I love this picture because I feel like it is so US!  We really do love each other a lot, when we are all at my parent’s house we can often be found cuddling on the couch, watching tv or movies, or standing in front of the fireplace gossiping and gabbing.

I started my week off on a very bad note – with a seizure on Monday evening – so I am taking a week off of work to stay home, relax, eat junk food, watch the United States of Tara, see a neurologist, visit with friends, see Sex and the City 2 with Mich and a few others, eat my food hamper, and getting a glorious 90 minute massage on Friday – who knew seizures took such a toll on a body? I feel like I ran a 10km race on Monday. I’m feeling more and more like myself again, after the seizure I lost memory of the past week, I thought it was January and when the paramedics asked me my address I told them my parent’s address at the Farm. Whoa! I haven’t lived there since I was 17. Tim took a few days off but is back at work tonight, and he has been so amazing. I definitely scared the bejeezus out of him (he was home when it happened, thankfully, but unfortunately he had to witness it).

I would like to take this opportunity to say a huuge THANK YOU to all of my friends and family who have shown support to me this week. I was blown away by how many people wished me well on Twitter, how many friends texted and called me, and the beautiful flowers I’ve received from my bff and my boyfriend’s family.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you thank you thank you. It means a lot to me to have so much support from both friends IRL and friends from blogging and twitter.

]]> http://fiveblondes.com/calgary/flowers-sisters-texts-boyfriends-tweets-and-massages-fix-everything/feed/ 12 http://fiveblondes.com/calgary/healthcare/ http://fiveblondes.com/calgary/healthcare/#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:26:18 +0000 Leah http://fiveblondes.com/?p=3733 I love Canada, and I love being Canadian. Recently I read  a tweet from an American blogger regarding the rising costs of her health care coverage/insurance (which shockingly went from ~$700 to ~$900 per month) and I was encouraged to write about my personal experiences with the Canadian health care system.

You may remember when I had a health scare in November in which I was experiencing severe pain in my lung and an x-ray showed a lump on my lung. The lump eventually disappeared but I will always be grateful to our health care system for the treatment I had.

The time line and cost went as follows:

1.) Experienced severe pain in my left lung for about a week and a half. Cost: A few missed days of work.

2.) Went to the walk in clinic down the street. Cost: Zero dollars. Waiting time: 10 minutes. Benefit: I got a family doctor at that clinic as they happened to be accepting new patients (and still are – if you are in Calgary and looking for a family doctor let me know, I would be glad to refer you to them).

3.) Doctor prescribed x-rays and informed me that I likely had pleurisy. He also prescribed painkillers. Cost for a referral for x-rays and painkillers prescription: Zero dollars. (I never took the painkillers- if I had taken them there likely would have been some cost incurred)

4.) Went for the x-ray the following day. Cost: Zero dollars. Waiting time: About 5 minutes.

5.) The following week got a phone call from my new family doctor (we had a meet and greet the previous week to go over medical history). Needed to come get the results. Appointment booked for the following day.

6.) Had appointment with doctor, he went over the results with me, what the lump might be and informed me to go back for more x-rays the following day. Cost: Zero dollars. Waiting time: 10 minutes. Benefit: Doctor was extremely kind and understanding. He answered all of my questions and spent a bit of time talking to me.

7.) Went for second set of x-rays. Cost: Zero dollars. Waiting time: About 10 minutes.

8.) Doctor called when results came back – two days later. Booked an appointment for the following day.

9.) Another appointment with the doctor. Results came back normal. Cost: Zero dollars. Waiting time: 15 minutes.

All in all, I spent a total of about an hour waiting for doctors or x-rays and the total cost for the appointments and x-rays was zilch. Thank you, Canada. I love you. I have been receiving mail advertisements supporting a privatized health care system and for what it’s worth, I will be voting NO to privatized health care for the rest of my life, so that my children and grandchildren will get the same kind of support  that I have.

ALSO – Canadians and non-Canadians alike should all read this brilliant post which offers a quick Canadian geography lesson.

For two weeks in November, I experienced severe chest pain. It was so bad at times, I literally couldn’t move. I would lay on the couch or in my bed for days on end, moving as little as possible. I would try to go to work, only to throw up from the pain and go home. After I figured out that this was probably more than a pulled muscle from yoga, as I originally thought, I got it checked out at the doctor.

“Pleurisy, or a pulled muscle,” he told me, and handed me a requisition for a chest x-ray. “If it still hurts in a few days get it x-rayed.” I went the following day to get it x-rayed, as the pain hit a peak. Last week I went in for the results. I felt silly going, because a few days after my x-ray I felt completely fine again. Looking at the results, the doctor was concerned. The x-ray showed ‘pleural fluid’ consistent with pleurisy, but oddly, it also showed a ‘rather ill defined density‘ in my left lung. More x-rays, and depending on the results, CT scans and more.

I was freaked out. Density in my lung? What the #$%@ does that mean? A friend of mine put it well, she said “The vocabulary alone that comes with the words density in your lung is terrifying.” For five days, the words tumour … cancer … chemotherapy … swirled around in my head. I would go from cursing the x-ray technician for doing a bad job reading the x-ray, to telling myself it was a shadow, to dying. I had to remind myself all weekend that it didn’t matter how much I worried or stressed about the new results, that it wouldn’t change the outcome at my next appointment.

Well, Monday I had the new results. I had a minor panic attack on my way to the doctors, and held my tears in in the waiting room. Will this be the end of my world as I know it? Or will I walk away from here completely normal? My doctor informed me during my appointment that whatever was there for the first x-ray, wasn’t there for the second. It was gone. I was okay. I am okay.

So to all the people who offered me support over the past week, I thank you with all of my heart. And all of my left lung. I love you all, very much.

Until tonight.

It wasn’t the music – that was fine. The plot? That’s ok too.

Do you remember the scene where Glee member/Cheerio Brittany demonstrated her ‘hairography’ skills to the club? First she compared her body movements to being tased. Then came the line “it’s like cool epilepsy“.

Now, wait just a hair-tossing moment!

Having a seizure is like being tased? Epilepsy is uncool?

Maybe I’m reaching, but what is a young kid with epilepsy supposed to think about this? Epilepsy is not just shaking your head and hair around. Epilepsy can suck. I speak from experience. But nobody should be sending the message that a disability is uncool. I am not uncool because I have seizures, just as Artie is not uncool because he is in a wheelchair, and the students from the glee club from the school for the deaf are not uncool because they are hearing impaired.

I’ve had epilepsy for nearly 10 years and although it is not an easy thing to deal with psychologically, only one person ever made me feel as though I was less of a person because of it. I’m comfortable enough with my disability that I can joke around about it with friends, but it is really disappointing when it is joked about on a top primetime television show.

That is definitely NOT a seizure.

This is the theme song to my absolute favourite show ever.  The Biggest Loser.  I watched it last night- the finale, when the final 4 are chosen, and everyone goes home to do it on their own- and it was so amazing.  These people all come into the competition with no idea what they’re getting themselves into, and all with different stories.  The most touching story this season was Abby’s story.  Abby had lost her husband, her 5 1/2 year old daughter, and her 2 1/2 week old son in a car crash three years ago.  I watched the very first episode where she first told everyone what had happened with Kaylee, who absolutely hates the show (howww?), and we were both sitting there crying, so we had to change the channel.  She was eliminated at Week 7, and was even on Ellen at the beginning of November.  If I knew how to post  video on here I would, but here is the link to the youtube video.

Bright orange shirt, multicoloured polka-dotted pants.

Yes, this is normal.

Yes, he is a medical professional.

He’s also a pilot.

I’m not scared.

While I was heading out, who should I cross paths with but a dear friend, her husband, and their week-old baby boy!  He was snoozing and looking very content in his…umm…thing that you carry babies around in.

I have a lot to learn before the X-man and I start procreating.

It’s official. As of last weekend, I have been seizure-free for one year. You have no idea how good it feels. I’m going to get my license back! So I can drive my non-existent car! Yeah!

Quick catch-up: I have had epilepsy since I was 18 and randomly started having seizures. Since then, I have had a dozen or so major seizures in fun situations such as at work, in a movie theatre, and at a video game store. I’ve even disrupted family events like Easter dinner. But my family and friends are cool and they understand. The people in the movie theatre? Not so much. But that’s another story for another day.

Let me rewind 366 days and tell you the story of my most recent (hopefully last?) seizure.

D (then-boyfriend, now-fiance) and I were out shopping after work. He wanted to ‘shoot the shit’ with some old co-workers of his at Future Shop, where he used to install sound systems into cars. He’s techy like that – I’m never going to have to program a piece of electronics again for the rest of my life. Which actually kind of sucks because I like figuring that stuff out. Oh well! Anyway, I wanted to hit up a shoe store or two and had a secret plan – to buy him a birthday gift at EB Games. We had just gotten a Wii and D wanted to download some old-school games. You can buy Wii points cards, so I was planning on getting one for him. Sadly, the store was sold out of points cards. I was the only person in the store besides the sales guys, so decided to try out a new game without risking the potential embarrassment of totally sucking. I started to play the new snowboarding game for Wii.

I wasn’t playing too badly until my head started buzzing…I was going into a seizure. It’s hard to explain how you know you’re going into a seizure – the best example I can give you is static. There’s a lot of static in your brain and you get tunnel vision. You start to lose focus. I tried to fight it off by stepping back and walking away from the game. I walked towards the counter to give back the Wii-mote, set it on the counter, and…blacked out.

I have to take a moment here to say that while at this store, I received possibly the best customer service you could ever ask for. The guys at EB Games knew exactly what to do. That, or the person they spoke to when they called 911 was a very good coach. When I regained conciousness, they had shifted me into the rescue position and had brought a chair over for me to sit in when I was ready. It was obvious that they were pretty freaked out (they kept their distance from me), but at the same time I was really embarrassed, so it all worked out.

The ambulance arrived a short while later. The EMS technicians (Emergency Medical Services – also, coincidentally, my future initials) wheeled in a stretcher and the big show started. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt as though the whole world was staring at you? That was me. I was conscious and able to walk so I insisted on walking out of the store myself. They sat me down in the back of the ambulance and started taking their notes. Eventually, they decided that I had better go to Emerg (ugh!) and started tucking me into the stretcher.

Then my phone rang. I had almost forgotten about D, who was completely oblivious to everything that had just gone down around the corner from where he was hanging out with his friends. He rushed over to me, kissed me on the cheek, and met me at the hospital. Have I mentioned how wonderful he is?

Thanks for celebrating with me!  Now, I’m off to make cookies

She made it seem like nothing too bad had happened so I was worried but not too badly. But I quickly drove to the hospital, which is only about 3 minutes from where I work. When I got there all the paramedics talked to me first and explained what his fingers looked like and what they knew so far, they freaked me out a bit because they looked so worried! Then I got to see him. His fingers were bloody, he was shivering and he looked like he was in pain! And he was in pain.

So what happened? Scott was working at our barn, waiting for the trucker to come to ship our pigs (to market..). Since he had a bit of time he decided to try and fix the auger which had broken. It had a bolt stuck in it and so the flex auger was winding itself out of the tube that protects it.

He turned off the power that runs the auger, but because the coil was under so much pressure being pulled out there was no stopping it. Scott knew that once he got the bolt out of where it shouldn’t be that it would wind back in, but he did not anticipate how fast it would happen. And that is why he found himself lying on the ground, under a grain bin with his right hand fingers stuck in a flex auger, one of these, which is used to move feed:

Scary, no? Augers are very dangerous and cause many people to lose limbs (or worse) in farming accidents. Scott was lying in the rain on the ground, and being the fast thinker that he is used his left arm to grab his cell phone out of his right pocket and started dialing neighbors phone numbers, and 911. The neighbours came, the police came, the ambulance came, the fire trucks came and even the air ambulance came (but it could not land because it was too foggy out.) They took a while to get there though so Scott was freezing because it was raining out and was pretty cold. Long story short they finally they got his fingers out.

Scott is a lucky lucky man, his fingers are fine, well except for a broken knuckle on his middle finger and he has about 16 stitches on his middle and pinky fingers. He’s taking some time off work right now, hanging out at home.

Scott, putting on a brave face in the hospital bed. He wouldn’t let me take a picture of his bloody fingers.. so no pictures of that. Sorry!

Pretty colours in the hospital room.

Scottie, the brave boy this morning, at home.

Let this be a lesson to you all, never try to fix a flex auger by yourself, and take all safety precautions!

Check out these Farm Safety Sites if you are interested:

Canada Safety Council

Farm Safety Association

Farm Safety for Kids -As children my sisters and I attended many Farm Safety days in the area, they always teach children dangerous areas around the farm yard.

[EDIT]

I’m back! My face is a lovely shape of swollen, and I was even awake for one of them coming out! I sooo wasn’t ready for going under for the second one, but let me tell you-a.maz.ing. If you want your body to feel super cool, then get your wisdom teeth out. ps. NOT condoning just getting them out for the high. Maybe I’ll post some pictures later to show. I even got to keep my teeth!

Photo by ericasimone

What’s “this”?

“This” is something that changed my life. “This” is something that prevents me from having a drivers license, keeps me reliant on medication every day, and has put me in the hospital once a year or so. OK, now I’m getting overly dramatic.

You see, I have epilepsy. We don’t know why. After seven years, an MRI, and various tests of my brain functions, there’s still no explanation as to why I started having seizures when I was 18.

All things considered, though, I’m really lucky. Next month I will reach the one year seizure-free mark and the government will send my drivers license back. My neurologist tells me that I’ll likely grow out of my seizures and someday I might not even need to take medication. Of course, he said that would happen in my early 20s – and now I’m 25. I still need my medication.

There are many out there who are suffering much more that I am – I wouldn’t even say that I am suffering much at all. Last night I watched a segment on 20/20 about a young woman whose seizures were triggered by listening to music – any music. You often hear stories about people who have seizures while playing video games. There are people who have seizures – multiple seizures – every day. People who have brain surgery to end their suffering.

I don’t suffer. But it still sucks.