books, this time a 2 day trip so we can spread it out and not kill ourselves trying to do everything in a day. It looks like I’ll be there over Canadian Thanksgiving, so we’ll also be going up to Emily’s parents for the holiday. Two Thanksgivings for me this year! Woot! Haha. We’ve just got to get a few things arranged on both ends first in regards to vacation days, then I can cash in those frequent flier miles.

According to an article I read the other day, they’re going to try to avoid all the massive gaps in between new episodes of LOST this season. So, the way it’s supposed to go: the season will premiere on Oct 4, and we will get 6 straight weeks of new episodes, through to November 8. After that, the show goes on a LOOOOOONG (12 week) holiday hiatus. It is supposed to start back up at the beginning of February sweeps (Feb 7) and run the remaining episodes of the season straight through to the finale (May 23), with no breaks/reruns/etc. And they’d damn well better not have reruns, after a 3 month hiatus!! The sections of uninterrupted episodes will be wonderful, but that is going to be one hellacious holiday break. Hahah. I’ve got most of my TV line up planned out, but of course that’s likely to change as new shows fail to keep my interest, or get cancelled. I’m mostly just glad “House” is back already. Mmmmm House.

I guess I’d better go work on writing up a fact…