A research study has shown that a tablespoon of buckwheat honey is more effective as a cough suppressant than cough syrup and more effective than the primary ingredient in cough syrup.

As someone who hasn’t made their bed since, oh, maybe grade school when my mom could still force me to, I really enjoyed this article over on the BBC website, which covers scientific research demonstrating that not making one’s bed is actually healthy for you. Really! Go read for the details, meanwhile I’ll happily continue on with my (healthy!) slovenliness.

I had my second MRI a couple of days ago. Surgery is about 99% likely at this point. The MRI itself was fine, better than the last one in fact, because they gave me headphones so I had something to focus on besides the incredibly loud sounds emanating from the MRI machine. Prior to the MRI though I had to have a substance injected into my shoulder blade to provide contrast for the MRI, which involved getting a 4″ long needle jammed into my shoulder joint. It was surprisingly painless but it was still super unpleasant – all my instincts were screaming at me to yank that thing out of my shoulder and run away and it took a lot of effort to force myself to just lay still on the table. Anyway glad it’s over – next up is a return to the orthopedic specialist to review my surgical options now that he has better MRI data to figure out what the best procedure will be.

I met with a specialist today and he’s pretty sure I will have to undergo shoulder surgery, the only question is the extent of the surgery. I have to go back and get another MRI, this time with a dye injection which will help highlight the tears (turns out there are multiple tears) in my rotator cuff muscles.

The gist of what’s going on in my terms is, your shoulder is sort of a fulcrum, with a ball of muscles that holds the joint in place in the center of its socket. There are tears in those muscles on my shoulder, which allows the shoulder ball to abrade against my shoulder blade bone, which in turn is causing tears in the muscle at the top of my shoulder blade. I may need repair on all of those muscles, or only the ones holding the ball in

First, the MRI was not as unpleasant as I had expected. I had it last week. It took about 30 minutes, was mildly uncomfortable, and did not involve nasty injections or consumption of vile fluids. I can see how some folks could get claustrophobic in the thing but it didn’t bother me much. The biggest issue was how loud it was so close to my head, and the attendant’s request that I be as still as possible. Whenever someone says that, you know your nose/eyebrow/something is going to start itching, so most of the time I lay there wishing my nose wouldn’t itch and wishing it was all done.

The results showed that I have a tear in a tendon in my right shoulder and have to now go consult with an orthopedic specialist. This really wasn’t a surprise to me in that I’d google’d the heck out of this and was already pretty sure that’s what was wrong with me, it just took an expensive MRI to confirm it. The worse news is at least from my general practitioner’s point of view, I don’t have a great shot at being a candidate for surgery for the issue – once you get past 35 I guess your chances of healthy recovery from repairs of this nature is not great. I’ll remain optimistic until I talk to the specialist though. Who knows – I’m in great shape, take care of myself, and know how to be disciplined about exercise/physical therapy regimens when I need to, so maybe surgery remains on the table for someone like me. I should find out in a couple of weeks.

So I experimented. I’d run across a few ‘optometrists are ripoff artists’ exposes over the last couple of years which talked about the huge markup on frames and how glasses should be cheap and accessible, not ridiculously expensive. My last pair of prescription glasses was a little over $400, which does seem ridiculous even though my insurance covered sit. So. I dug around and decided to try eyebuydirect.com. My optometrist had given me my prescription when I got my $400 pair, so I signed up for eyebuydirect, plugged in my prescription, accepted their default for the measurement between my pupils (the one fact the optometrist will not give you) and bought a $20 pair of glasses. The end result is:

So I had a Doctor’s appointment today, and ironically I woke up in the middle of the night tossing my cookies. Still, I went, after clearing my stomach of everything. In July I did a faceplant into the sand while body surfing, worst I have ever done in more than 20 years at Robert Moses, and it turns out that it created a cyst on the inside of my lower lip which I will have to have surgically removed. Meanwhile my shoulder is still screwed up so next week I have to get an MRI, and to top things off I’m having chest pain when I exercise, so today I had an EKG for the second time in my life. All was well with that so now they think it’s cartilage or tendon related in my chest.

If that’s not bad enough, I took Soolin for a walk and there was bright red blood in her poop. She seems to have caught the ‘dave is cursed to have oddball health troubles’ disease. I’m off to the vet this afternoon to get this looked into, here’s hoping all is well with that.