no barking

Time to blog, time to blog.
I'm trying not to feel guilty about never blogging. It will help me blog more often if I feel less guilty. Maybe I'll try that...tomorrow.

Our semester is more than halfway over. That is so nice to think about. I do not like being school because someone is forcing me. Especially this semester, I don't want to be there, I don't care about my classes, I see it as the last thing I should be spending my time on right now. But because the government is making me do it and because we've already payed for it, I go. And I can't wait till it's over...

I've been to lots of appointments at the hospital in the last month. A few with pain management/anesthesia and a few with neurology. I love finally having doctors that work together instead of acting like they're the only physician in the world.
My neurologist got a hold of the films from the upright MRI I had done. There actually was some millimeter differences between that one and the old MRIs. This is good because he was able to see that my brain actually is dropping when gravity hits it (hence more pain when I'm sitting or standing). So that's the good news.
The bad news is that I'm still not a candidate for surgery. He said that most people with the same symptoms/pain that I have will lie in bed for months or years, waiting for this brain surgery. The surgeons have no problem slicing their skulls open because they are probably giving them a new lease on life. My docs said that although they've never seen someone with the mental toughness I have to be able to fight the pain and pretend like I'm normal, it's actually backfired because now I have a lot to lose. They won't even think about wheeling me into an OR because they think the risks outweigh the possible benefits at this point.

That was disappointing. But I trust that they know the surgery and its limitations better than I do, so I let myself be upset for about 10 minutes, then I forced myself to get over it. I asked them, "So I'm not a candidate for surgery...what AM I a candidate for?"

Answer: Symptomatic control. Great. Isn't that what we've been doing? Pretty much. They said we could try some nerve blocks at the base of my skull. They may or may not work, but we might as well try.
So last week my sweet friend Emily took me to the hospital and helped me get some nerves blocked. It was a fairly quick procedure...just about 8 shots to the back of my head. He shot some cocktail of lidocaine, steroids, and pain killers into my head to numb up the nerves that may or may not be aggravating the pain. He said that it might take up to 3 weeks to notice a difference and that if it helped, the shots could last up to 6 months. Well, 3 days later, I could already tell a difference in the amount of pain I was having. For a few days after that, the pain level decreased every day. Now it's kind of leveled out, but over all, I think the pain has been decreased by about 40%. :) That is good news, people.

Other goings on: We're 6 days away from officially starting the next kids musical at our church. The girls and I have been working on it for several weeks now, but we'll start rehearsals with the kids next Wednesday. So far we've gotten a lot of the hard work out of the way. We've picked the musical, rewritten the script to make it work for our church, written out about 100 lists, and oh, we did a final head count of the kids we'll have. We have 57 kids ages 4-15 signed up to be a part of this. If you know how big (or small) our little church is, you should be laughing by now. The last two musicals we did, we had a total of 26 kids, I think. I freaked out a little in my head when I saw that number 57. I told my 2 organizationally-challenged younger sisters that we are going to have to be very organized about this. I think they freaked out a little in their heads when I said the word "organized".
To help ourselves think that we're keeping a good handle on all the kids, we made a big, colorful poster of the Musical Rules. Here's a few of the rules Beth and Shelley came up with:

Obey your directors (and helpers too)!
Say your lines loud and clear!
Sing--don't yell!
Always face your audience!
Be quiet off stage!
Don't make CJ call your parents!
No barking!
Do your best!


Well, I have towels to fold and a thunderstorm to watch, so I'll leave it at that. Until next month... :)