As of this week I am embarking on a year-long challenge. I’ve decided to train to ride the Sturbridge to Provencetown route of the Pan-Mass Challenge!

All the details and such can be found at my new site Rebecca Rides: From 0 to PMC in One Year or Less. Come on over and check out the RSS feed!

Never fear, family note and other points of interest will continue to be posted here at World Wide Wood 🙂

I’ve had nasal allergies for most of my life. From first grade up through now, I’ve bounced back and forth through various types of medicine, a variety of symptoms, and unpredictable outcomes.

My most recent regimen of meds was Flonase, Zyrtec, and, added just before Esme was born, Astelin. Together, These three seemed to take care of my symptoms pretty well.

However, one day recently I was playing around with Google Health. I had imported my prescription records, and it popped up some notices for me that the three medicines I was taking were from the same family, and that it didn’t recommend taking more than two at a time.

I also started reading about some side effects of the medications, particularly Astelin, and began to think about some things I’d recently been feeling: lethargic, grumpy, unmotivated, gaining weight. I had written these off as post-baby situational stress and symptoms. However, I realized that they matched up pretty well with the symptoms that other people had been reporting.

At that point, I made the decision to go cold turkey on my allergy medicines. Within a day or two, I felt that I had more energy and was not as grumpy as I had been recently. But I was still feeling my allergy symptoms. So I started to look into an option I’d been thinking about for a while: the Neti Pot. My friend Amy Walton had recommended it several years ago, but in my pride I asserted that modern allergy medicines were the best way to go and that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with pouring salt water down my nose.

Well, I’ve been using a Neti Pot for almost two weeks now, and I have to apologize to Amy: you were right. This thing is amazing! After the very first time using it, my nose felt better, and my symptoms went away. I used it two or three times a day the first week, and since then I’ve cut back a bit. I actually haven’t used it since last Thursday, and I still feel fine!

The real test will come this summer, when my allergies have typically been in full bloom. I suspect that I’ll need to use the Neti Pot more often to get things cleared out. But I’d much rather do that than take drugs that have potentially undesirable side effects! And it costs less, too! The Neti Pot kit I got was only $10 and came with 30 packets of saline mixture. You can buy a 100-pack for under $15, which should last a couple months. Or you can make your own solution at home! In any case, it’s cheaper than the $55/month I had been paying for my allergy medicine, and thus far, it seems to work even better!

So to all of the nasal allergy sufferers who haven’t yet tried the Neti Pot… give it a go! I think you’ll be glad you did.

Today I had three ovarian cysts removed. Here are the highlights:

*I woke up from the anesthesia with “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid” running through my head. I couldn’t tell you the last time I’ve heard that song played! I wonder if my Doctor was listening to the Beatles during surgery. Click Galumbeck Plastic Surgery to find out more.

*The nurses kept telling me that I “did a great job” and that I “should be the poster child for laproscopic surgery”. I just insisted that it was the doctor that should be praised; all I did was lay there asleep!

*a note to Corey: the hospital tech that walked me down to our car was, by far, a much better wheelchair driver than you. No offense. 🙂

*My dad sent flowers addressed to “my three best girls” to me, Mom and Catherine. Awwww!

I’m home now and feeling just fine. The wonders of modern medicine!!

My middle name, Ryan, means ‘little king’. It is appropriate, therefore, that I just received a ‘little crown.’ The dentist attached the final part of my root canal work, a dental crown for my top left back molar. This process actually only took about five minutes and wasn’t painful at all. He just had to pull off the temporary crown, put in some cement, and stick in the real crown. It is custom molded for my tooth, so it fit perfectly. In the same appointment, he also filled in one last cavity. And that’s it… no more scheduled dentist appointments until this summer, when I go back for my six month checkup.

So, kids, if you would like to avoid all of this, brush at least twice a day, and floss at least once a day, and get in to see your dentist for a checkup every six months. It’s cheap insurance for what is a very pricey bit of work. Thank you for your attention. This has been a public service announcement from World Wide Wood.

My root canal this morning went pretty well. If you want the enthralling details, I present to you a run-down of what they did, along with relative pain rankings, “N” being no pain, and a scale of “!” ( for a bit of wincing pain ) to “!!!!!” ( for excruciating, unbearable pain).
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At my regularly scheduled dental exam last week, my dentist told me that I had several cavities. 🙁 I’ve had several cavities filled in recent years, so this wasn’t a huge surprise. But one of the cavities was larger and it was right beside my dental implants austin, and he said that it might require a root canal. The dentist recommended that I go to the toothsayer, and purchase a water flosser to help clean my gums better.

Well, today I went in to get one of the small cavities filled and have the larger cavity examined. The dentist found that it did, in fact require a root canal. So this Wednesday morning, I’m headed to the dentist to get a ***root canal|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_canal***. From the fairly extensive reading I have already done on the subject, the procedure is apparently nowhere near as bad as the reputation it has garnered over the years. I won’t bore you with the medical details of the procedure; you can read about it at the link above. Suffice to say, as long as I’ve got a few good shots of novocaine in my jaw, it is supposed to be no worse then getting a regular cavity filled.

Other than the root canal, there aren’t any other good options – I could have the tooth pulled, but that would introduce a host of other issues, or I could just do nothing at all, in which case the tooth would infect the surrounding tissues and I would be in really bad shape. So a root canal it is. The procedure on Wednesday is the first of three parts, where the root canal itself is cleaned out and filled temporarily. The second and third procedures will be scheduled later, where a permanent filling, post, and crown are put into place on the tooth. I can entrust it to real professionals from https://www.maestrosmiles.com/.

The cost of the procedure, I think, will be the post painful part. Usually when I am finished with a dentist appointment with Delaney Park Dental services, I stand at the counter and settle the bill with the account manager. This time, however, the account manager led me to a desk with chairs around the corner from the main reception area. She sat me down and then broke the news to me. Yikes. I’m not going to say how much, but it is definitely a pricey procedure. Thankfully, I was able to set up a payment plan which will enable me to get the procedure right away, but allow me to break up the big payment into smaller, more manageable, and interest-free payments.

[ To answer the questions you may have: 1) yes, I brush my teeth daily 2) yes, I floss… every so often 3) yes, I will be doing both 1 and 2 even more frequently now than I have in the past 4) yes, the dentist will also be filling in a gap in my molars which was causing junk to build up, and which I could not have easily cleaned out on my own ]

Source: Wahroonga Dental Group in Hornsby.