3 posts tagged “health”
Harvard Women's Health Watch published this fantastic new article about sinus problems. It explains the roots of the condition, and what you can do about it, in detail, but also in simple language. If you live in this kind of misery, I can't recommend this article and its suggestions highly enough.
It's timely for me for a couple of reasons. One is that I have had a lot of sinus infections in the last year. I've been plagued with them since I was about 12 years old, but I had been able to stave them off for a while in the relatively recent past. More about that in a minute.
Because I don't have health insurance -- I haven't had it in a decade -- I usually go to the clinic at a local drugstore for this kind of illness. There was a new LPN when I was there last month, and she was much more aggressive about her recommendations than the previous nurses have been. I wound up with a new humidifier, a renewed commitment to nasal lavage and Mucinex, and a course of antibiotics.
The funny thing is that I wrote a long, mildly controversial article about nasal lavage -- sinus rinses -- about 15 months ago, but after I wrote the article, I started to neglect the rinses themselves. The preparation can be time-consuming -- cleaning the NeilMed bottle, boiling water, waiting for it to cool, having a clean area to do the rinse itself, etc. If you'd like to read the article, it's here: Cleaning Your Sinuses.
I had waited several years to get a humidifier -- for some reason, I thought it would be too wet for my bedroom, make all the books damp, etc, but that hasn't been the case at all. I'm thrilled to have it now. I don't even seem to mind that it means an extra trip up and down the stairs at some point during the day, when I rinse and refill the water tank. The one I bought is this Vicks Warm Mist model, for about $37. It's kept near the wall 3-4 feet from my bed.
The second reason the article is timely for me is that my mother just had outpatient surgery on her sinuses, and I've been helping her out for about the past 10 days. She's a terrible patient, because she doesn't take the recommendations to stay in bed seriously enough. The first few days were unpleasant, but she's doing much better now.
The whole thing started this past fall when she had a sinus infection that wouldn't go away. Eventually they did some kind of Serious Business scan of her head (CT? fMRI? PET? I don't know) and determined that one of her sinus cavities was completely packed. There were some visits to an ENT and surgeons after that, and it turned out that one whole side of her sinuses had been blocked for most of her life by a deviated septum. The surgeon removed a bone spur and left a stent in for a week.
My mother absolutely refuses to do sinus rinses, because she says the idea makes her gag (she's kind of a delicate flower about stuff like that). I'm wondering how much she'll protest if she continues to be in a state of chronic sinusitis even after the surgery.
The Harvard article was linked from Popgadget, which I've been reading for years. The blogger there commented that it seemed like nasal rinsing was becoming mainstream in the last few years, when before it had been considered a New Age thing (anyone else remember when George on Six Feet Under gave Ruth a neti pot as a gift, and she was mightily annoyed?).
I'd argue that the mainstreaming of sinus rinses has to do with NeilMed distributing its kits as free samples to doctors' offices. My kit came from my boyfriend's mom, who was the lab tech in an office for many years. I've tried a couple of different products of this kind, and NeilMed's Sinus Rinse Regular Kit is the best -- the easiest to use, the most comfortable solution mix, etc.
I'm hilariously evangelistic about this product; add this Harvard article to the list of things I will be gushing about in the future.
(Thanks to Flickr's Bionerd for supporting the Creative Commons with this pic from a sinus scan!)
I need to stop drafting posts and then not actually posting them.
I haven't been posting much lately because I'm super-duper busy as heck. Both the lead bloggers at DIY Life (one is darkmatt3r) stepped down at the beginning of March, and a couple of other ladies and I replaced them (the fact that it took three people to replace two harried ones, and the fact that all three of us are still very busy, might give you an idea of how much work we're talking about).
I wrote two long things in March, too. My article about Hinamatsuri, a holiday I think is really nifty because it involves super-fancy dolls, didn't get a ton of hits (but maybe people will discover it over time). There are some craft patterns at the end... a paper diorama, little cloth dolls, etc.
I also did a free knit/crochet pattern round-up for Easter: bunnies and lambs (or, if you prefer, rabbits and baby sheep). More cuteness per column inch than I knew what to do with. I want to make just about everything I listed, but I can't justify doing so. Anyway: Bunnies and Lambs to Knit, Bunnies and Lambs to Crochet.
I'm getting back on those "best free patterns of the month" columns, but skipping a few months. I have notes for a month that I'm not going to cover, so I will post them here. Later today, probably.
W/r/t my last post, I haven't yet bought any dolls. I did find that my local Japanese market is selling a few basic Re-Ment sets, so I bought one (single, not case) box of "Kawaii Kitchen" and one box of some food-based set. I don't think these are the new Americanized versions. Most of their other candy toy sets are based on, like, Power Rangers or some kind of mecha.
I banged my finger up pretty good last week, and in doing so, learned something: if you have a choice between Hello Kitty Band-Aids and non-Hello Kitty Band-Aids, get the Hello Kitty ones. They're bigger than the WaterBlock style anyway, and they will make you smile (at least, they will if you are me). I've been covering my bandaids in porous clear tape, then wearing a rubber finger cot every time I have to wash my hands.
I have managed to get a friend totally obsessed with Death Note. Now we are having long philosophical debates about A) whether or not we would use the Death Note, and how, and B) our deep, abiding love for L. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you clearly spend your leisure time more wisely than I do. (To be fair, though, everyone I know who sees the show becomes mildly obsessed with it. This includes my previously-animation-hating mother, who has also fallen hard for Ratatouille and anything from Studio Ghibli.)
(I'm also giggling at the moment, because Law & Order: Criminal Intent is on, and the suspect's last name is Morrissey, so they're saying things like, "I DON'T THINK MORRISSEY COULD HAVE PLANNED THIS ON HIS OWN," and I'm like, NO, HE WAS TOO MISERABLE, HE WILL BE CAUGHT WHEN JOHNNY MARR TURNS HIM IN....)
A bit before my last post here, the one from March, my fiance and I got in a car accident. The car behind us was hit by a drunk driver. That car then hit us. We've had varying degrees of whiplash: Tom is bigger and stronger than me, and has a healthier back in terms of fitness, so he was better within a few weeks. I seem to have wrenched the entire right side of my back from neck to lumbar. Things are improving but I'm still really uncomfortable. I definitely can't knit, crochet, or embroider: I'm right-handed, and all those things cause me to be tense in the shoulder, and I can't handle any more shoulder tension than I already have.
(I imagine I'm doing better than the passenger from the car that was hit and then hit us: she had to go to the hospital wearing a cervical collar and strapped to a board immediately after the accident.)
That said, I picked up some knitting for the first time tonight, and I did OK. Still working in an intermittent manner on Knitty's "Branching Out." Recommended pattern: easy, relatively fast if you do a motif or two each night, good introduction to lace. I ought to have finished it ages ago, but it's a project I pick up for a few nights every couple of months. This time, no serious pain for me, so I can probably get back to a restrained amount of knitting.
A few days after my last post, I came down with a really bad cold, and have spent the last few weeks getting over it & fighting off a secondary sinus infection. I think that's all OK now. Ironically, I'm pretty sure I caught the cold when I was in the emergency room; colds usually take 10-14 days to take effect, and I came down with mine exactly twelve days later. It delayed physical therapy, which is one reason I'm still in so much discomfort.
In the second week after the accident, along with my last post, I was working on some stuff for my commonplace book (I feel pretentious calling it an "art journal," because I'm not very good at drawing). I have a stack of tea-stained photocopies dating back to a 2-D Design class that I took in 1999, and among them was a cool anatomical engraving of a pregnant woman by Pietro da Cortona. I thought it would make an interesting cover for my journalbook, on a dark green background, with gold edging, so I covered it in gel medium that I tinted a sort of sepia-gold after some trial and error. (The only paints I own, aside from a tube of Interference Gold, are black, white, raw umber, primary cyan, primary yellow, and primary magenta, so I mix up every color I use... it's nice to know how, but it's also honestly kind of tiresome when you aren't really a painter!) I set it aside to dry, but then I couldn't find a sheet that was the right size and color for the background of the cover of my journal. I was still thinking of that when I got sick.
(In the meantime, I'd taken the background of the engraving and put it over a page from an old prospectus from the Museum School in Boston, which was itself a repro of something from someone's sketchbook, that showed through in the shape of the female figure I'd cut out. I think it's pasting it into my book which makes the whole exercise disturbingly meta. YOUR sketchbook in MY... thing. I Don't Sketch. It's Not A Sketchbook. Or an Art Journal. Etc.)
I didn't do anything for a few days, then came downstairs one morning to find out that my dog had found my little cut-out anatomical drawing and "investigated"* its shoulder. Square one. I wasn't upset, except that I have since discovered that my current library system does not have the Pietro da Cortona book (you can see more of its engravings here), and that I think the similar engravings they do have, in a book by Vesalius, suffer by comparison. Vesalius is justly famous, but he doesn't deal with women much in his work, and his engravings, supposedly executed by the studio of Titian, tend to have stockier proportions and less harmonious layouts than those by da Cortona. Vesalius was a very great medical practitioner and professor of the mid-sixteenth century, and his anatomy books were done, not precisely by him, to provide a reference for his students. Plenty of da Cortona's work is redrawn from Vesalius, actually; it's just that I think he's the better artist, compared to the executors of Vesalius's drawings.
(And if you have enjoyed the last paragraph or two, you will probably enjoy Medical Sight Lines, a blog about medical illustration. "Knowledge Pictures," the most recent post as of this writing, is probably the most relevant to what I've just written, and includes a copy of one of the most admired of Vesalius's plates. It should be noted that Vesalius's work was in the form of woodcuts, the original blocks of which were destroyed in WW2, whereas da Cortona's was in the form of engravings, allowing for more detail. Since I'm more interested in elegance than medical accuracy, you can understand my preference! Also interesting: Visionary Anatomies, a splendid essay by Michael Sappol presented by the National Academy of Sciences, which contains the following: Given the complexity of the interior of the body, you couldn’t just describe it, you had to show it. And what was shown was the dead body. Early modern representations of the anatomical body took death head on: the dead mocked the living; the living mocked the dead; the cadaver was an effigy. It served as a reminder of our mortality, our fallibility, our folly — the fragility of human life and civilization.)
On the other hand, I'm about to have access to a scanner again, attached to the computer I actually use to post! I lent mine to my fiance a few years ago, on the premise that I'd sometimes come over and scan things, which I never do. This new scanner around the house means that I may actually start to post more images. Or not.
Newer people, I swear I usually talk about pretty yarns and beads and whether or not certain books suck, rather than illustrations of dissected cadavers. But for some reason, just after my injury, the idea of using a historically-distant anatomical illustration of a woman appealed to me.
*Chewed. But she's a very well-behaved dog and rarely destroys anything that doesn't belong to her!
