I also thought it was the first time I’d not publicly acknowledged the date, but it appears the last one I mentioned here was the sixth. “Serious slackers” indeed.

Anyway, the sticker expired at the end of September. Money was tight even to spend $29 on inspection, so you can imagine what the extortive repair would mean. I finally took it today.

I got in the truck, started it up, and… no more engine light!

I couldn’t believe my eyes.

I was worried that it somehow cleared itself, and would be in the same state clearing it electronically would create. If you use a device to clear the error electronically, the computer in the car lacks enough data for the inspection computer to say that it’s working right for emissions. You fail, and have to give it a week or so to accumulate information, then get it retested. Thus if you have a rejection sticker and repair will involve resetting it, you really should get the repair done a week or more before the deadline of the rejection sticker. Otherwise you go over, even if you didn’t want (need) to.

But no… it passed! There were no other problems, and the computers had a friendly chat that resulted in much happiness on my part. Even if there is something wrong, at least we buy time.

The girls never had evidence worth noting tht they might have allergies. Until now.

Valerie had classic allergy symptoms after eating a peach, skin included, and getting the juice on her skin. She had also drank “peach punch,” a favorite juice we sometimes buy the kids when it’s on sale for a dollar per half gallon, but I discount that as a direct factor, with reason. Turns out that onset of peach allergy can be a symptom of the onset of birch pollen allergy, naturally manifesting in the spring, and common in our neck of the woods. Processed, peaches or peach juice might not trigger that the same way a raw peach, skin and all, could be expected to, or so I gather.

It has been several months since we needed Benadryl for Henry - approaching a year, perhaps. It took a solid dose of it - initially I gave her a lighter dose based on what I remembered giving Henry when he was younger - but that and washing thoroughly cleared it up. A bit slowly. She had hives all over her belly, was extremely itchy, was red around her mouth, and had one eye get red and puff up almost closed.

I called the doctor’s office and they lined up a prompt appointment with the allergist. Early next week will be busy! Sunday there’s a beach get-together the kids and I are going to, centered around a friend visiting from Oregon. Monday Valerie has two sessions of evaluations at the kindergarten, seeing just what help she may need with school and how she should be placed. Then we have a brief get-together with someone I haven’t seen since 1976, visiting from Minnesota.

On Tuesday afternoon it’s Valerie’s allergy testing. Should be interesting, since she’ll get a battery of them, and they are notorious for showing allergies that have never been seen to exist in actual practice. Like my grandniece with the peanut allergy that isn’t. Which I suspect may be true with Henry, since that’s the one thing he never showed signs of at all. In his case we won’t take chances, though.

Things have been going well, so just keep doing what we’re doing. He’s had no signs of any new ones that needed testing. There was no answer to the question of why his tree nut allergies showed up positive without our having had evidence he was allergic to any of the ones in the suite. Macadamia is not part of the testing. He broke out after sucking the salt off a macadamia, and it could have been cross-contamination or something else. Also, he had eaten most tree nuts, and showed a reaction to what he’d had, in proportion to how much he’d had it, but none to what he’d never had. If I were going by observation, I’d say he was allergic to milk, eggs and bananas, not the peanuts or tree nuts, yet those are the most dangerous, traditionally, and also the easiest to avoid.

I was able to report to him that he was correct about Henry eating things with dairy or eggs cooked in. He can eat cake, brownies, donuts and bread with those, for instance, and we no longer look at whether red sauce has milk, as some unexpectedly do. If it is flavored with cheese, duh. If it’s “traditional” flavor, why would I expect milk? But there it is!

I still have to pick up the eppy pen prescription, waiting at Walmart, which I’ll swing by tomorrow. In effect, that was what the appointment was about. Which is fine, though I was already curious about what a retest might find - if there’d be a breakthrough.

At the risk of having to reschedule it or whatever, I made an appointment a year ahead. He goes back, and gets the retesting next time, April 12, 2012. Subject, of course, to any need to change it for shceduling or insurance conflicts.

Most notably, we were quiz buddies. I’d take a silly internet quiz and post it. He’d see it and take the same one. Or vice-versa.

We were more or less in related political circles, though in his later blogging, and that of his eventual co-bloggers, he seemed a bit hard right. Which, I should write a post about sometime, I am not, despite overlapping enough to have been naturally friendly with bloggers who are vehement in ways or degrees I am not, or who might be startled by where I stand in some cases.

In the past 2-3 years or so I’d tended to forget to visit there as often as I could have, but still enjoyed seeing what they had to say. It’s sad to see it gone.

Anyway, MS is of particular interest, given that my sister has it, a friend has it, a former, albeit lousy, supervisor had it, the first guy I ever bought web hosting from had it, and Deb has symptoms that act like it. That very list make it feel like MS and the like are more prevalent than they once were.

She was one of those bloggers I’d particularly wished to meet someday, and one who left me intrigued by the idea of possibly living in Alabama.

Perhaps he will see this and make himself known.

She still has a bit of the social awkwardness, despite being far better than she was, and we ought to put her in extracurricular activities of some kind to help maintain and expand her progress.

Her speech impairment is essentially gone and should not need any help, with the last of it just waiting for teeth to come in. Yay!

She’s the top reader in the class, along with one other girl, so the teacher sometimes has the two of them read together, believing in clustering that way. She did so well in the standard reading test earlier in the year - she was in the top 4% - that in April when they do it again Sadie will get the first grade test, rather than the kindergarten one, since that’s where her reading is.

Apparently we accidentally prepared her well for school. They assume we worked with her intensively, when in fact we thought we slacked. It surprised them she’d not been to preschool or such.

It’s this far into the year and Sadie still loves going to school. That’s cool, since her parents both had some degree of issues with school along the way, though in my case not at the very beginning.

We’re hoping she gets another great teacher for first grade. That makes all the difference. It did for me. My experience was up and down, depending how the teacher was year to year, or teachers, later on.

One of my early blog friends was Ith and other at or connected with the blog that became Absinthe & Cookies, dead of apparent blog software and/or database issues, and never recovered. Ith is still around, and the root of that domain remains valid, but the blog is gone.

What bothers me is the difficulty I am having remembering the original name. It was some number of girls… and a guy. Which really amount to 2 girls, whether the official number was 3, 5 or what. It was great fun.

I just hope these aren’t predictive dreams or the sort I sometimes have.

When Kate exploded onto the scene, I assumed she’d been long established, she was that polished, prolific, and savvy at generating an audience.

Hardly seems like eight years.

I’d had the normal sniffles and stuffiness. In a meeting before work in the wee hours, I was especially stuffy. Near the end of it, fluid started dribbling out of one of my ears. Freaky! It kept doing so during the shift, then I went home and searched online for the symptom and what the properties of the fluid meant. Clearly it was not cerebrospinal fluid and I didn’t have meningitis. I didn’t even have a fever.

That was Saturday. I ended up going to emergency care at my doctor’s practice on Sunday, seeing an excellent doctor and getting diagnosed officially with a middle ear infection. That meant antibiotics, which were a bit slow but did clear it up. It stopped briefly right after I started those, but then the leaking ear went on leaking for a few days.

More importantly, this was the first time I had been to a doctor since last May. I’d been shirking, since they like to monitor my blood pressure regularly. Because I simply couldn’t afford to go! We got kicked off of MassHealth as of the end of 2009 for having the audacity to have low enough income to qualify, but an employer who offered insurance we couldn’t afford to buy or use. That’s just the two of us, not the kids, who remained fully covered, because we had low enough income to qualify, but…. what? Insurance from the employer that would have cost too much wasn’t good enough for them, just for the adults? In reality, looking at the rejection, there was some level of care they covered even for us, but it was unclear how to use it. Apparently it was a safety net thing where the doctors and hospitals were supposed to figure out what not to charge us for or something. Also, other people who were required to buy insurance got part of their insurance cost reimbursed at borderline levels of income, but if we were supposed to once we obtained it, I was never aware of that. Perhaps this year, if they ever get back to me, they’ll be clearer. That’s a whole other story, the kids being thrown off and our having to reapply from scratch. They’re seriously taking their time, and we’re overdue for checkups for two kids. Ugh.

Anyway, our insurance meant the first 12 visits to the doctor, or a lower number and some testing, since that’s not unusual, would have cost me entirely out of pocket. I can totally afford 10% of my income before insurance starts to pay 80% of the cost. Yup.

Plus I’d been off and on, mostly off, the three blood pressure meds since early 2009. When I saw the doctor the last time in 2009, I took the drugs for a couple weeks ahead of time, enough to have a passable blood pressure but have him mildly concerned about edema. See, the meds made me feel like crap, and left me almost unable to work. I’d take them, and after a fairly short time the managers would wonder why I was so darn slow. I’d wonder why I was so darn slow, and my brain didn’t work right. Not that this should have surprised me, since one of the meds was a beta blocker. The second doctor to treat me for hypertension avoided giving me beta blockers because they affected me so badly the first time. Arguably I lost my very first tech support job because I was on one. I couldn’t remember anything, couldn’t think as clearly as I ought to be able to, and had a total lack of ambition that went beyond ordinary levels of lazy or disinterested. Took me a long time to blame it on the pills, and I seem to recall that was only when I stopped taking them and transformed back. The second doctor to treat me was happy if he could keep me from going much about 150/95. The next time I went to that practice, seeing a different doctor because mine had left, after being off meds a while my pressure was 185 or something and they flipped. I sat in the waiting room for hours, waiting for meds they gave me on the spot to kick in and lower my BP enough that they’d let me leave. I don’t remember what that doctor gave me, but he specialized in hypertension and set out to determine a root cause.

I don’t generally consume inordinate salt, don’t seem to be affected by it, and am aware that they’ve found minimal correlation, even though doctors still ask. I believe they have figured out 1/3 of people can go higher on account of salt, 1/3 are not affected, and… 1/3 go down! I did 24 hour urine samples for levels of catecholamines. I got an MRI of my kidneys, looking for pheochromocytoma. Nothing. My current doctor, technically the fourth to treat this, also found nothing, in part taking my word for the prior guy’s findings, since the other practice never passed along my records when asked.

Nor did anyone find damage as a result of the high blood pressure, in the past anyway. I was already about to the point of going back to treatment, sure I was being affected by it. I started losing my eyesight when we switched to compact fluorescent bulbs, but I’m not convinced BP hasn’t been a factor. On the emergency visit for the ear infection, my blood pressure was 210 over… now I forget, but not as high as my record 220/140. 120 or 110, this time. Naturally this got me an EKG, and skepticism about my chest congestion pain when taking deep breaths being normal congestion. Heck, that’s an old familiar pain to me, the breathing pain. Without being congested at all I’d get it when I was a kid, if I tried to run any distance in elementary school. Singing, bike riding (I miss my bike!) and expanding my lung capacity mitigated it, but it come back now and then.

I was lucky that the doctor I went to on the Sunday let me go with instructions to resume taking lisinopril, the least likely to cause a problem, in an effort to start controlling it some, and to go to my regular doctor in a week to followup on that and the ear. The EKG showed very minimal signs of uncontrolled blood pressure but was basically fine.

On another note, nobody ever finds I have high blood sugar or cholesterol, despite my mother being convinced from the time I was young that I was fat and was going to get diabetes, have a heart attack and die. Knock on wood.

Backing up a little, the very last time I took the combo of lisinopril, atenolol and hydrochlorothiazide was in the fall for a week. After a week it turned my brain to mush and provoked depression like flicking a switch. It was remarkable to observe! Since it had been months since I’d touched the stuff, and it was completely out of my system, it was a clear test. I’d previously observed that, at least at times I tended to get dehydrated from work and weather, hydrochlorothiazide may have been provoking gout attacks. The emergency doctor thought that made sense, and that the actions I ascribed to the beta blocker made even more sense.

About nine days later I saw my own doctor, getting an extremely prompt appointment once I finally called. You’d think they were concerned or something.

My blood pressure was dramatically lower, like 165/100. My doctor was ready to give me an EKG until I noted I’d had one several days before.

I kept me on lisinopril and added back hydrochlorothiazide, but switched me to amlodipine instead of atenolol. To be honest, I thought I’d made my feelings about beta blockers clear when I first saw him and already thought they messed me up, and I thought - and maybe it was true initially - he was not giving me one of them. Eventually I learned that one of them was, and perhaps that was true all along.

Looking up amlodipine after I got home, I was amused to see it is prescribed for angina as well.

A week went by and…. No wait! Two days went by and it was as if I’d become a new person. It improved more from there. The combo, presumably to be pinned on the amlodipine, almost seems the opposite of a depressant. Since it worked that fast and with no side-effects, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the one day I forgot to take the pills caused a bit of a mood crash. There’s incentive! Skip a day, go all gloomy for two days before returning to normal? Naw, I think I’ll just keep to the regimen, thank you. My vision hasn’t improved. If anything, it’s worse. However, something else I suspected was affected by blood pressure went away, and the ear problem stopped dragging on, as it seemed to be. Google seemed to suggest that the ear symptoms could be tied in with blood pressure, apart from the fact of a very real infection.

It’s hardly perfect, since how glowingly happy can you be when you’ve gotten in a life hole with canyonesque sides, but I’m optimistic and energetic and alert and awake in a way I haven’t been for the most part in years. Not sure it was this good in the parts of 2003 and 2004 when I wrote about being on Lexapro. Who knew I needed it to counter the blood pressure drugs! Could have avoided the whole thing. I’ve also had some insight that goes deep and may help explain the blood pressure problem’s roots, while also helping me move on, but that’s another story. Time to make supper!

Last night Sadie was trying to play Scrabble on the Xbox, locally against Valerie, of all things, but since Val needed 100% guidance and passed in frustration her first turn, Deb took over for a turn, then I played the rest.

Sadie quickly learned the ropes, if not a fine appreciation for all the strategy, and could read almost any word played. We helped her out a lot, but in the end she won by a nose, after being way ahead for a good part of the game.

We’re pretty impressed! Six years old.

Except it still seems a little weird having Atlas Shrugged updated to be set in modern times, and the characters don’t look much like my mental images. Reardon, to whom I most relate, comes closest.

I’m overdue for a reread, but with the film pending, I considered it recently and decided to put it off.