My dad had a follow up appointment with the oncologist today.  He said everything looked good.  He does want to repeat a bone marrow biopsy in 6 weeks and then dad will go back to see him two weeks later for the results.  Otherwise everything else is good, his counts look good.

I just put up one of the ultrasound pictures from yesterday.  It is on the fourth page of the AL 2009 gallery.

Shows that we are going to have a boy!

Tomorrow.

I had an appointment with the OB yesterday…my foot is doing ok.  Yes, that is right…it was mainly for my foot, and I go back again on Thursday to re-check it.  For all of you that know me, you know that I am a little…accident prone.  Well, in my defense, this time I have absolutely no idea what I did…but I did manage to somehow do something to my foot.  I can barely walk on it.  They are not sure if it is an infection, broken, sprained, strained, or just acting up.  So, right now they are treating it like an infection…which means antibiotics and stay off it.  For all of my medical friends reading….you will find this part amusing.  All MDs that I have found down here refuse to treat pregnant women.  I actually had one go so far as to tell me that it is “illegal” to for a regular MD to treat a pregnant women…I laughed…knew he was lying…and promptly decided never to return to him again (I didn’t like him anyway).  Yes yes, I know nurses make the worst patients (and I understand that everyone in WA reading this right now is laughing and would say that I am the worst of them all)…but this is ridiculous.  So, as a result, my OB has now become my ortho, ENT, and PCP…that slightly concerns me…and him…hopefully between the two of us (and all of his resources and mine) we can figure out what is going on with my foot.  If anyone has any suggestions I am more than open.

Erin and I did a little yardwork today, and have more planned for tomorrow.  We’re in the midst of planting a garden, so took up a bunch of grass, and marked out another section for grass removal. I added some pictures to the Alabama 2009 gallery.

I’ve also got a picture of me fixing the lawnmower.  The self-propel belt drive got stuck and for some reason, they don’t put an access panel above the transmission.

Well, since Nick is teaching tonight, I guess it is my turn to update.  Unfortunately, my luck from Friday has continued.  I had an appointment at 9:30 this morning with the ortho doc.  Knowing that it would be a challenge to get him to agree to a shot in my shoulder I also called my OB’s office to clear it with them.  Thankfully my ortho always runs really really late.  At 10 I got a call from the OB saying…yes…it is fine please have it done if it will help.  Ok great…that should make the ortho visit easy right…wrong.  At 10:45 I finally get in to see the ortho.  We discuss it (the fact that the pain has been getting so bad I have come close to passing out)…his reply…yep, that is perfectly normal and it will only get worse.  Great news.  So, then we discuss the injection, his reply, “I don’t treat pregnant women.”  I said, even if I get a note from my OB saying it is ok?  He said “well do you have one.”  I nicely told him that no I did not have one, but would be more than willing to get one since I sat in his waiting room and talked with the OB no more than 45 min ago.  After a lengthy…discussion…I won and got the shot.  It hurts a lot now, but in a couple of days (once the meds are absorbed) I should feel much better.  I also asked when, after Aug, I can have the surgery.  He said that is up to my OB (which I actually can agree with), but felt the need to add “you do know you won’t be able to do it for a while because you will have a baby to hold.”  I said yes, but I have a wonderful husband and parents who are more than willing to help…you know…cuz I am sure passing out while holding a baby (from the pain of the dislocation) is a good idea.

So, after the shot I head to the trailblazer to leave.  When I hit the gas to back out of the parking lot the fan kicks on really high again (just like before).  After a lengthy discussion with both Nick and my dad (thank you both) I headed back to the dealership.  I arrived there at 11:50 and was informed that all the mechanics are gone for lunch and will be back in a hour.  So, I left and walked around Walmart for an hour.  After re-starting the car, the fan stopped making the noise.  At 2 the mechanic came out to talk to me…and basically said he couldn’t make the car make the noise.  I said I couldn’t either but we all (Nick, Dad, and I) agreed that is may be a loose connection.  The mechanic agreed and reprogramed the computer again.  He then said to give it a few days to “work the bugs out” and if it is still happening come back and they will replace the fan clutch…again.

After that lovely adventure I returned home to call our appliance people to see if anyone is coming to fix the fridge anytime soon (this is the third part we have had to have ordered and the fourth or fifth time the guy has had to come out, at least it is all under warranty).  Nick did call them last week…at 4:45 on Thursday and was told the computer was already off and they could not turn it back on …and on Friday and was told their computers did not work.  So I called at about 3 and left a message…by 4 no one had called me back, so I called again.  This time I was told that the part (which was supposed to ship on 3-5) had not shipped until 3-13 and that maybe someone can come out tomorrow afternoon to fix it…and the dishwasher.  Great…just in time for the guy to come look at the huge crack in our hardwood floor.

Congratulations Jeff and Amanda!

So far so good.  Doug has followed up with the doctor who says that everything is going fine.  He needs to have a repeat ultrasound and a bone marrow biopsy.  So far, things are looking up.

Let’s start with last night. I spent quite a while getting some things done so that Erin and I could take a short trip up to Peoria. We’ve got a radio transmitter that attaches to the Ipod to allow us to listen to its music over the car’s audio system. It was acting funny lately, so I pulled it apart and discovered that the power cord was disconnecting intermittently. No problem, I cut off the plug and made the power cord a permanent accessory.

Then, planning on sealing our tile shower, I started pulling everything out. When I pulled out the shower caddy, the glass bottle of wash that Erin likes fell…and shattered. So I had to spend about 1.5 hours cleaning that up. Fun stuff. We’ll be picking little bits of glass out of our toes for a week! It’s almost impossible to get it all.

So anyway, we were ready to get up to go in the morning at 6 AM. We left and got about a mile down the road in the trailblazer when, all of a sudden, the engine sounded like it was racing whenever I would press on the gas. We pulled over and checked under the hood for anything obvious. Nothing disconnected, belt still intact…weird. Well, not wanting to do any damage, we took it back home at a slow speed because we didn’t have enough light to really do or see anything. I started looking around under the hood more and went through the manuals a bit. We decided to call a tow to get it to a shop and checked out. I eventually figured that it might be the fan clutch that was acting up, but couldn’t really verify it without any failure codes. We took it in and after meeting some… rather interesting folks, found out that the fan speed sensor was not transmitting its data properly. Fantastic, a new fan clutch, $700 and 7 hours later, we decided that it was a bit late to get on the road back to Peoria.

While the trailblazer was being worked on, we drove to Babies R Us. On the way, I noticed this mini van with a rear driver’s side wheel that looked a bit flat…and the left side of the axle was vibrating a lot. They had some issues…when passing we also noticed the front passenger side wheel was a bit flat too…and the front bumper was missing…and the hood was seriously damaged. I’m not sure that they got too far. We got to the store and purchased one of those umbrella strollers…which took me 10 minutes to figure out how to work…while Erin was laughing hysterically one aisle away.  When checking out, the cashier was about the weirdest cashier I’ve seen in a long time.

We got back to the shop and took the trailblazer back home and didn’t hear anything weird anymore. We got home and found cinder-blocks broken in the middle of the street and moved it off to the side…must have been dropped by one of the house contractors.

We decided to stay in the rest of the day. Erin’s foot has been bothering her (and swelling up) the last few days, so she’s been limping everywhere. We limped out to get the mail and found a bill from a lab where they decided not to bill our insurance. I had a nice chat with their billing office and found out that they like to just send out the bill to the patient and wait for them to call back and complain. Apparently it’s easier than the doctor actually sending the patient info, or being able to access it electronically.

When we went to get the mail, of course it was raining, so I got an umbrella. Opening it up, it inverts. At this point Erin is cracking up because of course it would invert [sigh].  We also got a good laugh from the mailman.  He stopped for about 10 min down the street messing with the mail in the back of his open pick-up truck in the pouring rain.  Needless to say, our mail was a little wet.

I later check lifehacker.com and find out that Hotmail finally has pop3 enabled. I decide to set up outlook on the desktop and promptly delete Erin’s email from the server.

We call the doctors office because Erin’s shoulder is dislocating (it is starting to make her almost pass out when it pops out) a lot more lately and wanted to look into a cortisone shot. Of course, 2 of the 3 doctors offices are closed…before their normal closing time…and their phone messages don’t say anything about being closed.  The one that was still open, the ortho office, said they don’t know if he will give a shot to a pregnant woman or not…she has to wait until Monday morning to find out.  Of course we did try the OB, but they were one of the ones that closed early today…for some reason.

At this point, we decided that ordering dinner was a fairly attractive idea. I called Steak-Out for delivery (we’d seen a couple Steak-Outs around the area). Well, the first one wouldn’t deliver out to our area, but they offered to meet me at a Texaco station. Uh…no. I called one in the other direction. “Sorry…we don’t deliver that far…I can meet you at Texaco…” Fantastic…no…something about meeting a random guy at a Texaco doesn’t appeal to me…and it kind of defeats the purpose of delivery.

At the moment, I’ve cracked open a bottle of wine and decided to blog.

Did I mention that our laptop fried the other day? Oh yeah. If you have ever used a laptop before, you understand just how much a pain in the butt it is to have to go to another room to get on the internet. We have a new one coming soon.

Maybe you had to be here …but this was certainly an interesting day…to say the least.  I wonder if anyone actually read all of this…??