B&W Photo Challenge Day Seven

July 12, 2018July 8, 2018 ~ msgracefulnot ~ 11 Comments

I was tagged a few days ago to participate in the black and white photo challenge by Kim author of I Tripped Over a Stone. If you haven’t “met” Kim or visited her website, please do. Kim’s blog is primarily geared toward living with Fibromyalgia, but it’s not only informative about her disease, she offers great advice and support for so many people no matter what they have on their plate. I definitely consider myself blessed to be able to call her my friend.

You know there are always rules to everything in life! The rules for this are straightforward. Seven days. Seven black and white photos of your life. No people. No explanation. Challenge someone new each day.

Today I invite, my dear friend Bill, from Superman can’t find a phonebooth. While superman may not being able to find the phone booth, I think he may have found his new calling. Bill is a story teller, and a damn good one at that. He is a fascinating man that continues to fight to live his life after a kidney transplant in 2011. Lately Bill seems to be finding himself in the right place at the right time. If you have a minute, check out his post here, you will not regret that you did.

My dear friend, I hope you will join the challenge

I’m curious to see the world through your lens!!!!!

Getting a blood patch for CSF leak

July 12, 2018July 11, 2018 ~ msgracefulnot ~ 15 Comments

This is the last part of A very long walk.

For those of you who have been reading along and commenting…there is a happy ending and an even better future

The PLAN was that my dad would drive me in my van with the seat laid flat, and my mom would follow in their car. Decatur Memorial advised my local hospital that I would be arriving later that day and that I needed a BLOOD PATCH. They even printed all my records for me to take with me. Yah should be pretty simple right?!?

NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT!!!!!!!

While we did make pretty good time getting there, ( a little over 4 hours) the hospital could not just admit me because I had declined the ambulance transport, instead they tried to seat me in the waiting room.

When you go to the Emergency Room, they take patients in the order of the severity of their injuries, I get that… Unfortunately a “headache” doesn’t rank very high on the list.

I don’t know if you have ever had the kind of headache that comes with a spinal fluid leak, but I promise you, it’s enough to make you think you are losing your mind. I still can’t quite explain it either.

Maybe kind of like the spins, after a night of too much drinking combined with someone smashing your head between two symbols while trying to speak to you in 3 different languages at the same time?

I really think I must have looked like I was losing my mind because I literally laid on the floor in the emergency room to try to stay horizontal. I’m really not a germaphob, but even I would draw the line at that normally.

I was frustrated, my parents were frustrated why couldn’t you just do this blood patch thing?!?!? I don’t remember all of the details that followed other than, I left and went home. Well my dad drove me home and they both stayed at my house with me.

I think some of the difficulty was that it was a holiday weekend. Another issue was that they were not sure where I was leaking cerebral spinal fluid from, and doubted the effectiveness of a blood patch if they didn’t find the right site.

Once the weekend was over, my mother was able to contact the neurosurgeon that had performed my thoracic laminectomy from a few years prior, and he said to bring me right into his office and he would do the blood patch immediately.

So what is a blood patch?

An epidural blood patch is an injection of your blood into the epidural space. The epidural space is not an injection into the spinal cord itself. The spinal cord and spinal nerves are in a “sack” containing clear fluid (cerebrospinal fluid). The area outside this “sack” is called the epidural space.

This is a great link explaining it in more detail. What is a blood patch?

I remember being terrified to stand up after the procedure. I had the doctor on one side of me and the nurse on the other, and I slowly stood up….. Nothing happened!!!!! My head DID NOT explode, there was no projectile vomiting!!! I was still sensitive to the light, but I could handle that. OMG it worked!!!! and almost immediately too!

After going home, I still continued to chug coffee and laid in bed for the next couple of days….just to be sure.

For the next month or so, I would continue to get migraine like headaches, but they were not positional and could be managed with medication.

While I thankfully no longer suffer from those headaches, I plagued myself with the fear of walking alone. When I walk in my house, I grab everything, walls, furniture, people. When I walk outside, I always have someone with me. What I did was to make myself a prisoner to my fear.

Prisoner no more

If you have been reading my blog posts for the last month, you know that I have been in a dark place both emotionally and physically. I don’t want to feel that way anymore!

So I started to force myself to “hit the road” again…. God let’s hope not… I mean walking again.

B&W Photo Challenge Day Six

July 11, 2018October 5, 2018 ~ msgracefulnot ~ 11 Comments

Today I challenge Jane, from Naturally Calamity Jane, to participate in the challenge. To quote her directly about why you should follow her blog, Jane Writes…

What I want to share here is my truth, my voice, my life, with all it’s ups and downs, excitement and mundane, everyday moments. It’s raw and it’s real and that is frightening.

She is an incredible writer and another person I am glad to have in “my tribe”

Jane, please don’t feel like you have to join the challenge. BUT After rereading the rules… I really do like the part about Seven black and white photos of YOUR LIFE.

I’m curious to see the world through your lens!!!!!

A long walk (part 3)

July 11, 2018October 5, 2018 ~ msgracefulnot ~ 19 Comments

This is a continuation of A long walk parts 1 and 2

When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stand the light…in any form.

Okay now I was getting really scared.

I asked Einstein to take me to the immediate care center. His license was suspended, and he refused to risk it, so I drove myself. Before I left though, I called my parents and told them what had been happening to me, just so someone else knew.

By the time I arrived at the office, my head was spinning again, my vision was blurry, and the nausea was overwhelming, so I just laid in the car for a few minutes. Even with the air conditioning on, the car was too hot to stay for long, so I forced myself to walk in the front door. I made it to the counter to register, uttered my name and collapsed on the floor. When I came to, I was in the emergency room at Decatur Memorial Hospital.

Thankfully I carry a sheet of paper in my wallet (right next to my driver’s license) with all of my medications, surgeries, doctor’s names, and emergency contacts on it. The hospital found the list, and had already called my parents. They were on their way down. The doctor was performing a spinal tap on me in the emergency room when my parents arrived. Several MRI’s were performed, the Lumbar puncture, and it was concluded that I had a CSF leak.

I was in the hospital in Decatur for a week, receiving a continuous supply of caffeine and sol-medrol via iv. I didn’t feel like it was helping at all, in fact pumping that amount of stimulants in my body while telling me I had to lay completely flat was making me homicidal. The hospital listed me as a fall risk (no surprise there) and set alarms on my bed to prevent me from getting up to use the bathroom on my own. After wetting the bed a few times while waiting for assistance, I suggested that they put a foley catheter in instead. They didn’t. Instead they put a ‘GPS tracker’ on me.

I was livid! So much so that I really began to show my ass. I informed them that I was leaving their backwoods, no brain hospital, and going home to where doctors actually had some brains. (I didn’t know how I was actually going to do it, but I was leaving)

In fact, just to show them they couldn’t “hold me”

I slipped the tracker off my wrist without breaking the band and threw it at the nurse when she finally came in to respond to another alarm I had set off.

Yes I CAN be quite the asshole, when I feel trapped. and NO, I am not proud of that, but it is true.

The hospital began trying to arrange an ambulance transport back to Chicago…. like insurance was going to cover that…. No no, just sign my discharge papers and I will be on my way.

I called my neurologist in Chicago, and he asked, “Why don’t they just do a blood patch?” I responded, “because they are idiots”. (not that I knew what a blood patch was either or where I could “pick one up”)

I would soon find out……

370K spam comments in one day

July 10, 2018July 10, 2018 ~ msgracefulnot ~ 30 Comments

I swear to anyone listening that no one can make this shit up! If anyone wonders, why I swear so much….this is ONE example.

No that is not a typo!….. What it is, is just my luck!…. I spent a good hour yesterday emptying my spam folder. (even with bulk edit, it only lets you empty 20 at a time). I had almost 2000 comments in spam, so it did take awhile.

I don’t know if you can read that, but when I was done yesterday it said I had -17 spam comments. Not sure how they came up with that number either, like I said just my luck?

When I signed into WP this afternoon after running all my errands this morning, I had 370K

Before I was done chatting with “WP support” I had another 7000.

When I started writing this I thought I was “gonna go off” about this, but to tell you the truth now, I am just plain exhausted. Below is a copy of the chat with wp:

I emptied my spam folder yesterday and today I have 370k comments in spam. Can you do a mass delete for me?

Help?

Hi there!

Hello

What type of spam are you talking about please? Is it comment spam?

yes

Ok, Comments can be managed via the WP Admin area of your site here:

https://yoursite.wordpress.com/wp-admin/

Click on that link and then on Comments tab on the left bar.

You can then select the spam comments and at the top of the comments list

that is what i did yesterday and I deleted all the spam comments 20 at a time

i got 370k overnight

I see.

In this case I advise you to blacklist this spam source

how do I do that?

You can do that by coping the email address of the spam comment and pasting it in the Blacklist textarea in this settings page here:

https://yourwebsite.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php

the messages are coming from no email address

Do you have an example for me to help you?

You may copy the IP address as well.

I mean instead of the email address.

you cant sign into my account?

ip is the www address?

The IP address appears below the comment author’s gravatar

The IP address is a number

I’ll send you a screenshot, hang on, please.

i think i found it

how do you add multiple ip addresses

Ok, one per line

and is there not a way to do a “mass dump”?

Actually no, the same IP needs to be added just once.

czadh@gxjyt.bo 6 minutes ago·www.herpescured.com

jbqxkqkot@yjhn.hk

they are all different ip addresses

I advise you to activate the comments option that makes name and email required.

i just want to make sure you are telling me I have to add them all manually? there isn’t on dump all spam bucket

Yes, that’s correct.

OMG!

There isn’t a way to add those IPs or emails automatically.

We already have an anti-spam tool

I thought so too, but why did I get so many?

askimet right?

it is working but the comments that passes through it, they need to be marked as spam or blacklisted manually.

Yes, correct.

ok, well ty for your time, I apparently have a lot of work to do

I think this comment option is really important to activate.

but it still wont dump the ones there

No, it’s just to avoid that amount of spam.

In the future

one last question

Sure thing!

sarcastic question

has anyone else ever had that much spam in one day

or am i just lucky?

I can’t tell, but making name and email requirements, makes it more difficult to robots send spams

Ok ty for your help. Have a nice day

Did I mention you can’t make this shit up?!?!?

Needless to say, I am NOT going to go through an add all of those ip addresses, and I am kind of disappointment that they were not able to help other than to suggest that I only let people with a wp account comment. That is what I have done for now.

I was thinking of switching to self hosted next month, maybe things will change for the better then. In the meantime, I apologize if you can’t comment on a post.

Has anyone ever had a problem like this? Help? Advice? Tips?