The Ibuprofen and the Hydro codons knocked her pain down enough that she slept pretty soundly this morning. I checked in on the WW Net and had 4 eggs, sausage and a slice of rye toast for breakfast.
Her cheek is noticeably swollen this morning. We called our dentist, and they said we’ve not been seen for more than a year, so we called Braces Now and it went to voice mail. We drove to Braces now and they were at a different location today. Worse the only person that showed up said that they were not dentists, but orthodontics. (*I assumed that was a specialty of dentistry.) We called our normal dentist office back and made an appointment for 10AM. I dropped her off and I headed home.
She called me about an hour later and I drove back to the dentist office. It’s now long past the time she was supposed to take her pain pills, and she was pretty miserable. The shock was that they cannot use the normal injection to relieve the pain if the tooth is abscessed. I held onto my wife as she screamed in pain while they pried her back molar out of the jawbone. (I was crying myself.)
Back home we’re trying to treat the hole in her jaw while getting back on schedule with her medications. We have one more tooth to be removed on Wednesday. I will have to look over the paperwork thoroughly, but I assume that the responsibility for her teeth was hers with her dentist and NOT braces now. (The assumption I made was that she was under their care, we paid them almost $6,000.00 just to have two teeth pried from her mouth today. (Implants will probably cost another $6,000.00.)
There is a very large lump on the side of her cheek. (Larger than the one above) that has me concerned for her health. We’ve both been under a dental surgeon and she could extract a tooth in about 20 minutes with almost no pain.
CF Philippines sent me a status of Josephine’s gifts saying they’ve been sent to the Local Partner. (They are still pretty late at 65 days.) The plan going forward is to withhold gifts without letters at three, that will save all of us a lot of time.
Tuesday (30 Hours to go)
She’s in a lot of pain this morning. We changed the Amoxicillin to 3x per day which is every 8 hours. She has 6 Codon’s left which will get her till the extraction of #30 tomorrow. (Both lower molars on her right side will be gone.)
7AM, 2x Ibuprofen and back to bed for a little while. 10AM is the next pill. I sent a message to Fortinet asking them why all the marketing E-mails are being sent to me.
I am running out of gas, needed a nap… We were very particular about her pills all day today and she’s almost free of pain. (It hurts to push against the cheek) We’ll take a 800 Ibuprofen before going to the dentist tomorrow.
Got a message from LiveFine about our pill dispensers. The E-Mail looks like it just wanted to verify our purchase (Under warranty and under customer service agreement.) There are a lot of discrepancies with this product. It looks like a value added product where someone can put their name on it and market it as their own. Which means the manufacturer is not interested in marketing the product themselves. In the current environment we have no idea who is selling product retail from inside camarketing.inc. There’s no way to hold anyone accountable for any failure of this medical device. (Which is crazy inside the USA.)
Wednesday
We’ve both taken a shower and I checked in on the WW Net as we get ready for the dentist this morning.
Dentist went ok, we left there with more questions than we had answers. We were given a referral to an orthodontist to try and save the tooth. The long story is that she could not guarantee that the pain shot would work and we’d be in the same situation we were on Monday. We called the Orthodontist and made an appointment for next Wednesday. That’s 7 days from now and we have enough antibiotics for 6 days.
My next problem is that keeping track of these four medications is proving to be difficult. Depending on the last pill taken and the current dose to be taken, changes when the next pill is taken.
Ibuprofen can be taken at 1:30 intervals, half of a tylenol can also be taken at 1:30 intervals, Codon’s at 6:00 intervals, and Amoxicillin at 12:00 intervals. So all of the pills can be divided into 3 hour intervals. What ended up happening is that we occasionally took them at a 4:30 interval. Then you end up with a piece of paper that looks like this.
To accommodate all these different times I had to use two dispensers, since they can only do 8 alarms. The two pain med trays are staggered by 1:30 so that one of the two trays can be used at any given time. The Amoxicillin was just put into her regular 12hr dispenser. (We had to take them at 8 hours for two days, that was tough.)
Or four pill trays that look like this. If we take the pills from these trays, we’ll not have to worry about taking them too often.
I exchanged callsigns with a station in Canada and California tonight using ONE Watt of signal! (That’s AMAZING)
Thursday
I heard back from Ignacio Customer Support Agent for Live Fine, he said “You should be fine, you should have any issue with the unit”. Ok, unit is singular and I was asking about the five other devices. How about risk to my network? I know that these units reach out to AWS over an encrypted channel.
I checked in on the WW Net while sipping on my coffee. I do have one tooth that is sensitive after I’ve aggressively flossed it yesterday. Lunch was ham with veggies served on warmed plates thanks to a gift we received over Christmas.
The pill dispensers can only do 9 dispenses a day so I have to use two dispensers for 16 doses. I thought it better to use alternate times versus morning and evening for pain management since there’s always a dose available. But the dispensers prevent more than three doses in a short amount of time. (When a dispenser moves you could have the previous dose, the current dose and the dose in the 2nd dispenser available to the patient.) That still would not exceed the maximum dose of either medication.
We’re trying to determine the minimum amount of pain medication and that’s been a little more difficult than I had anticipated. She didn’t take any medication for 5 hours and then she complained that her mouth hurt for the next three hours while taking the maximum (Incremental 90Minute) dose for Ibuprofen and Tylenol. She passed up her 6PM dose and took the 9PM dose with some pain present. I’ve pulled the Ibuprofen from every other slot in Meds 2 to reduce the dose just a little. I also changed both timers from 90 min to 2 Hr. increments to space out the medication a little more.
For the first hour the dispenser flashes blue requesting to take pills. After that it flashes red for an hour letting us know that we’re late.
Friday
Checked in with the HAM radio guys on the WW Net while sipping on my coffee. She again stretched out her pain meds past 5 hours this morning so we may be on the other side of all this pain meds. I wanted to get rid of Blue Focus before the next Insurance renewal. I’ve got three days left, the 10th is Monday.
My Glucose is still within range, albeit barely for pre-diabetes.
Hers has come back down to a normal range for us with the meds.
We went to get some cash and then to the eye doc to repair her glasses. Then we had a great lunch with our friends in downtown Lawrenceville. Back home for a good nap and some TV time. We made our coffee for tomorrow then went to bed a bit early tonight. Her pain meds are on a 4-hour timer for the next two days. She’ll have access to two 1/2 doses at any time. I thought about collapsing the regiment into just one timer but that might be a little premature. It’s no trouble to let these two dispensers run.
Acetaminophen comes in three dosages, 100mg for kids, 325mg for adults and extra strength 500mg for adults. Cutting a 500mg in half results in two ~250mg tablets. It’s actually pretty hard to cut them exactly in half even with a pill cutter. It’s far easier for me to cut them with the dog nail clippers where I have more control over the process. If she has a headache 250mg has been sufficient thus far. It’s not good for her to take Ibuprofen at all, let alone take an 800mg tablet.
Saturday
Her feet are swollen, and it is hard to get her boots on. The assumption is all the salt that was in the Mexican food we had for lunch yesterday.
We had scrambled eggs and breakfast sausages for breakfast. My shoulders are a little sore and that’s a distraction from getting a head start on what I have to do today. Time to go through my morning list.
Our current chores list, it’s growing!
I’m staggering my 20mg omeprazole to reduce the efficacy to 15mg. Now when my stomach gets a little overactive, I just take a small sip of baking soda water for immediate relief. She’s taking 40mg / per day which is a huge pill and a lot of medicine.
I bought a new license for the new FortiGate, it should get here on Monday. The licenses grant me updates which are vital to a secure network.
Helped her do a little housework this morning from both of our lists.
I cut the end of the Invisalign tray off for the tooth she had extracted on Monday. We have one more tray in the series, but we haven’t worn them for more than a week with all the drama. With the crowding the doctors were pushing #30 towards the back so we don’t really need the back of the tray. They were pretty tight tonight, and she had to take Tylenol so that she could get some sleep.
Most of the thank you letters from our Child Fund children are at the edge of being overdue. Normally Mariel responds within 30 days, it’s strange that Her’s is this far behind. The gifts were sent in November, delivered to the in-country team in December and they should have gotten them about the middle of the month. The child has two months (Dec+Jan) to send a thank you letter back to us. Roughly Feb 15th all of those legs of the gift+letter have expired at 74 days, we’re at 69 days for all of them.
Vacuumed the house today and we’re washing her masks. (She changes them every other day.)
Our neighbors brought over some food wrapped in corn husks. Apparently it is a Mexican delicacy to wrap corn meal in a moistened corn husk.
Sunday
Had to change the dispensers back to 8 doses per day. With the braces in place, she needed Tylenol more often than I had planned. (Ibuprofen would need her to take out her braces and wait 30 minutes to put them back in.)
Checked in with the HAM radio guys on the WW Net and talked to Paul for a good long while. We had scrambled eggs for breakfast with sausages.
Church service went well, we went to CVS and picked up a prescription for Amoxicillin that will carry us through the procedure on Wednesday. The question is that the Dentist prescribed 3PPD and the original prescription was for 2PPD that ends tomorrow morning. We did 3PPD for a couple days after the extraction and then dropped back down to 2PPD. I mistakenly read the dentist prescription as 2 pills, not 21 pills. LOL.