2018 in review

I don’t normally do the whole year in review thing, but sometimes it’s warranted.

Of course, I go to type this post, and discover that WordPress’s latest update has screwed with the Create A Post page, massively, and I hate it. Thanks WordPress for reminding me why I hate software updates.

So, I started out 2018 with major abdominal surgery. Everything has healed beautifully, and I’m long since back to work. Oddly enough I’ve STILL not noticed any major changes. The surgeon was positive that I’d notice all sorts of changes after the cyst was removed, but honestly, nope. Which is all kinds of scary actually, but I’ll take what I can get.

Then we discovered that Shadow is an asshole when it comes to food. But for all the frustration involved we’ve managed to trim his weight by almost 4lbs, so it’s worth it. Even if he doesn’t agree.

We had our first successful Bluebird hatching in years.

Somewhere, May-ish I started having some issues with my left knee again. I injured it in high school, playing soccer, and ended up having to have a lateral release done on it in college due to the same injury, so its not the strongest joint ever, but it doesn’t usually give me huge issues at work as long as I’m reasonably careful about my lifting form and not being stupid when carrying things upstairs. I ended up wearing a soft brace for work all summer, and finally went in to see the doctor, who sent me to an ortho specialist. Ortho says there doesn’t appear to be anything new wrong with it. His theory is that I got far enough out of condition out I was out of work for surgery and I didn’t work it back up correctly. So we’re working through some physical therapy to see if that’ll help. It seems to be, so cross your fingers.

June-ish I started having bouts of insomnia. I’ve always been a restless sleeper, but I don’t normally have huge issues with insomnia. I worked my way through the normal things, no caffeine with lunch or later, melatonin, Tylenol PM, with no real success. I was sleeping worse and worse and waking up with a headache more and more often. At the same appointment with my doctor about my knee I also discussed the insomnia problem with her. Turns out I’m borderline for all the base checks to possibly need a CPAP machine, so she put in a referral to get a sleep study done. She also prescribed a small dose of Trazodone to see if that would help me sleep. Not so much unfortunately, it gave me hot flashes and nausea. Fortunately at least some of the insomnia has gone away on its own. In the mean time the initial sleep test found that I absolutely need a CPAP, oxygen saturation in the low 80’s (it should be 90 or higher), and apparently I stopped breathing some 40+ times per hour. Yay. I go back to be fitted for the CPAP in another couple weeks.

The garden was fun this year. The Gagon cucumbers ended up making stellar pickles, nice and crisp without any extra work from me. I need to sit down and figure out what seeds I want to order for this coming summer.

The podiatrist was unable to find a cause for the ingrown toenail, my follow up with him is in another week.

Arty turned 7 years old in November, and Apollo turned 8 in December. Good lord, where did the time go??

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Edited to add: I had a birthday too (duh, I know) and I guess I need to go modify the bio portion of the about me page, cause I can no longer claim to be a “30 something”. Oh well.