Sinus Infections and treatments

If you do not want to read about respiratory infections and sinuses, do not read this post. Don't say I didn't warn you!

For the last few months I have had the worst run I can remember with respiratory infections. From April through to the end of August, I have been lucky to have a couple of days in a row where my sinuses or chest have not been infected with some variety of virus or bacteria. The constant fevers, difficulty breathing, and severe cough have been very debilitating.

I have been asking my doctor for the last couple of months what is going on. Up until a couple of weeks ago he kept insisting that this is just a really bad cold/flu season (which it does seem to be). A couple of weeks ago he came to the same conclusion that I had, that the number of infections I was getting was too many to be explained by a bad season. So he gave me a referral for a CT scan of my sinuses.

While I was waiting for the results of the CT scan, I had a chat to my sister, where I mentioned my ongoing sinus problems. She had had the same issue a few years ago, and in her case CT scans etc. had showed nothing. She recommended that I try daily Nasal Irrigation, which she had found very helpful.

I had tried Nasal Irrigation a couple of times when I was coming down with a cold, but not as a regular practice. After researching the options a bit more online, it seemed worth a try. My sister had assured me that the expensive sachets that came with the nasal irrigation kit were not necessary, and that common iodised table salt worked just as well. Armed with this information, I started a daily regime of sinus cleansing.

The first few days, the saline solution was quite uncomfortable, and the process took a long time. I soon worked out that I needed to hold my head at just the right angle to get the saline solution flowing through. After a couple of days the discomfort subsided, and I started to notice an improvement in my breathing.

By this time the results of the CT scan were back, and I went to see my doctor again. He told me that there were signs that the opening from the one of the left hand sinus cavities to my nose was partially blocked by inflammation. This would explain the constant infections, as the sinus was unable to drain properly. He gave me a prescription for a steriod spray, to try to settle the inflammation, and confirmed that the nasal irrigation would be helpful, and that I should continue with it once a day. He said that if this was not sufficient to resolve the problem, then the next step would be surgery, to widen the opening from the sinus to the nose. Hopefully the surgery won't be needed, but it is good to know that there is a fallback option.

I have now been on this regime (nasal spray and nasal irrigation) for a week, and so far, so good. I haven't started any more sinus infections, and my cough has started to subside. I am not fully recovered, but I am on the improve. From what my doctor has told me, it could take months to get back to full health, but at least now I am moving in the right direction!

Changes

The last month or so have been full of change, good and bad.

First up, my hail damaged car was written off by the insurance company. Fortunately I was able to replace it very quickly with a younger and nicer car, so while I am a bit out of pocket on the changeover, all in all it worked out well.

Then the project I was working on was suspended, so I was abruptly out of a job. I have been thinking for a while about travelling to the UK, and had shelved my plans until the end of the year because work was so busy. Suddenly that wasn't an issue any more, so I decided that this was a golden opportunity to make the trip. I have blogged about the trip itself in a separate blog:

vctouk.blogspot.com.

The final change is that my sister has had her baby, which makes me an aunt. Definitely a good change there! :)

Storm

Yesterday afternoon we had a major storm, complete with large, damaging hail.Here are a couple of pics of the aftermath.


I had friends around at the time of the storm, so I didn't really get much chance to assess the damage until this morning. The only real casualties were the rear window of my car, and the polycarbonate roofing between the house and the sleepout at the back of the house.

Initially I was going to leave the car window as is, with just a tarp over it, until a repairer could reach me. But due to the scale of the storm, it seems that that might take several days. In the mean time, more heavy rain is forecast. I wasn't confident that the tarp would keep the car watertight, so I removed the broken window, and taped a plastic dropsheet over the hole, then put the tarp back over the lot.


My insurance company is flooded with calls, so it may be a day or two until I can reach them. Not much more I can do now.

Woodshed

When I bought my place there was an old woodshed on the fenceline. From the looks of things, all of the houses built in the housing estate had them originally, although many have been removed. As my house has central heating, and I have mild asthma, using the wood fireplace in the house is not something I want to do. So the woodshed (full of wood) was just a home for spiders and rats. Last year my parents helped me move all the wood out of the shed onto the nature strip, ready for the hard rubbish collection. Not that that was needed, because the wood all vanished long before the council came round to do the collection!

This year (well, August 2009, which is strictly speaking last year...), I wanted to demolish the woodshed, and put the wood and roofing out for the hard rubbish. My parents loaned me a wrecking bar, and with that, a hammer and a ladder, I got stuck in.


The first step, and the hardest, was to remove the roofing iron. This was complicated by the fact that the roofing iron for the woodshed on the neighbors property, on the other side of the fence, overlapped with mine. I needed to buy some new roofing nails to re-nail the roofing iron for the neighbors woodshed by the time I had finished.



Next step was to remove the slats, and then the framing. Mostly that was just a bit of work, except for the beams that connected into the fence. I had to cut those with a bow saw.


The final step was to haul all of the wood and iron out to the naturestrip for the hard rubbish. I started with the roofing iron. By the time I got back out with the first load of timber, the roofing iron was gone, rust and all! The scavengers move fast around here! The wook took a few days to disappear, but even though it was a bit rotten, it all went before the council came around.

Job done!

Email upgrade

For a long time I have been using Microsoft outlook 2000 as an email client, largely due to inertia. I had it, it worked, why change. Recently I have been having a problem where when outlook shuts down, it doesn't shut down cleanly, making it hard to shut down the PC. So, clearly time for a change.

I had a look at a couple of freeware email clients, and finally settled on Thunderbird, mostly because I was already using firefox. I like the client and the look and feel, but the set up was a bit of a pain. Thunderbird happily imported my outlook folders (which was excellent), but it only imported half the account information. It didn't bring across the username/password, and it didn't provide any option to add them to the account it had imported. In the end, I deleted the existing mailbox and created a new one. The automated setting detection got the wrong info, but the manual setup (referring back to outlook for the correct settings) eventually worked.

The second part to replace was the Outlook calendar. It turns out that Mozilla also have a calendar app, called Sunbird. There is also a version called Lightning which is an add on to Thunderbird. I tried Lightning first, and found that the latest full release available on the Mozilla site (0.9) doesn't work with the latest version of Thunderbird that I had just installed. So I went back to Sunbird, which works fine.

I can see why people who are not computer savvy would have problems getting things working, given the amount of stuffing around I needed to do.

Still, now things are up and running it is looking good. And I can't argue with the price!