This is the first time in months, ever since I first started participating in Works for Me Wednesday, that I haven’t shared a tip. I have a couple in the back of my mind but need to just let them incubate for a while.

The Ladies’ Luncheon is this week. :0 Things are coming along, but there’s lots of little stuff to do, loose ends to take care of. I’m finding summer is not the best month to do this — so many people are out of town. I just keep having to give the whole thing to the Lord — attendance, details, etc. I tend to have this underlying nervous feeling when things like this come up, even if everything is going well — would appreciate your prayers for a calm heart (and mind and body…) Yes, I am meditating on Phil. 4:6-8 often.

Thank you for your well wishes with my cold last week. Though I was initially dismayed to be sick with so much to do, really last week was a better time to be sick than the week before or this week. And though I had intended to get a lot done with Jesse away at camp, I was able to really rest with the quietness and knowing he was being taken care of and not being neglected in another room. And I was able to get a few things crossed off my list even with that. The “brain fog” started to lift about Friday and the energy level started returning — that helped a lot! This cold seems to come with a lingering cough — Jim and Jesse are still coughing. I’ve had a little bit of a cough but I’m still having to blow my nose a bunch even though overall I feel a lot better.

One odd thing happened though — one day when I was blowing my nose, I all of a sudden felt extremely dizzy — had to grab the door frame because otherwise I was going to fall. It only lasted a few seconds, but then my right ear felt like it was blocked, like it does when I fly, even though I could still hear out of it (odd, since the left sinus has been the worst). That feeling went away after a while, but sometimes when I blow my nose, there are squeaky sounds in my right ear.

The visit with the new doctor went well. It took two hours just to get back to the exam room, though. I hope that’s not normal. She seems maybe just a little bit flighty — forgot to give me the prescription she wrote out but thought she had given to me when I asked about it, then she found it, then, when I got home I saw it was for the wrong dosage. I still have to call back and get that corrected. But I liked her overall and felt that I could communicate with her. That’s probably the biggest criteria I have for a doctor — that we communicate well and that they are willing to listen and discuss things with me. In the past I have had a well-known, much recommended Christian doctor have his hand I the doorknob the whole time he talked with me, like he really needed to go. I knew he had a waiting room full of people, but I had been waiting a long time and was paying good money for that 10 minutes of his time! He also tended to resent it if I asked questions. I like to be an informed patient. I don’t really go to a doctor just to get a prescription (my dad was that kind of patient — “I don’t want to hear all about it, just fix it.”) I like to understand what is going on and I don’t like to take medicine.

When this new doctor started with, “Tell me your story” and then asked questions along the way, I felt we would indeed have good lines of communication.

Everything was ok with all the blood work (cholesterol is only 168!) except for one odd thing I had never heard of before. The lab tests listed my “EO” (whatever that is) as 15.9H %, and normal is 0.9-2.9. She said in 30 years of practice she had never seen it that high in anyone and said it indicated either I was very allergic to something or had a parasite picked up from animals. She asked a lot about the cold, but it was definitely a cold and not allergies. I’m not having any symptoms of either of those problems, so she wasn’t sure what to make of it. I’m supposed to go back in a month. The lab test results page says this suggests “eosinophilia” — this was the only word I had trouble understanding with her accent but I am sure it was because I had never heard of it before. I looked it up online — and you have to be careful about that because they always have to give the worst case scenario and can scare you to death — but I still don’t know what to make of it. We do have a dog, but she’s mostly outside. She comes in at night and stays in one room. I don’t feed her or really do much with her besides occasionally petting her and washing her blanket that she uses indoors. I have seasonal allergies in the spring and am allergic to a couple of medicines, but haven’t been exposed to those. So I don’t know what to make of it, but I am not going to worry about it. We’ll see if it is the same when I go back next month. She also said I have a bit of a heart murmur — I had never been told that, either.

Well, this was just going to be a short note, but I have rambled on. Better go get some things done! Hope you have a great day.