Wussy Injury Update

Remember that time I went to Urgent Care for cutting my lip open with my reading light? And the doctors probably secretly mocked me? And then told me it was no big deal and that I didn't need a stitch and that it would heal up just fine and in a couple of days?

Well, it's been about a month, and I still have a scar. And I think it's going to be permanent. Stupid Urgent Care.

Battlefield: Cincinnati!

Favorite Cousin Erin, reporting in from Battlefield Cincinnati!

I have been honored and privileged this week to serve under the command of the "Little Warrior" Marky Jeanes and his troops (a.k.a. Lynette, his mom)! Mark came out to see a special doctor at Cincinnati Children's hospital who knew how to do a special test. This hospital is Numero Uno in the nation for GI/Colorectal stuff, so our not-so-little anymore "Little Warrior" was in great hands!

Mark and Netti arrived Tuesday afternoon at the Cincinnati/Kentucky airport, and left Sunday morning. Tuesday night we got to spend hangin' out and discovering all the cool stuff at the Cincinnati Ronald McDonald house. That place was AWESOME! Wednesday through Friday were spent on the battle front at Cincinnati Children's hospital, during which Mark led the troops valiantly and bravely to a glorious victory Friday afternoon! It rained during the whole "battle", but was totally sunny and beautiful when Mark and the troops got out of the hospital. During the hospital stay we spent a lot of time watching cool movies like Green Beret & Independence Day, and we shared annoying videos with each other like "Annoying Orange" & "Friday".

After bustin outta that joint Friday afternoon, Mark & the troops spent some time in the beautiful Cincinnati sunshine! Saturday, favorite cousin-in-law Ben came down and we all went to visit the Cincinnati Zoo! We got mooned by a lot of animals! We followed the Zoo trip with a trip to Micky D's for a Black Angus Burger and shakes. Mmmm mmmm! We really were lovin' it! After an awesome game of hide-and-go-seek in the super cool RMH playground, where Mark & cousin-in-law Ben showed off there amazing hiding skillz, Ben & Erin had to leave to go back to Columbus. And the next day, Mark & Lynette flew back to the home base in Utah.

While we loved having the Little Warrior and his support troops here for their deployment in the Ohio, we sincerely hope the next time we see them, they won't have to have any hospitals involved! :)

Marky, it was a pleasure and honor serving under your command! And, one more thing:

Wazzzzzuuuuuuuuupppppp!!!

I'm trying to stay awake so I will blog.

I'm trying to stay awake as long as I can, because we have a gigantic line of tornado producing thunderstorms heading our way. Because Ohio is awesome, these storms will be hitting the Columbus area around 2am, right in the middle of when we're sleeping! Ben could sleep through a train coming through our bedroom, and I can't sleep without a fan on, which blocks out the noise of the tornado warning sirens. So, I'm going to stay up and watch the weather reports to make sure we'll be OK and so I can hear the tornado sirens if they go off. We live right next to a high school where one set of the city's sirens are located, so when they go off we can hear them nice and loud, unless we're sleeping! So, I'm trying to do things to keep myself awake, and blogging is on the list!

Here are things of note in the Carper household, in no particular order:

1. I have rediscovered Fresca. And consequently am making it my personal mission to drink enough of that sweet nectar to fully stock up our supply of emergency water storage containers.

2. We bought a car. Turns out we both have amazing credit (my credit score is one point better than Ben's--I'm just sayin') and we got a great interest rate on a loan through our Credit Union. And we desperately needed a new car. So, good credit + tax return + desperate need = New Car for the Carpers! It's a 2008 Ford Focus, it is a not-ugly color of green, and we love it. It makes the pot-hole ridden streets of Columbus much more pleasant to drive! And it has a CD player with an auxiliary port for our iPod. And apparently it has some sort of voice "sync"-ing thing that allows you to use your voice to have the car turn stuff on, or make calls on your phone. I don't think we'll ever use that. Now if only we can keep this car from being broken into, everything will be great! Knock on wood. Here is a picture of it. We've already driven it to Cincinnati and back.

3. We went to Cincinnati! We went to visit our good friend Mary Ellen (a former grad. school buddy) who now lives and works in Cinci. She has season tickets to the Reds games, and invited us down for a Saturday game. It was both Ben and my second MLB game EVER! They played the Pittsburgh Pirates, and WON! And there was even a GRAND SLAM during the game! It was freezing cold and a little bit rainy, but we had great seats and enjoyed all the classic baseball game fare like overpriced hot dogs and singing "Take me out to the ball game" during the 7th inning stretch. Awesome. Thanks Mary Ellen!

4. I might end up having up to 6 piano students in the fall! One of my fellow church members teaches piano, and has too many students already and wants to send some potential students my way. Yes, please!

And that's all for now.

I'm so tired. I hope I can make it until the storms pass . . . Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

My second nerdy injury in under a week.

So, if you suffer through this blog, you most likely read my recent entry about my (wussy) trip to urgent care. Well, because I am all kinds of awesome, I've managed to give myself another (nerdy/wussy) injury, less than a week after my last one.

I've decided to start painting again, and busted out my old art supplies earlier this week. I've been doing some sketching with my charcoal pencils in preparation for a few paintings I want to try. My pencils are old, so I managed to wear down the tips really fast. I lost my sharpener, so yesterday I dragged Ben to a craft store with me to buy a new pencil sharpener. You know, the old school, insert pencil, twist by hand ones? Last night, I sat down to sharpen my pencils, and decided it would be a good idea to sharpen my entire collection. By hand.

Turns out, it's a really quick and efficient way to give your self a fatty thumb blister.

Nerdy Injury #1: Cut open lip with the light you use to read in bed.

Nerdy Injury #2: Blister from sharpening pencils!

Sheesh.

My (Wussy) Trip to Urgent Care

So, Monday morning started out much like any other morning. Ben got up, showered, woke me up to say morning prayers before he left for work around 7am, and I stayed in bed a little longer. I was still half asleep, but needed to test my blood sugar & take some insulin. I turned on this little flashlight thing to help me see that I keep next to my bed and usually use to read by at night.

I must have set the light on my covers while I was fiddling with my insulin pump, because after I was done fiddling, I swooshed the covers back towards me to try to tuck myself back in bed for a few more minutes of sleep, when WHACK! That stupid light smacked me right in the mouth!

At first I thought I had cracked a tooth, because it was so loud! When I felt around my mouth with my tongue, I realized all my teeth were still intact, but I started to taste blood. Grrrrreat. So, I stumbled out of bed (insulin pump trailing behind) and into the bathroom only to see a gigantic, fat, bruised lip with a cut that was bleeding like crazy.

And, instead of rationally dealing with it, I TOTALLY FREAKED OUT! I attribute this to two things:

1) Head/face wounds bleed a LOT more than normal cuts, so they can seem deceptively severe.

2) A few years ago, a co-worker of mine had a daughter that got a small cut on her lip. They were just going to brush it off & let it heal, but decided to go to the doctor just in case, and she ended up having to have a plastic surgeon stitch it up! She explained to us, that while the cut was small and only needed a few stitches, they had to make sure the stitches were super well-placed because of the vermilion boarder on your lip. If you don't stitch it back together just-so, you can end up looking like you have a wonky lip once your lip heals.

I did NOT want to have a messed up vermilion boarder (yes, I'm vain). And, I was too chicken to try to determine how deep the cut was, because it was bleeding all over the place.

So, I called Ben. And made him come home & take me to Urgent Care. And when I got off the phone and was waiting for him to come home, I cried. Hard! In my defense, it really hurt, I had basically woken myself up by smacking myself in the face with a hard plastic object, and it was only 730AM--NOT by best time on a normal day, let alone on a day when I try to beat myself up.

To make a long story short(er), we went to Urgent Care, I iced the crap out of it while waiting to be seen by the doctor, it wasn't deep at all, it didn't even need one stitch, and I'm pretty sure I was the laughing stock of Urgent Care that day. "Hey, did you see that lady who came in for a paper cut on her lip? Haa haa ha ha ha ha!"

Yeah.

Finally!

Whew! A lot has been going on in the Carper household these past few weeks, which is why you haven't heard from me in a while.

Most notably, I finally got both my new insulin pump and my new continuous glucose monitor (CGM)! And today I officially started pumping and CGM-ing!

I will post pictures soon, and will probably write a detailed post about it on my diabetes blog, but can I just tell you how much I'm already loving this? If only I could have had this technology earlier, I think it would have saved a lot of my heart/nerve/liver/kidney/eye cells. ;)

In non-diabetes related news, our good friends in our ward, the D-family, just had a teeny tiny baby girl at the beginning of March, to which we are the unofficial godparents. :) I think we were awarded this title mostly because we helped her mom survive some seriously awful two-weeks of early pregnancy while her dad was in another country. But teeny baby G is super cute, so we'll gladly accept whatever responsibilities come with Mormom God-parenting. (Mostly, I think it just involves doting, at which we are very adept.)

Okay, that's all for now. These next couple of weeks will probably just involve a lot of blood sugar testing, highs, lows and doctors visits, so I probably won't post much on this blog, because it will just be plain boring and tedious. Test, high, bolus, low, eat, high, test, low, bolus, etc. That's just how things go with a new pump until you get all the basal rates right, so I won't bore you to death with the details. But, if anything exciting happens, I'll be sure to let you know!

Hand Carts-Or my yearly political rant. Consider yourself warned.

To quote my friend K's grandma (I think), the world is "going to hell in a hand cart." Or, at least that's what it seems like these days. While I usually try to keep a positive spin on life, because otherwise I'll fall flat on my face and die instantly, there are a few things that have just totally disheartened me lately and/or made my blood boil. In no particular order, they are:

1. I feel like since the moment I turned 18, everything I come in contact to in my life is "out to get me." Every decision about anything remotely important (or even non-important ones) have to be scrutinized with a microscope to make sure no body is trying to screw me over. Case in point: banking. From what I know of banking back in the day (at least, from what Mary Poppins taught be about banks back in the day), it used to be that you put your money in a bank because they were trustworthy, and you felt like they would be responsible with your money and keep it safe. Now days, it seems like you have to pick the bank that will screw you over the least, the one with the least amount of fine print or the least amount of hidden fees, etc. And it's not just banks. It's rental agreements, mortgages, utility bills, insurance or medical bills, and the list goes on. Just an observation.

2. If you haven't been keeping up with the news, Ohio is one of the states where there are big anti-labor union bills being pushed through the legislature, and there are subsequently massive amounts of protests going on every day at the state house here in C-bus. This bills, SB5, infuriates me more than I can even begin to explain. All the arguments for it are totally inane, and while it might end up helping the state's budget deficit in the long run, I don't understand why public workers, particularly those that work in education, are first on the chopping block? What happened to "I believe the children are the future?"

The big argument our governor is using in favor of SB5 is that public workers pay so much less for their benefits than private sector workers and that they get higher wages, too. So, SB5 is supposed to close that gap and make things more "fair." It's no secret that government jobs come with much better benefits that most private sector blue-collar jobs - that's why people take them in the first place. What I don't understand is why we're not trying to pass legislation that will bring the private sector jobs up to the level of the public sector jobs, instead of trying to pull a whole sector of workers down. I also don't understand why we're trying to cut benefits to education and to blue collar workers (those that belong to labor unions) to close the gap in our budget deficit, instead of tapping those who can actually afford it already. Why are we still giving tax breaks to rich people and huge corporations? Oh, yeah, because it supposedly "creates jobs and grows the economy." (Also, I hate that phrase "grow the economy.")

But, really, all of those arguments are moot anyway, because the real reason all of these states are trying to pass these anti-labor union bills are because the Koch brothers, and other Big Corporations like them, are pulling the strings in the GOP. (And that is my Glen Beck-like conspiracy theory rant for the day. Except my rant is founded on more factual things, like the Wisconson governors actual conversation with who he thought was a Koch brother. Ha.)

3. The "Heart Beat Bill". Some members of the Ohio legislature are currently trying to pass a bill that makes it illegal to get an abortion after the first detectable heart beat of the fetus. According to the bill, that is usually around the eighteenth day of pregnancy. Let me first of all state that I love babies, I'm not for abortion, but that I am pro-choice. How can that be, you say? It's easy. I don't think people should get abortions, but I do believe in a woman's right to exercise her own agency, but that she must accept the consequences that that will bring. The thing that I don't like about this particular bill is , that it totally ignores the precedent set by Roe v Wade. Hands down. Hasn't this issue already been decided? Like, back in 1973? If it passes, it will be the strictest abortion legislation in the entire nation. This is why this bill makes me upset. Not to mention my personal belief that this bill is setting women's rights back a billion years.

4.I was going to talk about what's going on in the middle east, but I'm exhausted and I think I need to calm down, so I'll just save that for another day.

5. If I have offended any of you, I'm sorry.

Okay, my rant is over. Done. I feel better now. I really didn't write all of that to convince any of you, dear readers, to think the way I do. I don't really care what your political views are, because they're your views. All I care is that you vote. Mostly, I just wrote it because now that I got it all out of my head, I feel better.

And, I'm off to bed. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.