Adventures in health: Update and extra stuff

Tonight I set up an appointment in late March for my muscle biopsy!

At my last neurologist appointment, I was diagnosed as having a form of muscular dystrophy. This has been one of those “it maybe could possibly be this, but who knows” things bandied about over the years, so it wasn’t a surprise to hear this being what it is, yet…it was mildly stunning, all the same. A diagnosis. Never thought I’d see the day.

I know it’s not the end of the world, and maybe diet changes and vitamins and who knows what else can help me at least a little bit in terms of quality of life – but the problem is that now that I know for sure that it is a problem with my muscles themselves, it’s like the flame of hope that it was all just a problem awaiting a simple solution has now been extinguished. Over the years, being told “it’s all in your head,” while frustrating, also carried with it that hope in the back of my head of “well if it is all in my head, or no big deal, then that means all I have to do is take a pill or do a certain exercise and I’ll magically be normal.” But … with a diagnosis, with facts backing up what I’ve feared/known all these years, I’m a dented carton of milk. There’s no denying that. It’s hard to accept, even though deep down I knew something was truly wrong here. I guess I still held out hope maybe it had a simple solution I just hadn’t found all these years. So, I’m wondering if maybe therapy is in my future. I don’t want to get all downer about it. I can see potential for that to happen, though.

Even now, I find myself thinking “Well wait, maybe they just read the test results wrong,” like I still cannot believe I have a diagnosis, that I still am holding out hope there’s some loop hole, some magical answer and it’ll be found. Such a strange quagmire of thoughts.

Anyway… the EMG results, according to my neurologist, were pretty clear in showing my muscles are in fact the issue here. This upcoming biopsy should shed more light on that diagnosis. I mean, sure, it could yield nothing much — but from how obvious my test results were from the EMG, I’m guessing something will show up from the biopsy. A few weeks ago I also had a CK test. Once I have the biopsy done, I’ll learn about those results along with the biopsy itself.

I am both eager and fearful. Well, fearful seems like too strong a word, but at the same time it is fitting. It’s been a long road leading to this. Now that I have a name for my issues, it’s like I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. I mean, it was always there, shoved in my face — but now I know what to call it. It’s a strange feeling. This seems to be my state of mind for the past few months.

Also, in late February I have some dental things to be taken care of. I kept this in mind when choosing my biopsy’s appointment date. As I knew after my recent dental procedure, it was only a matter of time until I had to have another area looked at. It’s a rough thing, dealing with the futility of something like this. Pain sucks. The cost of fixing that pain sucks more. And the result of fixing that pain, while worth it, is also something I can’t really ignore. Will I feel more self conscious or less so? I’m facing losing all of my teeth. I’m not even 30 yet.

I’m hoping there’s no overlap in recovery time, at least. I may be a tough cookie, but I’m not so sure I’m tough enough to deal with two areas of pain intersecting.

Despite all of this stuff, I’m pretty optimistic about the year. I’ve been feeling like this is the year where I get everything squared away and on track, such that by 2013 it’ll be relatively smooth sailing.

As of right now, I’m dealing with my health issues and wrestling with my diagnosis and what it means for me, and how to move forward with it in mind.

My face hurts from my dental problems, my body is sore and tired, and I’m not looking forward to having my leg cut open. But my dental appointment(s) should take care of the face hurting issue – I’m trying not to become worried about being rejected by people due to that stuff – and my biopsy and diagnosis should lead to resources and more fuel for the fire of figuring my life out and how best to live it.

I’m a bit stressed out these days, but I’m optimistic all the same.

Still can’t believe it’s really 2012. I will turn 28 in May. Whoa.

Adventures in health: EMG edition

It was determined that I do not have MG (Myasthenia Gravis)

Let’s start at the beginning though.

I was 2 minutes late to my EMG appointment today.

My wheelchair is getting older now. It folds, and sometimes parts fall off, including a screw. So today in the parking garage of the hospital, the screw fell off again and thus my seat wouldn’t fold completely down. The wheels wouldn’t turn properly, so my mom was having to drag me around in it. We hadn’t been to this hospital before, so it was stressful trying to get there. I was sure we could swap with a hospital chair once we got there though, so I stayed positive.

I was indeed able to borrow a wheelchair once we got into the hospital and stow mine away at the desk. Now, the paper hospital directions I got in the mail for my appointment didn’t really tell me much about the interior of the building, which is essentially a maze. Luckily everyone in there was very friendly and helpful and we found our way. I was incredibly glad that I had that working wheelchair because there’s no way mom could have dragged mine all the way there, and there was certainly no way I could have walked that far.

The appointment itself began with going over details of my case, including which is my dominant hand. After this, some testing of my reflexes – of which I have next to none – and then onto the shocks portion.

I’m not sure, but I think they decided to work on my left side because of the fact I’m right handed. There was a pillow at the foot of the bed that was moved to the head of it after I explained my right-handed nature.

My cold (as always) hands were commented on a few times, and I actually had to go over to the sink and rinse them under the hot water until they warmed up so the test would work. heh

Now, the surface electrode part was uncomfortable at first but not that bad. They started with my left hand. However, the first shock was very tiny. My hand was taped to a board so it wouldn’t move. As the intensity was increased. it became quite unpleasant. It was a very strange feeling. I’d say that the most bothersome area for me was when they did it on my left foot. Very sensitive area down there. It wasn’t exactly pleasant to experience in the rest of the areas they did, though. Another unexpectedly bad part of the testing was when they had to take the tape off of my face.

In total I had shocks on my hand, two parts of my arm, my neck/shoulder area, my face, and my foot.

This series of tests came back negative in terms of diagnosing me with MG. (MG is what my neurologist thought most likely for what my issues are)

It was at this point that he said the testing should continue onto the needle portion. This involved wearing a gown, having my skin swabbed down with rubbing alcohol, and then thin needle electrodes being inserted into the skin and down into the muscle itself. The rubbing alcohol part made me feel like I was preparing for 1,000 shots at once. It was quite pungent. The needle insertion and probing itself, well… this was extremely uncomfortable. It became flat out painful as the needle was positioned, mainly because of the fact that the needle had to probe around a bit and it was painful as it was doing so. A very sickening strange sensation. Once the needle was properly positioned, I would then move that muscle at various levels while it was inserted and it was measured on a screen. This was difficult. I shouted out a couple times, and I felt really bad about that because I didn’t want to freak anyone out in the other room and I was trying to be cool. hah

In total, 5 places in my leg and 2 places in my arm were tested with the needles, and it was during this testing that it was shown that my muscles are definitely the problem. I was relieved that they didn’t need to do the probing in my face. I was dreading that idea the entire month I’ve been waiting for this appointment.

I was surprised that I wasn’t disappointed at having MG ruled out. It would have been positive in a way to have a diagnosis, but at the same time, ruling something out is still a big step. Knowing it’s a muscle issue at least gives something to go on.

I have a follow-up appointment scheduled so I guess we’ll be discussing the test results in more detail then. For now, I’m relieved to know that, yes, there’s definitely something wrong with my muscles. For now, I don’t know what it is. But I do know it’s something. And something is better than the guesses and nothing I had before.

My neurologist briefly spoke with me about things, and said a biopsy is definitely needed. The biopsy will be taken from my shoulder. I’m not all that worried about the biopsy due to the fact I will be numbed in the area, so hopefully discomfort will be mild during the procedure. This EMG, however, I was fully aware throughout and it was definitely the more worry-inducing of the two possible procedures, for me. In a way, I was looking forward to the possibility of a biopsy ever since it was suggested during the consultation appointment with my neurologist in October. That’s because it was something to look forward to beyond the EMG. I have been dreading this EMG ever since the appointment was made! haha

So there you go. I had another lab rat moment in my life today, but I think it was a good thing. I’m glad I have more to go on now.

Not only is this post for myself, but it’s also for whoever out there in the internet is searching for information on how it feels to have an EMG performed. Me, I did plenty of research and read many forums and watched videos trying to educate myself before my appointment today. (I’m the type who feels better going into something if I know what to expect) I was disappointed to find a lack of personal accounts of the procedure during my research, so I hope this might help even one person out there. I find that reading personal accounts from others helps put my mind at rest, in a way, because it gives a sense of “well, they got through it, so will I” as well as “oh, hadn’t thought of that detail…”

No, it wasn’t a fun procedure, exactly. It was fun to learn new things, though, and I found the enthusiasm of the people working with me to be interesting itself. I lived through it. I think the information gained from it is worth the hassle. If you’re waiting around on an EMG appointment, my advice to you is bite your other hand while they’re probing, or bring some kind of squeezy ball ahead of time. No pain no gain.

Project Myst III: Exile

I’ve become closely acquainted with a game I’ve never even played over the past few months. A friend of mine has been doing a Let’s Play of Myst III: Exile. He had the idea of making a DVD style menu for the LP, and somehow I ended up taking part in the project myself.

His description does a good job explaining what we did:

A nifty DVD-like menu of the Let’s Play series of Myst III: Exile. Click any of the books to access the submenus (they’re the best part!). Once you do, I recommend using the links inside the submenus to get back here, rather than using your browser’s back button.

I’d like to thank my friend Maya (victorianrobot) for her help with this project. We spent many hours staring at grainy images in the game in order to recreate the Lesson Age symbols and the letters printed on all the books. One major challenge came from the fact that these books were not standing upright, which meant the true shape of each letter had to be inferred and constructed from scratch. Yet, we still managed to produce a relatively cohesive font.

Maya also recreated the Exile logo on the main page and designed the custom borders around each menu option.

The main menu shows many of my borders and such, and by clicking each button you can see each submenu where the symbol + font we created are in each one.

I had a lot of fun on this project. I never would have dreamed I’d ever work on recreating a font, let alone doing borders and offering artistic direction on anything like this. I’m glad I took a chance and got involved in something so outside of my comfort zone.

A Myopic Boyfriend

My friend Julie asked me what I’d like her to draw for me a while ago. She sums it up well in the description of the drawing, which she posted today:

“I asked my good friend ~myopic LAST YEAR what drawing she wanted for her birthday and she had this brilliant idea for me to draw her up a souuulllmate. WELL, it was a challenge for me to come up with someone who wasn’t just a mashup of her likes with my likes. I just tried to make somebody I thought was a good match for her (but not too perfect. There must be a good balance.)”

(Click image to see it bigger + full description and comments)

First: I have an eye chart shirt too! I love it.

Second: “I just tried to make somebody I thought was a good match for her (but not too perfect. There must be a good balance.)” I very much agree with the bolded part. Balance is awesome.

Third: She made the guy an NT. This is one of the best details of a drawing I’ve ever seen. It says so much about the guy in such a simple way.

Looking into MBTI and the dynamics between types is a little hobby of mine, so seeing the “INTJ” shirt made me smile. Considering the fact I’m an NF – INFJ, to be exact – NT was a good choice for this guy’s personality.

Julie always draws some awesome stuff, but I gotta say this one really blew my mind. Best belated birthday present by far!

Frozen

The plan is to move out of here by the end of January. Awesome, right?

In December, I had a tooth issue flare up. I called to make an appointment, but the earliest I could get in was January 13th. As the date approached, the plans for moving quickly turned into being out of here by the end of January. That is great because I’ve been dying to get out of Vegas, but it’s kinda bad because now I have to put off my dentist stuff even longer. Considering we’d be out by the end of the month, I didn’t see a reason to get a consultation at a dentist I won’t be seeing twice, so on Monday I cancelled the appointment. I reminded myself it’d be easy enough to make an appointment with someone in Davis once we move.

In an effort to quit worrying about this stuff, I distracted myself with some X-Files on Netflix.

Around that same time in December, I was suddenly hit by a random computer freeze. This was weird because my computer has never given me problems like this. No new hardware. No new software. The event logs are clear, and I haven’t gotten any error messages or blue screens. In this computer’s lifetime, the only problems I’ve ever had were from obvious things: Malware, drivers, or application conflicts. These may be annoying, but they’re easy enough to fix once you pinpoint the cause. I have this routine I go through and it always fixes the problem.

This time, however, the cause wasn’t easily found. I’ve been trying to pin down what’s going on for weeks. System restore didn’t help. The only thing I hadn’t tried was reformatting and restoring to factory settings. I avoided this for quite some time due to the fact I’ve never done it before and it seems like such a drastic measure. I’m pretty annoyed with this freezing, though, so I tried it tonight. For a while, I thought it had fixed the issue. A little while ago, however, I got another freeze. This time I received a blue screen. (which went by too fast to read) I disabled automatic rebooting and hopefully if/when I get another blue screen, it’ll tell me what’s going on.

In the meantime, I’ve finally come to the conclusion it’s got to be a hardware issue. I’m thinking a RAM issue. I’ll be running a memtest to see what comes up. Whether it says there are errors or not, either way I’m pretty sure it’s not a software issue. My problems seem to match up with failing RAM warning signs.

During all of my troubleshooting I ruled out Flash. I ruled out Silverlight. I ruled out specific browsers. I ruled out temperature problems. I ruled out fan problems. I’ve frozen with different things opened and closed, and nothing is a constant. At this point, it’s driving me crazy. I hate when I can’t fix something myself. I figure I’ll replace this computer sometime after I move, and then figure out what’s wrong with this one later. I think I’ve got enough stress on my plate at the moment. I’m happy it didn’t melt like my last computer, at least.

In the days leading up to moving out, I was hoping to watch as much on Netflix as possible. The X-Files is one of my favorite television shows ever. I’ve been rewatching it from the beginning for the past while. It’s been great for getting my mind off of stressful matters. While I am looking forward to moving out of here, I’m not really looking forward to my hiatus from the computer. It’s my replacement for TV, it’s the simplest way to keep in touch with many friends, and it’s where I like to draw without using up my paper. With the way my computer is speeding up its decline, I may end up computerless a lot longer and a lot sooner than I thought. So much for vegetating in front of my computer until the end of the month. At least I’ll be out of here soon, right?

MudPepper

One of my favorite books is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Whenever I think about it, I think of California. San Diego and Sacramento, to be exact. Whenever I think of San Diego or Sacramento, I tend to think of the book. It’s one of those connections that is pretty much burned into my mind.

The reason for this? An internet friend I had years ago who used the handle MudPepper. He lived in Sacramento at the time. We talked mainly about video games due to the fact we met in a chat room focused on them. During one of our conversations, he brought up a book that was soon to be released. I can’t remember how he had heard of it. He was friends with someone or something or other. In any case, he insisted I read this book as soon as it was available. During a trip to San Diego, I stopped by a book store and asked about it. It wasn’t on the shelf, but the girl working asked me to wait a moment and went into the back room. She came back with a box, cut it open, and pulled out a copy of House of Leaves.

When I returned home, I began to read. I didn’t stop reading. I ended up finishing it overnight. It was one of those experiences I didn’t want to end. An incredible book.

It’s hard to believe all of this happened way back in 2000.

What reminded me of all of this is the fact I will be relocating to California soon. It’s looking like, instead of San Diego area, I will be in the Sacramento area. This reminded of the book, MudPepper, and everything else that went on during that time. Time flies. It’s amusing to me how things that didn’t seem like they’d be tied together at the time have now become so woven together that I can’t imagine them ever being unrelated, in my mind. It makes me wonder what things I see, hear, read, and do now will be connected to and related with in my mind years from now. Interesting to think about.

The end of the first day of the new year

I don’t think 2010 was a bad year. In fact, I believe the good points far outweighed the bad.

Bad points

End of summer in general:
- Clearwire’s move over to “network management” and all the stress and ragefests that entailed.

November:
- My beloved kitty, Jasmine, passed away. She was 17.

December:
- The 1 year anniversary of my dad’s death.
- My mom was admitted into the hospital (twice) due to high blood pressure and weakness. Heart problems were ruled out, as were neurological issues, but the root cause is still yet to be found.
- We didn’t really have much of a Christmas at our apartment due to my mom not feeling up to doing much, and money issues being on my mind due to all the health things going on
- I had a cavity issue flare up and so I know that I need to follow up on those other dental issues I have. MEH.

All in all, the month of December was a huge pile of stress.

Good points

(not separated by month due to the fact a lot of these apply all year)
- Getting my wisdom teeth out!
- Learning new things about myself and about others, in general. Yay for MBTI and other personality matrices.
- Attending San Diego Comic Con! The last time I attended was 2005. It was fun seeing how things have changed.
- Seeing The Magnetic Fields in San Francisco. This was the second time I’ve seen them on tour.
- Speaking of San Francisco, the fish and chips at the Academy of Sciences was awesome.
- Falling in love with sites like Flickr, Tumblr, and we heart it
- Seeing Conan O’Brien’s Legally Prohibited From Appearing on Television tour when he was here in Las Vegas (and meeting Bley in the elevator and getting a guitar pick from the band!)
- Working on a project with a friend I made this year. In the process, I’ve learned to do many things I never imagined I’d be able to do.
- The Hipstamatic app for iPhone
- Making new friends!! I’ve made a few new friends this year. Creative and interesting people who have brought new things into my life.
- Discovering new interests! Top unexpected interest of the year: Basketball. Who would have thought I’d ever be into sports? Baseball is fun to watch, too.
- Talking with my brother over the telephone for the first time. It was amazing to hear his voice!
- Filling up my second blank book so far. Each time I’ve finished one of these I feel more grounded somehow. More in touch with my creative side.
- Picking up journaling again. In 2010 I started writing and drawing in a book for myself. I also kept up a computer journal.
- Even though mom and I didn’t have much of a Christmas ourselves, Lori and Rich had us over yesterday and we made up for it. It was nice to spend time over there and they gave me some very thoughtful gifts. (including two blank books!! yay) So Christmas ended up being pretty good after all, even if it did wait until NYE!

I know quite a few people who had a rough 2010, and I hope that 2011 is better for them. As for me, 2010 was, all in all, pretty great. I think 2011 can only get better!

An update on the internet

I’ve had a change of heart regarding Cox!

Cox doesn’t, in fact, suck. Anymore, anyway. I now have at least 10mbps at any given time ever since activating service with Cox again. The stress of Clear and its throttling are all in the past for me now, and I’ve found myself back to my routine of streaming Let’s Plays on YouTube along with many movies in my queue over on Netflix.

“Reunited and it feels so good!”

I’ve noticed I’ve had a steady stream of visits to my previous post regarding Clear, and to anyone out there experiencing the troubles I dealt with for so long: Feeling stressed over Clear’s (lack of) service? If you have other ISPs in your area, switch now and leave Clear in the dust. The stress is not worth it.

Clearly misleading

This is a Clear ad. “Unlimited” — Really, Clear? Not quite.

Last year, we were about to get rid of our Cox service (we had a bundle) and so that meant needing to have a new ISP. At the time, Clearwire(before the name change) was making the rounds in Vegas saying they had unlimited, affordable internet service perfect for streaming videos and playing online games. Of course, as I was turned on to Netflix streaming at the time and Hulu and Youtube both were getting more shows and movies streamable, my mom and I both thought this would be perfect in light of our jumping ship from Cox.

We ended up with a 2 year contract with Clearwire. We both were overjoyed at the fact we had consistent service, considering our Cox internet was always so fickle. (Cox sucks) In the year since then, I’ve watched plenty of movies and TV shows on Netflix, enjoyed tons of full-length Let’s Plays on Youtube, and in general I have enjoyed consistent speed and I’ve had no disconnects or problems of any kind.

That is, until getting back from my trip to San Diego.

It was around that time that we got a call from Clear asking if we’d like to upgrade because of 4G coming. We upgraded our account to the next highest speed. (“up to 6mbps”) It was shortly after that I noticed Netflix started buffering a lot and I’d notice we’d suddenly have really bad speed. As in, 0.55mbps or so. I thought maybe it was the modem or the router acting up, and after some resets and stuff like that, they seemed to work fine again. However, these problems started cropping up more and more often, and with more testing done on my own, I realized it wasn’t the router. Suddenly our modem started showing 1 to 2 bars rather than the usual 3 and 4, and even after moving the modem and achieving 4 bars again, speed testing still showed as low as 0.11mbps. I became more and more frustrated as days turned to weeks and weeks turned into months. I realized there was a bigger problem. What was it, though? Hmm. I was tracking my speed at speedtest.org all this time, and as I noticed it was consistently bad over time, I decided to track down ISP help forums and see if anyone had the same issue.

It turns out this issue started affecting people exactly the same way it did to me — Speed was good for quite a while, then suddenly it took a nosedive for no apparent reason. Nothing had been changed on our ends to cause this issue, so what was the deal? Doing all the steps listed out in the “optimize your internet speed” FAQ on the Clear website didn’t help at all, and there’s only so long you can really believe that “working on a tower” excuse tech support sometimes gives when their fixes don’t help, so people have been growing steadily more annoyed about this as time goes on.

During all this, there have been a couple days where I’d have speed faster than I’d ever had before. By “faster than I’d ever had before” I mean 3mpbs. This is actually kind of sad, considering my upgrade was for “up to 6mbps” so I was achieving half of that only a couple days out of the month. The day following these quicker speeds I’d be back down to … oh, 0.25mpbs. Sometimes as low as 0.11. These snail speeds would last for at least 2 days at a time before creeping back up to about 1.2mbps or so. Nowadays on top of these awful speeds, I’m also getting randomly disconnected. This was incredibly annoying when I was attempting to download a large file(250mb) from a friend last week and had to retry 6 times. This wouldn’t be quite as annoying if not for the fact I was having to deal with 0.34mbps download speed at the time. (I was not a happy camper!)

As I kept an eye on the forums, I noticed more people were waking up to what’s going on. People have been complaining of exactly the same issue – but they were also being told that they were being flagged as “heavy” users and thus being “managed.” As in, they were being capped due to how much they were using their “unlimited” service. Hmm.

A few days ago, someone pointed out that the acceptable use policy had been updated in June, describing acceptable use as “occasional” video streaming, “occasional” gaming, etc. The problem is that this is how they describe their service:

http://www.clear.com/shop/services/home?id=292

“Stream videos, watch movies [...] play games online,”
“Data usage Unlimited”

What the above doesn’t state is that you can do one of those things at a time and only once every couple days, or else you’ll have your connection throttled. Granted, if you hover over “unlimited” it says that it is subject to the AUP, but the AUP does not state anything beyond the vague “occasional use” terminology in regards to how much streaming and gaming you can do. What really gets me is that, alright, I can’t speak for new customers or what they’re told when they’re being sold on Clear, but I know that last year when I was being sold on it, this “occasional” business was never mentioned, and they made a big deal about how much streaming I could do and really stressing the “unlimited” bit.

And really, with the way they seem to be capping users now, if you did all three of those things in that paragraph in the same week, let alone the same day, you would be instantly throttled.

The TOS was updated as well, though much more recently than that. (August 30th) Essentially, if a user has any problems with throttling or service, they claim no responsibility.

http://www.clear.com/discover

What can I do with WiMAX?
Everything you’ve always dreamed about doing on the internet that the slow drip of 3G makes so painful. Watch live soccer from Europe, from your kids soccer game in Seattle. Email ginormous presentations from the road in seconds without having to pay for a mega-grande just to get a connection. Download a video of that conference you couldn’t attend in the middle of a trainload of commuters. With this kind of mobile speed you can do it all.

Is CLEAR Reliable?
Because CLEAR has mobile 4G coverage virtually everywhere in your city, you don’t experience the same hassle of finding a hotspot or watching minutes and minutes for a spinning ball to download, or upload, or simply stream your video. How much of your life have you lost to that?

How much time have I lost to buffering, Clear? Quite a bit as of late, thanks to that “reliable” service you’ve now got going.

What we have now is nothing like what we all were sold on. What we have now is nothing like what we were enjoying before the “upgrade” in July. The upgrade that apparently had a big impact all over the country, bringing so many people down to 0.25mbps in the exact same pattern.

I guess I should be glad what we were sold on was actually what we got for about a year, but I’m upset that they did a complete 180 and now I’m stuck with a service that doesn’t suit my needs. It’s very disappointing.

Going by the sudden capping/throttling/”management” and change in policy(which we weren’t notified of), apparently what has happened is they oversold, and now instead of fixing their towers and stuff for their current users, they’re editing the AUP with stricter guidelines and enforcing this automatic capping on “heavy” users.

They’re still marketing Clear as being perfect for Netflix users and online gamers, which is not the case. People on the forums who have called into tech support multiple times are finally being told that anything over 1GB of data per day is considered “excessive use”, one person even being told he should limit his usage to 500mb per day. (Seriously) In fact, it’s starting to come out that 9GB per MONTH seems to be the maximum amount of acceptable usage. Again, this is NOT clearly stated anywhere on Clear’s website. This is all information I’ve gathered from people rallying together on the help forum trying to figure out what is going on.

Anyone who uses Netflix or watches high quality Youtube videos will tell you that 1 movie alone can run you at least 1GB. (HD, or very long movies, TV series, etc will push you way over that line) So pretty much if you watch ONE movie per day, depending on the quality and length, you can end up “managed” (since Clear doesn’t like the term throttled, even though that’s exactly what it is) and have your speed cut down to less than dialup speeds. That doesn’t really go along with what they’re continuing to advertise at all, and people are being misled.

Honestly, the majority of people wanting high speed internet are going to want to stream online content. The fact is, Clear knew back when I joined that people are dumping cable TV in favor of Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and other streaming websites. They sold themselves on the fact that they could provide a good service for people to stream with. Thankfully when I joined last year they actually delivered on their promise. It’s just a shame they’ve gone back on that now. With things as they are, they should change who they’re trying to attract with their ads. If they only want users who watch one video a month and spend the majority of their time emailing and posting on message boards, then they should market themselves accordingly and clearly state what their limits are on data usage and completely drop this “unlimited” business which is currently a complete lie.

Another thing someone mentioned in a thread on the Clear-related forum is that Comcast has a 59.99 plan which clearly states it has a monthly limit of 250GB. Well, I checked my usage statement with Clear and it seems I’ve used about 26GB last month, and I’m nearing about 23GB this month. As you can see, Comcast would be perfect for me considering the fact that with my current usage, I’d be nowhere near the amount they consider throttle-worthy. Sadly, Comcast is not available in my area.

What Clear needs to do is clearly state what their limit is per day/week/month in terms of GB in their advertisements and stop making customers out of people they obviously don’t want as customers anymore.

Man, I wish Verizon FiOS would come to my area. I’m not looking forward to having to go back to Cox. Ahhh, feels good to write all of this out, though!

adventures in tooth excavation pt 2

Today was dental extravaganza #2, this time tackling the left side of my mouth. Bonus feature: I’ve felt sick all weekend, and it isn’t completely gone yet, plus I’ve got sinus drainage! I got back an hour ago, and since the numbness hasn’t worn off yet, I feel up to writing a recap.

The sickness and drainage led to some amazing feats of gagging/choking due to not being able to breathe when my airway clogged up and general stuff like novocaine down my throat and such.

All in all I’d say it went pretty well on the top, no problems there. The metal widener thing was used throughout the whole thing this time, and while it did hurt, it’s amazing how much easier it seems to make things.

The trouble came in when attempting the bottom. See, my jaw apparently is weirdly aligned, so it wasn’t numbing. She went in to numb it from the sides and that was a bit painful but not too bad, but when she went in on the top to numb it, HOLY CATS. I wouldn’t wish the pain I felt in that moment on anyone, anywhere, EVER. Dear readers, I saw a white gnarled tree shape flash before my eyes. I guess that’s what crazy pain looks like, heh.

After numbing it a few more times for good measure, we figured out that the painful jab was the one that sealed the deal and I was finally totally numb. That tooth came out pretty well, except for the last 30 seconds when I couldn’t breathe and we had to pause. (thanks, sinus drainage blocking my airways!)

Once everything was done, she said how lucky she’s felt every time a tooth successfully came out of my mouth. I said “oh no, what am I going to do when I have to have my wisdom teeth pulled?” and she said “oh you don’t have any, I pulled all of them,” to which I replied “what? really? but I thought you have to get that done in the hospital!” and she said nope.

WHAT? Now, at the last procedure appointment, she said the word wisdom in passing, but I thought it was because the ones she was pulling were very close to where my wisdom teeth were coming in. As I type this, I can’t actually believe that she really pulled my wisdom teeth! It seems too good to be true! I guess I just assumed that my wisdom teeth would be too difficult to get so the thought never even crossed my mind. I knew I needed my back teeth out, but yeah, never dawned on me that I got them pulled *that* far back.

Also, I feel like kind of a badass. So many people check in to the hospital and get put under when they have their wisdom teeth pulled, but here I am getting them pulled in an office under local anesthetic. This is all amazing to me since I’m such a weird special case. Crazy!

I hope this is all true and not some weird fluke or something, because not having to worry about my wisdom teeth is an unexpected weight off of my shoulders. Ahhh.

Edit on Sept. 10th, 2010: During my checkup appointment on Sept. 7th, I asked her about my wisdom teeth once more. She confirmed that yes, she had said she wouldn’t be able to pull them during my consultation, but that she had indeed pulled them after all during each of my two surgeries. I’m free of my wisdom teeth! Thank heaven for that lovely surprise.