Sometimes, you just have to wonder: What’s the point? Why am I going through all this stuff? I’ve been spending a lot of time wondering just exactly that this last week, these last two weeks actually, and mostly because things have been so unrelentingly bad. I’ve been having a lot of trouble walking, to the point of having to haul out the walker again, and then having to use it for days at a time. It’s been like playing some endless game of ‘Simon Says,’ and Simon keeps saying I have to take another giant step backwards. This is not the game I wanted to play, or at the least, this is not the direction I wanted to play it. Instead of taking a giant step forward, I keep getting slammed into reverse. What has happened?
As things continued to go backwards, or downhill, or in the opposite of my desired direction, I did something I’ve been intending to do for some time: I started a food diary. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and wondering if that might pinpoint my problems. It’s amazing how many excuses you can find for not doing something though, and I’ve come up with a lot over the last weeks (and months). The only valid recent one has been the difficult time I’ve had writing (and/or typing), which is why I haven’t made a beginning to it. But last Sunday I was moving so poorly that I couldn’t even go to church, so I forced myself to make a start of it. By that point I’d already been through a week of lousy walking, and I was getting desperate. Little did I know that things were only going to get stranger.
Monday morning I woke up and started my day slowly. Paul was going away on business from Tuesday to Thursday, and I was gearing up for that, because when he’s gone I have only myself (and Joely, for a few things) to rely on. More snow Tuesday meant we’d need to get plowed out again too, and the guy who plows our driveway hasn’t been doing a very good job around our mailbox. That ended up meaning we didn’t get our mail for three days either, because our delivery person couldn’t get to the mailbox, and I couldn’t go shovel it out when I couldn’t even get down my hallway. But on Monday morning, that wasn’t the problem. Instead, ‘What’s the point?’ took on a whole new meaning, when I discovered an odd bump in the roof of my mouth. What was it? Though it wasn’t too sore, I couldn’t figure out what it was. My tongue bothered it in the same way you can’t keep your tongue from the hole of a newly pulled tooth, and within an hour it had turned painful. By then I reached in with a finger to try to feel what that bump might be. In the process of doing that I discovered that ‘the bump’ had broken the surface, and my fingernail scraped over something hard and bony. Tongue investigation told me that the protuberance was just outside the extraction site near tooth 3, which deepened the mystery.
The ‘mystery’ was soon solved when the hard and bony surface I could touch became a needle-like point. Tooth shard? I had heard (and read) that such things sometime take a long time reaching the surface, but eventually they work their way out. And now, almost four months after my original surgery, I was discovering that was true. Since it wasn’t in a place I could see, I needed help with the tweezers I was trying, so blindly, to use. I could feel it; could Paul see it? The answer was yes, and after taking over the tweezers and using a bright flashlight, he’d soon pulled it out. Thank goodness it happened on Monday, because I could never have lasted from Tuesday to Thursday, waiting to have it pulled! The last hour it took to break the surface and point its way out was nasty, and I would never have gotten through a couple of days with that thing hanging down from the roof of my mouth!
So, strange point removed, I returned to my day, my week, and my food diary. Here’s hoping I find out something useful as I go about keeping track of every morsel of food I put in my mouth. And oh, yes, I’ll let you know if I discover something of value.
Because otherwise, what would be the point?