dianaschnuth

There’s some sort of little-league football team that’s been practicing in the vacant grassy lot across the street from our house. Mind you, we live on a dead end, so when all the parents come to watch little Tyrone and Jamal play football, they park their cars / trucks / minivans / SUVs such that our comings and goings are challenging at best. They don’t seem to comprehend that it’s a big, open field, with plenty of room for you to park your vehicle. No, they have to park either on or in the street, often simply stopping to idle in the exact middle of the street, forcing me to come to a complete stop and glare at them until they get the idea and move to the side so I can get around their giant SUV and actually park in my own goddamn driveway.

We were upset on Tuesday morning, when the garbage men actually took the giant branch that had been sitting on our curb for two weeks; that branch had kept the annoying minivan fucker from parking in front of our house. Somehow, though, the inconvenience must have trained Minivan Fucker not to park in front of our house anymore, as she’s continued parking in front of our neighbor’s house.

We’ve had quite enough of the peewee football practice, thankyouverymuch. We’re ready for it to be over, or for it to move elsewhere.

This evening, they seem to be having some sort of cookout. There’s a charcoal grill puffing smoke and tables laden with buns and paper plates. The boys are playing football without their pads and uniforms, and someone is booming rap music out of their truck.

The good news is that this could conceivably be the end of peewee football season. The bad news is that I have to put up with rap music and hollering kids (and parents) for a few hours.

I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

I’m not quite sure what happened.

One of my co-workers had mentioned this week that he had to have his ears cleaned by his doctor. A few of us ended up discussing various good and bad ways to clean out your ears: borax, hydrogen peroxide, Q-Tips, etc.

This evening, I decided to clean out my ears with hydrogen peroxide and a warm water rinse, just like Mom used to do. Did it shortly after dinner. One capful of peroxide in the ear, head tilted all the way to the side, with a washcloth standing by for drips. After the fizzing died down, I flipped my head over, washcloth to my ear, and dumped the peroxide out of my ear onto the cloth.

When I came upright again, I felt a little funny. Dizzy, almost. I figured it just had to do with me having my head on its side, and went ahead with the second capful of peroxide. Same thing — I was *really* dizzy when I straightened up this time. But I still had to rinse, so rinse I did. One capful of water in the ear, same way.

Then I was unusually dizzy, but not off-balance. Not too much, anyway. Almost disoriented. Nauseous.

I laid down on the couch to watch World News, then changed to the Food Network to watch Good Eats. Still nauseous.

Even now? Still kind of sick to my stomach. Something went horribly wrong during what should have been a welcome ear-washing experience, and I’m still not sure what.

And I didn’t even get to wash out my right ear.

Update, 8/18/06: I did some Googling to see WTF I ended up doing to myself. Read on to see the sources I found…
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Sure, I’ve had worse days… but this was the worst day I’ve had in quite a while. Read on to hear all about it.
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I donated blood for the first time yesterday.

It wasn’t bad.

Sky Insurance, across the street from the Sky Service Center where I work, hosts a blood drive every so often. I’m not sure what made me decide to donate this time, after being eligible for 13 years and never having done it before. It just seemed like a simple thing, a no-brainer. I asked our department’s regular blood donor about the process, and we opted to make back-to-back appointments and walk over together.

I’d like to give a detailed account of everything that went on, just for my own journaling’s sake — but, honestly, it was pretty tame. Jess and I went in, read the blue binders of donor prerequisites and information (no, I haven’t visited the UK recently and gotten the bird flu or mad cow or some other fool thing, but thanks for asking), and finally were invited behind a privacy screen for our mini-physicals. Basically, they pricked my finger and checked my iron levels (which were declared safe enough to allow me to donate), took my blood pressure (which, from what I could tell, seemed to be 120-something over 88 or so), and had me answer the insipid questions I’d already read in the blue binder.

Then it was go time. I climbed up into the bed thingie and offered forth my right arm. Got swabbed with iodine a couple times, had tubing taped to me and a blood-pressure cuff wrapped around my arm, squeezed the squishy ball like the nice lady asked, and pointedly looked at the ceiling while she stuck me with the needle.

It wasn’t bad. At all.

The needle only stuck a little. I don’t have a “thing” with needles like *some* people I know (ahem), and I haven’t been to a doctor in years, but I know enough about myself and past needle experiences that I know I’m OK if I don’t know the exact moment of insertion. If I watch, I get all tensed up and it makes things worse. So, when I felt the moment coming, I looked up at the ceiling and let the nurse do her stuff.

The nurse, Michelle, had told me to squeeze the squishy ball every five to ten seconds. I was hesitant at first to squeeze it too hard; I could feel that there was a needle in my arm, even though it wasn’t painful, and I was worried that squeezing too hard might *make* it painful. After a while, though, I got up the nerve to squeeze a little harder than just with my fingertips, and it was just fine.

Then I got really brave, and took a look at my arm. Attached to it was a length of tubing. Clear tubing, made an oddly opaque red from the inside. From the blood coming out of the crook of my elbow. I could feel warmth where the tubing was lightly fastened to the inside of my wrist. It was strange. But I was OK with that. At that moment, I actually wished I’d brought the digital pocket camera to take a picture of my arm as I was donating blood, because I thought it looked so… unusual.

After a few minutes, I noticed that Jessica’s blood bag was starting to fill up. I wondered how the staff knew when the bag was full. As if on cue, the metal arm holding the blood bag tipped downward with a clunk. A balance scale! Not even a minute later, I felt my own stand clunk, and one of the attendants came to disconnect me. I don’t recall the exact sequence of events, but she took the blood that hadn’t made it into the bag and filled up several vials — for testing, presumably. Handy, that — very little wasted blood. Once she was done, she deftly removed the needle from my arm and pressed gauze to the puncture, telling me to apply pressure and hold my arm up over my head. No problem.

Jessica and I lay there on our elevated beds with our elevated arms, feeling only a little silly, with the Sky Insurance employees watching us through the windows from their smoke break outside. Then we got bandaged up — “This stays on for five hours,” the nurse said as she applied a standard-looking medical-grade Band-Aid. “This stays on for one hour,” she added, applying some folded gauze on top of the bandage and securing it with medical tape. She then instructed us to spend ten minutes at the “canteen” before we left.

One small bottled water and two chocolate-chocolate-chip cookies later, we were on our way back to work.

As we left the building, Jessica asked how often I’d given blood. When I told her this was my first time ever, she said she had no idea I hadn’t given blood before. Apparently, I was a “champ.” 🙂

I was a little fuzzy for the rest of the day, and I took a nap after work. The area inside my elbow didn’t bruise at all, though. Not even a little. I can still see the stick-mark, but it’s only sore when I deliberately press on it.

That wasn’t bad. I’m planning to do it again, next time Sky Insurance holds a blood drive. I could make this a habit.

I haven’t been to a dentist in… *counting on fingers* …probably five or six years.

When I did go last time, it was in Parma (where my family no longer lives), and I had several visits’ worth of very deep cleaning. My gums hurt like a bitch for the next couple of days, but I actually felt a lot better about myself afterward. I was even OK with letting loose a big, toothy smile every now and then (even though my teeth are still crooked).

I kept up with my “tooth maintenance” pretty well for a couple years. Brush twice a day, use those crazy orange Stimudent sticks, floss (sometimes), and swish the mouthwash around. It was a pain when I still lived in the dorms and had to cart all my tooth maintenance sundries down to the bathroom, halfway to the other end of the wing. But I digress.

After a while, my tooth maintenance fell by the wayside, and I returned to my old habits. Suffice to say that, if I’m running late in the morning, I’d rather spend two minutes throwing together my lunch than brushing my teeth. My only saving grace at this point is two years of the Atkins diet: no refined sugar. Or, rather, very little — I won’t pretend I don’t ever cheat and buy a cookie or a Frappucino out of the vending machine.

So, from what I can tell (and I’m admittedly not a dental professional), I have much less plaque than I had before. I’ve still got tartar, though, and it’s pretty gross. See, my bottom front teeth are very, VERY unstraight — one grew in almost entirely behind the others, so only one-third of the middle of the tooth is actually showing. Someday it would be cool to have my teeth fixed, I think. Aaron thinks otherwise, since he had braces when he was a kid and didn’t take kindly to it. But, again, I digress.

Here’s the entire reason for this blog entry.

I was in the bathroom just now, examining my bottom front teeth, and being understandably grossed out by the amount of tartar buildup behind the teeth. They all come together in funky ways, and the tartar tends to fill in the cracks where they’re crooked and don’t meet the way they should. It’s weird. Anyway, I stuck a finger in my mouth to pick at it, maybe see how thick the layer of tartar was—

And a piece of tartar CAME OFF.

OMG gross.

What was grosser was that its absence left a weird depression/hole in the normal profile of the back of my teeth. Also, where the tartar had been encroaching on my gums, they were much redder than the rest of my gums. That was also pretty gross. I stood there in the bathroom with an extra pair of tweezers, peering into the mirror and trying to pick off the rest of the chalky tartar behind my teeth.

And I thought to myself, “If Aaron were here, I’d just show him. As it is, I’m probably going to blog this.”

Anybody in the Toledo area know a good dentist or dental hygenist?

…

Some complete stranger is going to find this blog entry and comment on my hygiene like this person commented on my lack of style. Heh. I’ll try not to be offended.