Rarely do I use colloquial expressions in our blog, but today I am going to use one, “When it rains….it pours”.
In this case, it represents both a figurative and literal meaning.
The Figurative…..
It has been a tough week since the last update. First off, for some unexplained reason, our cat Sophie decided to chomp on my lower leg last week right after I finished stretching on our bedroom carpet. This is normally a daily routine in the morning, and she is always in the room, wanting to get petted while I stretch. For some reason, when I was finished and heading toward our closet, she decided that it was time to bite my leg. I guess maybe she was not ready for me to stop petting her, who knows, but she fully latched onto my lower leg just above the ankle and left two deep puncture wounds. It hurt at first, but then just was a bleeding event. I was getting ready to take my mother to a routine doctor’s appointment and had to keep wiping of small amounts of blood while we were waiting for her doctor.
After the appointment was concluded, everything seemed normal and the only lingering effect was some pain.
When I got back home, I cleaned the wounds well with some peroxide and applied Polysporen and some band-aids and all seemed well.
The next morning, I felt a little achy but attributed that to all of the yardwork we had done a couple of days ago. Then, about an hour later, I started to feel chilled. I headed to the bedroom and got into the bed with our heated mattress pad on to help with the chills I was having. About an hour later, I took my temperature and it was 102 degrees, not good.
I was not sure if it was Covid since it is going around, or some other cold-type illness. I had been having some trouble with a very runny nose and a lot of sneezing about three days ago after we had done all of the yard work, maybe it was allergies, but I didn’t usually suffer from those.
I decided to take a Covid test, and it was negative, ruling that out at least for now. Sometimes the tests don’t detect the virus if it is too early. I had used the 30 minutes for this particular rapid test to allow my body to cool off, maybe I was just hot from being in the bed wth the heated mattress pad. I took my temperature again after the thirty minutes as it was still 102 degrees. With only a week to go before we left on this trip, I decided to head to Urgent Care, something was just not right.
I was swabbed for a combination Covid-RSV-Strep PCR test and sent back to the waiting room for the 45 minute period for the test to be completed. I was called back to the room and met with a Nurse Practitioner. I explained about the cat bite, my issues with the runny nose/sneezing, and that I also seemed to have a possible earache. I had been swimming laps in our lake, and always get water in that particular ear while swimming, but always flush my ears out with alcohol after I am finished. He looked at the cat bite and noticed a little swelling on my leg, but no redness. He also examined my ear, but made no mention of there being an issue
A short time later, he returned to tell me that all of the tests were Negative, and that was good news, at least I was not fighting Covid. I was prescribed Augmentin as an antibiotic, it is widely used for cat/dog bites, and also ear aches. I did not know that cat bites are much worse for infection as dog bites. He said that I might also have an upper respiratory infection, which was the cause of the runny nose and sneezing. He advised that I not swim in the lake any longer, he was a swimmer and said the lake is not healthy to swim in this time of year due to the high water temperatures, and resulting stripped bass fish kills.
By this time I was not feeling that bad, and my temperature had subsided. I ran a few errands on the way home, allowing the pharmacy enough time to fill my script for the antibiotic. I picked it up and headed home for lunch and to take the first dose.
That night, my leg started to swell in the bite area and it was slightly red and warm to the touch, obviously, I was fighting some type of infection from the cat bite, and that now seemed to be my main issue. Over the next two days, I still had some fever, and the swelling and redness were still present in my leg, but not severe. We were getting a little concerned about the effectiveness of the antibiotic, mainly because of our upcoming trip departure, we wanted to know if the infection was subsiding, but if not, to have enough time for an alternative treatment.
We set Saturday as the goal for either seeing improvement or heading back to Urgent Care for additional treatment. By Saturday, we did see improvement, I no longer had any fever and had stopped taking my Ibuprofin, so the lack of a fever was not due to medication. That was good. I was still seeing some swelling, but not as much, and the redness was much less, and there was no longer any warmth in the bite area. Things seemed to be on the mend, my only issue now was the intestinal effects of taking the antibiotic, which I finish on the day we travel, which might make it more fun!!
The Literal…….
As if we did not have enough on our minds, Mother Nature has decided to throw us a potential curve ball, Hurricane Debby. We have been monitoring the storm, and as of today, we are predicted to have heavy rains from the storm on Tuesday, the day we fly out. Great. We are connecting in Atlanta, and their weather looks good, just some clouds, but our concern is getting the plane we fly to Atlanta on into our airport with all of the rain predicted here. There is not much we can do but hope for better weather, or that the weather we have does not severely impact our initial departing flight on Tuesday afternoon. All summer long, we have not even been close to having any tropical weather, but on the day we leave, it is forecast to be the worst for our area. Debby is not your typical storm, even though it is forecast to be just a Tropical Storm when it is near us, the forecast uncertainty is high, and the storm’s predicted path is still highly uncertain. Also, it is expected to slow down in forward speed significantly and be in the area for several days, with several inches of rain expected.
Needless to say, it has been a tough few days.
On a more positive note, we were able to complete our packing last night. It was one of our tougher packing efforts. We are taking several items of food with us, mainly protein bars and individual serving packets of instant grits. We also vacuum-packed several granola bars for snacks, things we have read were harder to get in Iceland (What…no grits in Iceland).
These things, along with a few other items like empty aluminum water bottles, are just bulky, and take up a lot of space.
Our initial effort was perfect on weight, both bags were about 45 pounds. However, there were still a few items we had not been able fit into the luggage, and we had to figure out a different plan. We gave consideration to using the expandable feature of our suitcases to get more room since that was the issue, not the overall weight. We have never had to do this on any of our travels to date on the initial packing, maybe once on a return when packing is sometimes more difficult.
We decided to first go through each bag separately and remove a few items of clothing. We wanted to make space for the water bottles in the side of the luggage with our clothes, and that also required a re-packing so that they would fit along the side of the suitcase with the clothes.
We repacked both bags and redistributed a few items between them, and were able to get everything to fit. The weights were still good, one bag was 47 pounds and one was 48 pounds. Now weight was more of an issue, we no longer needed to expand either bag for more space. There are still a couple of items to add that we had forgotten, and we still did not have the protein bars packed, we needed to put them in smaller zip lock bags to be able to fit them into a few small places. We did not have enough room for the box they were all in together.
We will complete the final packing tonight, and we are fine with being right at the 50-pound airline weight limit for the trip over to Iceland, knowing several things we have packed will be used while we are there and not be in our bags for the return flight.
Now we just have to worry about the weather…….
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