Traffic, traffic and more traffic!

I'm trying really hard not to complain.  But how can I not when all I do is sit in traffic.  For some reason, getting to work in the morning has been okay but it's getting home that's been a bear the last few days.  Now I do kind of go out of my way a bit which does add to my commute only because I don't want to pay $6.10 just to drive 2 miles.  Instead, I pay $1.00 to travel 5 miles out of the way which adds 15 minutes to my commute.  Oh and by the way, that's $6.10 in the evening.  That doesn't count the $6.10 I already paid in the morning.

So I don't know if people have spring fever and everyone is leaving work early or if it's construction of the metro or who knows what but I just can't seem to get home in less than 1 hour and I'm only 19 miles from work.  Yup.  Not 20, not 30, not 40 miles but 19.  How is this possible???

Bye bye plants

Well, they had only been in the ground for a few days.  And I'm mad at myself for not looking at the forecast but after being in fantasy land for 3 days in a row and the fact that it's mid April I assumed it would be okay to plant some flowers and tomato plants.

With a blink of an eye and a cold front that rolled in, my poor hibiscus plants never had a chance.  It rained hard all day and the temperatures dropped from 72 degrees to 40.  I ran out in the rain and covered all my plants. The tomatoes were covered with big pots and the hibiscus were covered with bags.  Since I couldn't move the pots in the house, I pulled them up against the house and covered them best I could.  Later in the evening I heard sleet hitting the windows.  And all I could think of was, "I can't believe I planted these plants.  Why didn't I look at the forecast???"  I'm a forecast junkie!  I always need to know what the weather is.  What happened?  Did my brain stop working because it was shocked to feel the warm sunny weather?  That must be it.

So this morning when I went out to check on them, the tomato plants looked fine but the hibiscus were completely frozen.  Oh, I'm so mad at myself right now.  A waste of my time and money.  When I got home tonight, Ken and I decided together to lift up these heavy pots and bring them inside the house.  Why we didn't do this last night is beyond me.  I think it was because it was pouring down rain and all I could think of was cover them, cover them now!  DUMB!  So even though they look terrible, there may be a chance that they could survive from this even though I doubt it.  But I'll give it a week and see how they look. 

As for my tomato plants.  They looked good this morning but didn't look so good tonight.  So I will take this as a loss too.  In order to get a good bounty of tomatoes, you have to start with a healthy plant.  So what I wonder now is, how many plants were ruined at Home Depot and Lowe's and how long do I wait before buying new replacement plants?  I'm just so frustrated and bummed.

Back to the old drawing board.  Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll get my 1st vegetable plants planted by May 1st? 

Early Girl

Grape tomatoes

Hybiscus

A few days later and all the leaves are falling off

Tink, tink, tink

Is that sleet I hear?  Why yes it is.  It's April 15th and the northern part of Virginia went from 80 degrees on Sun to 75 on Monday to 67 this morning and now at 6:45pm it's sleeting out? What in the world is going on with this state?  Why are we having so much weather drama?

Oh no!  My plants....I hope they make it tonight.  They are covered but it sure is cold out.

Visit to the Neurologist

A few months back, I had a bone and CT scan performed to check for cancer.  During the CT scan, I got this really weird warming sensation in my right upper thigh right after the doc injected the contrast.  I mentioned it when it happened and she thought that was odd.  Well that little incident stuck out in my head.  Shortly thereafter I experienced these odd warming sensations in the same area at random times of the day but not every single day.  I'd be sitting at my desk and all the sudden my right inner thigh would warm up.  And a few seconds it would go away.  It felt like someone was rubbing my leg producing friction, hence the warming sensation.  My legs wouldn't go numb, nor would they feel like they were falling asleep.  Just that one area would get warm and then go back to normal.  It was so strange and annoying enough for me to take notice of it.


Odd, and a tad worried I went to the oncologist who referred me to a neurologist.  A neurologist is a doctor who specializes in treating diseases of the nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord.  I knew the doctor had something to do with the nerves but not including the brain and spinal cord which makes me realize how many doctors specialize in so many parts of the human body and how lucky I am that I live in a modern world.  Anyway, when I called, the appointment was scheduled 1 1/2 months out.  I thought geez, had I known that, I would have brought it to the attention of my oncologist sooner.  So as time went by, my leg started to settle down.  I thought, "go figure that once I actually get my appointment my leg will not longer be acting up and I will have wasted my time and the doctors time.  But low and behold, the wait was over. She had a cancellation, calling me to see if I'd like to bump my appointment up 3 weeks.  Ummm.....yeah!

Lucky or not so lucky, my leg started acting up again today.  Good timing leg.  For the last few weeks the warming sensation had kind of gone away and I thought, this doctor isn't going to believe me if I have no current symptoms.  But today it magically re-appeared.  So I thought, is this all in my head?  Am I making this stuff up?  No, I'm not.  I know I'm not crazy.  When I sit at work and its super quiet in the office and my leg starts to warm up for no reason, that's not crazy, that's real.

I explained my condition to Dr. Stone.  When it happened, what it felt like and how long it's been going on.  I even told her that the warming sensation ended for a bit and then my right leg felt heavy.  Not like a dead weight but just heavy, like weights.  But not while I walked, only while I sat.  Then I wondered as I was talking.  Am I just sitting to much during the day?  Am I causing my own drama?

Remember it was a pain in my ribs that started all this testing?  I slouch at work a lot and I shoveled a hell of a lot of snow this winter.  Can I be doing this to my body myself?

Dr. Stone did some minor tests just to see my leg strength and how my body reacted to things.  Like the reflex test (which she said was good since I did have chemo) and had me follow her finger with my eyes without moving my head, pricking me with a sharp object to see if I had different sensations in my legs.  Nothing.  Not a darn thing was different.  In fact, after answering all her questions and completing her random tests, she didn't have a diagnosis for my leg.  Of course I asked if there was a possibility of a blood clot and she said no.  Same as the oncologist office.  So that put me at ease, although without an official test, I can't rule it out in my brain.  Anyway, she said that I should monitor my leg and see how this goes for 1 more month until I see Dr. Wilkinson again.  If I still have it, she will request that I get a scan done.  But for now she wants to see what it will do.  She feels like the injection of the dye might have escaped and irritated the leg in some way, like an air bubble.

It's so hard to understand doctor talk sometimes.  And now that I have been a pin cushion to many doctors, I wish I had gone in the medical field myself so I could understand what is going on with me.
So...that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to focus on my symptoms and document this so I can go to the doctors with fact and patterns verses saying random and I have no clue.

We'll see how this all pans out.