Event Heart Monitor...sigh

So I went to see my family doctor to check on the cyst on my heart that I had drained a couple years back. After a CT scan, my doc said it was still small and nothing to worry about. Okay..fine with me. But, I keep having these heart flutters, missed beats, and out of rhythm beats. They sometimes wake me up and that's a little unnerving to say the least.

A little history:
As a teenager, I kept having pains in my chest and the flutters, missed beats, and out of rhythm beats. I was tested again and again and nothing was found. They couldn't catch my heart doing these things because when my heart would act this way, I was always away from the doctor's office. They didn't bother to give me a heart monitor to wear either, which is odd. It turns out it may have been from the large cyst on my heart that no one seemed to catch on the x-ray or cat-scans at that time. I had to have had the cyst since birth because a big nerve runs across the cyst and that's why they couldn't remove the cyst, only drain it. I did have the cyst drained back in 2007, but the symptoms were still present. We decided to give my heart some time to heal and wait a year to see if the symptoms were still bothering me. Well, they are.

Back to the present:
I spent this past Thanksgiving with my dad and sister in Zanesville. When I arrived home, I saw a UPS package by my door. "Hmmm...what's this?" I thought. "I hope I won something!" Ha ha ha...nope, it was a heart monitor. I remembered then that my doctor said she was going to send for one and I would have to wear it for a month. What this contraption does is monitor your heart and when you have an "event", that's when you notice your heart doing something it shouldn't, you press the "record" button and it records from 45 seconds before you hit the record button to 15 seconds after you pressed the button. Pretty cool. So, it keeps about a minute of your heart beats in storage at all times. I guess this is called "looping".

If you've ever had an EKG done at the doctors or hospital, you know what I mean when I say there are electrodes, I have two I wear, on my chest. There are like 10 on an EKG, so me having to wear only two is great. I stick the electrodes on my skin, one right below the clavicle on my right pectoral muscle, and the other electrode just below my left pectoral muscle. Now, I have no muscle tone at all there right now, so we can assume they mean "man-boob"..LOL There are two buttons on the electrodes where you snap corresponding wires, and they are plugged into a little black box that has a belt clip on it. Looks like a little Walkman (showing my age here), except there are wires going to your chest, not your ears. (smile)

I can shower with the electrodes on(not the wires, of course), but I have to change them every other day. The total time I need to wear this thing is a month, so this is a great way to "catch" my heart doing what it shouldn't be doing since I cannot ask it to act crazy for me on a whim.

Oh, funny thing..I need to send the recorded information every couple days. How is this done? Well, you need a landline, first of all. Then you call the tech people at some 800 number, they tell you to place the phone on the black box and press send on the box. There is a screeching noise that sends the data to the tech's which prints out as an EKG. Pretty cool, huh? Now, can anyone guess what the screeching sound is? Yep....a modem baby!! Remember modems?....deedrrrrrdeeedrrrrrquaaaaaaahhhhhhhdeeedrrrdeeedrrrrquaaaahhh!!. I have to listen to that for a solid minute while the little black box sends the information. Why isn't there like a USB plug or something in it to send over the Internet. Hello? It is 2008 people!!
Ugh...oh well. Maybe they'll find something and maybe they won't. It could just be a genetic thing passed to me by my mother's family or something since they have a history of this happening to their hearts. (according to something my mom mentioned a long time ago). It's worth checking out though. I'll keep ya posted.

Eyeglasses...here we go again!

A few of you may remember me having glasses in college and in my early youth. At about 8 years of age, I started having a lot of headaches, and after doing CT scans of the brain and some other tests, they found nothing in particular except the right side of the brain was bigger than the left side. The doctor said maybe the right side of the brain may be pressing against the skull and I would grow out of it. After Mom and Dad thought about it, they took me to see an Opthamologist. He found that I had Esophoria for both eyes and Amblyopia in my left eye. This means that my eyes have a tendency to turn inward and the point of focus happens in front of the object I'm looking at, not right on the object. So my eyes are constantly trying to focus and fighting with eachother to maintain focus. So, I had to get glasses as well as do eye exercises using different lenses to look at cards I was given. I think I wore a patch too for a while to help my left eye "learn" to focus.

While in in high school, I got glasses with bi-focals and prisms in them. The prisms helped my eyes to pull outward and therefore my eyes focused on the object and not in front of it. The headaches went away and all was well....until I left them in a booth at a restaurant in Chicago. Oops...I never did go back to get a new pair. The headaches returned, but not as often and not nearly as bad. I meant to get glasses again, but never got around to it.

Remember the eye exercises I did as a child? Well, they helped my eyes and the glasses kept the benefits of those exercises intact. But, when I lost the glasses and didn't get new ones...for 15 years..I undid all the benefits those exercises gave my eyes.

So at the present time, after having headaches about everyday and my eyes getting so tired after starting college again, I went to see an Opthamologist. After 5 hours of testing, he concluded I have significant Esophoria and Amblyopia in the left eye, plus the vision is bad. Not real bad, but enough. So, I'm getting glasses again..with bifocals and prisms. I better not lose these pair! I should get them this week, so next time I come visit y'all, I should be 4-eyes once more...LOL

In the mood for more swing? (pun intended)

Here ya go!! These are fun!

I would write more, but I'm getting ready to head out to school. Then, it's off to Dad's for Thanksgiving! Yay!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Thanksgiving is almost here!

Ah, Thanksgiving...memories of good food, family fun, and traveling to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Gotta love it!

My best memory is going to my Grandma and Grandpa Black's house to visit during Thanksgiving vacation from school. Every bit of food was so delicious. Buttered home-made noodles were my favorite. Putting black olives on my fingers one year has been a story told every Thanksgiving and gets lots of laughs. Who HASN'T done that? I remember sitting in an old-fashioned white metal high-chair that could be used for babies or older boys. I wanted that chair everytime until I eventually got too big for it, then I'd stare at it longingly while eating at the table..that was MY chair. Oh, and speaking of eating at the table, we kids all sat at the "kid's table". No one liked that table because we all wanted to sit with the grown-ups.

Afterward, all the men went hunting, although they never came back with anything. But they had their fun. I wanted to go so bad, but I was too young. My brother, Kevin, got to go, but I didn't...humph!! Grr....
My cousins, sisters, and I would play games inside before going out into the cold weather. There was the magic tin of buttons Grandma had that held our attention for hours. Then, there were the coloring books that appeared one year, and were there for years and years, with messages from the past written on the pages such as so and so "stinks" or someone loves someone..cute stuff like that. There was the ostrich string puppet, chinese checkers, a regular checkers game, cards, and a whole lot of other stuff. Everyone would play cards too in the evening before bed...that was so much fun. Especially when I'd get to sit on dad's lap and "help" him decide what cards to lay down. There was the piano in Great Grandma's room I was never allowed to play, but the older kids could which pissed me off every year. LOL Ahhh...I'm having fun writing this...

Ohhh ohhh!!! There were the BEADS...God, how could I forget the wall o' beads!?! My Grandma Black made jewelry, bells, and all sorts of things with fishing line and beads. It was magical. So, we put beads on everything and we had this crazy notion that we invented Friendship Pins. If you don't remember Friendship Pins, well then you missed out. They were safety pins with beads on them. You made them for your friends. Well, Grandma had a wall where she mounted a cabinet of like 50 drawers of beads. We had the time of our lives making things with those...such fun..

I remember the smells of the house very well, it seemed like each room had a different scent. They were comforting..not nasty. Every corner of the house had some sort of mystery about it. My favorite things in the house though were the clocks. 2 parlor clocks and one mantle clock. I fell in love with them. They were all key-wind and the chimes were beautiful. The mantle clock stopped working after a while, but it looked so cool...it was very, very old.

As for the outside activities, all of us kids would tell make-believe stories about something haunting the outside buildings or some sort of nonsense. But it was so much fun. We'd go exploring to see what treasures we could find. There was the coal pile outside...cinders really that we would play on and get very dirty. Then, I got to ride this special tricycle that was stored in the attic. I had to ask permission to ride that for some reason. Plus, you could only ride it on the front porch, not on the gravel driveway near the road!

After playing outside, we had to get ready for bed. Taking a bath at grandma's was an experience. The tub was cast-iron and the water smelled like iron. The tub filled ever so slow, and the soap was some kind of white soap..maybe Ivory, I dunno. I always felt sqeaky-clean after the bath and got to slip into my warm jammies. We'd play a bit more, then it was time for bed.

We'd head upstairs....oooooohhhh..it was a scary, exciting place to be!!! You opened the door to the hidden stairs leading up to the bedrooms...."Watch that 3rd step!!" was always heard before you ascended the stairs. The 3rd stair had a board missing in the middle running horizontally you had to watch out for. But, the stairs had that carpet on them...you know...the old fashioned kind where it was just stapled to the wooden stairs. So, you'd flick the light on and the ceiling was soooo high, but when you got to the top of the stairs, the ceiling kind of sloped so you had to duck your head...I felt like Alice in Wonderland every time.

The kids room(our room to sleep in) was to the right. Now it was so dark in there, and you had to go to the middle of the room, reach for the light switch chain and pull it to turn on the light. Okay, imagine 3 kids(me and my sisters) daring eachother to go to the middle of the room. Sometimes Grandma would come up with us and she'd go in the room. Funny thing is, she couldn't see the famous "stoplight pull switch"(we'll get to that in a moment) and would wonder about the middle of the room, hand grasping in the air for that pull switch. Then, she'd start to giggle because she couldn't find it. I just remembered she brought a flashlight upstairs with her sometimes to find it. Then CLICK! The room was lit. A BIG bed and dresser was in the room, along with some pics on the wall and always a towel with a 1973 calendar printed on it on the wall. I'll always remember the year on it because I wished it was from the year I was born, 1972. But suddenly, one year, it changed to 1982!! That was a surprise.

Oh, I almost forgot about the stoplight pull switch for the light in our room. Okay, this was awesome to us kids. It glowed in the dark. That's right...really cool, huh? So, we would get ready for bed, jump in, and one of us would stand on the bed, reach for the switch and BLINK! The light would go out. But behold! The white stoplight glowed..brighter at the top since it was closest to the light, and dimmer at the bottom. I'm colorblind, so I don't remember seeing the red, yellow, or green colors of the stoplight, I just remember staring at it and loving it so much. It would fade and disappear into the dark just before we went to sleep. But wait! What was that? In the distance, a train whistle would be heard. It was like the countryside was saying "Goodnight" to us. That was comforting.

But, as our eyes got accustomed to the light, we'd see the closet door directly across from our bed. That was the scariest thing about that room. We'd huddle under the covers and stare at the closet, whispering to eachother horrible ideas of what was in there...and the occasional "Did you hear that?!? and the slight giggle. "Okay kids, go to sleep", we'd hear from mom or dad in the next room. Superhearing....parents always have it. Damn....so we'd eventually go to sleep. I always slept so good in that bed.

Sadly, we stopped going after a while. Family squabbles I guess. Anyway, I'm glad to have those memories. Great times....

This year I'm going to my sister, Shelly's house to celebrate with her family. My dad's going to be there too. Shelly got a 20lb turkey..um...leftovers much?? I know I'll be taking some home and making turkey, stuffing, and mayo sandwiches....my mouth is watering thinking about it...yum! More good memories will be made there, I'm sure

Anyway, get out your feed-bag and eat all you can! I know I am!! Woot!!
By the way, here is a super fun Thanksgiving clip. Enjoy!!