Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady Review and Other Things

For a while, I did kick around the idea of taking weight loss medication. I always was a little hesitant to take them. My line of thinking was that it was an easy way out to lose weight and seeing some people like Kelly Osbourne take it to the extreme. What if I take this to the extreme and end up looking like I have an eating disorder? The when my doctor had mentioned that I did make strides in weight loss and my health, I probably wasn't going to lose a whole lot more weight with just diet and exercise. With my family history of heart disease and diabetes along with my having PCOS, it was time to talk about weight loss medication. After kicking around that information, researching and talking to others who have been on weight loss medication, I decided to go ahead.

Then I ran into a big snag, Medicaid. You would think that Medicaid would pay for a medication to help me get healthy. Apparently not. I just don't understand how Medicaid would rather pay for the complications of being obese but not a medication to help people get healthy. I want to get healthy. I am tired of my feet and knees hurting, I am tired of being winded and I want to not have diabetes like my grandfather did and eventually his kidneys failed. Even my band aid health insurance through my job won't pay for it. Apparently, I am not the only one in the same boat. Even people who just have private insurance have a difficult time with this. But I will tell you that even Good RX could only get it down to $149 a month. But I would have to pay Good RX for some kind discount and paying $39 per month and then $149 for one medication is excessive. I don't have $149 per month to spend out of pocket. My savings account would only be able to get a little over 6 months. But yet, Medicaid has no issues with paying for bariatric surgery. I just get it, what do I have to do? Start a go fund me for this?

Over Memorial Day weekend, I saw that Frederic Malle had a sample set of 3 for $20. One of those samples is Portrait of a LwrongSo I gave that a whirl towards the end of the week. I did hear that it was one of those more sensual perfumes. I am one of those that will wear vintage Bal a Versailles out of the house and was hoping that it would be along the lines of Bal a Versailles.

Turns out that it was not the case. What I got was something that was pretty much identical to Headspace Rose. The whopping dose of rose was just all sorts of wrong. The rose is like the dreaded "old lady" type of rose. I do smell some kind of crushed stems but it doesn't seem to suit the rose. All I know that Portrait of a Lady hates me and I dislike Portrait of a Lady. I will have to admit that the lasting power is pretty close to the half life of plutonium and the projection has a far reach. So all I got was something that smells dated.
 

Bath Stuff and Bad News

 Well, there has been some pretty bad news on the mom front. The hospital finally got around to doing the tests that they needed to do. The tests have determined that my mother has dementia. I am thinking that it's probably in the moderate stage. Mom hasn't been released yet and at first they were talking on releasing her tomorrow but now they seem to be going for Wednesday. I am just waiting for them to push it back further, so I don't know when she is coming home. At this point, we don't know what kinds of services she needs or anything. I know that my dad wants to keep her home as long as he can. So I think that my father is starting to get a lot of things in order and see what exactly needs to be done. I am not fully sure that we would be able to keep my mother at home for very long. In some ways, I do hope that my sister comes out, even if it is a week, to help us get a few things set up. Mom's dementia could progress slowly or quickly and my mother is about to turn 70 next week, so she is kind of on the young side of all of this. It's just a lot to take in at this point. So I have been trying to clean up the house a little more and use up some candles to try and save my sanity. In the past 2 weeks, I have used up 3 candles.

I know this is a rip off from March's post over at Perfume Posse butI don't often talk about bath stuff but something kind of funny did happen. Some time last year, I had bought the Drunk Elephant Sweet Pitti deoderant and I started to use it about 2 weeks ago when I ran out of my other deoderant. For the first couple days, everything seemed to be fine until about 3 or 4 days ago. I noticed a smell while I was at work. Since I work at a grocery store, sometimes you can get just random bad smells and I didn't think anything of it. Then when I was at work the next day, it was the same thing. Then after I took a shower the next day and put on my deoderant, I realized that smell was me. Well it was the deoderant and I had to take a look at it. The Sweet Pitti doesn't have baking soda or aluminum in it. When one works in the bakery, it can get really hot and humid and that means that I sweat. I don't want to be wafting onions in the bakery. The smell of rising bread and cookies is what most people should be smelling when they enter the bakery. But that doesn't stop me from wearing perfume while I am at work.

It's My Gallbladder

I thought I was making some kind of progress with getting better with my stomach problems but apparently not. I ended up in my local ER Wednesday night instead of the one a half an hour away. I wasn't exactly in the mood to deal with this crap again of waiting for hours after a blood draw to be seen. I managed to be taken back, have a blood draw, urine test and was examined all within 15 minutes. The nurse that was doing the examination had said that it was probably my gallbladder and ordered an ultrasound. The biggest thing is that I was given pain and nausea relief and I wasn't waiting for hours and not have anything done except a blood draw. The ultrasound had confirmed that my gallbladder was the issue. I was given scripts for pain, nausea and directions for a surgical consult. I made that consult before I left the ER. So Monday afternoon, I go for that consultation. The total time that I spent in the ER was probably 3 and a half hours. After complaining for around a year, I am happy to have some answers. My endocrinologist and my regular GP had pretty much decided that keeping an eye on it was the only thing to do.

The hard part is just managing the pain and nausea. Before the medication, I couldn't eat period without vicious amounts of pain that would last for hours. Now I can eat a little more but I am kind of limited and will be limited for a while on what I can and cannot have for a few weeks. It will be a very bland, low fat diet and I am not looking forward to that. But I am looking at a month with less than $75  coming into my bank account per week for about a month and I am seriously not looking forward for that part.

Monday is the day I will know if I am having surgery and what type of surgery. I probably will not be wearing any perfume if I have to go the surgical route but I am debating on wearing either no 19 extrait, no 22 extrait or Iris Silver Mist. I want something that is subtle but with a little bit of backbone. Dabbing make most perfumes more subtle. The only one that might be kind of comforting is no 22. I will have plenty of time later to wear what I want.
 

Northern Lights and Adventures in the ER

For the past year, I have been having stomach issues. At first, I thought it was initially because I am 40 and a good chunk of it happened before my time of the month so I wasn't too worried until the 10th.

October 9th is when I started to have some stomach troubles and didn't really think much of it at first. But after dinner, I started to have more issues and went to the ER shortly before 4 in the morning on the 10th. At first, I was taken back pretty quickly and the nurse did a blood draw, urine test, put an IV in and sent me back into the waiting room. Mind you, this is 4 in the morning and there were 2 other people and I thought that the wait wasn't going to be take too long to be seen by a doctor. Well, I was freaking wrong. I waited hours without being seen by a doctor. I went to see what exactly was going on and I was given the response of I was next in the in line but no time estimate on when I was going to be seen. At this point, I was starting to get kind of riled. I had been in the waiting room for a little over 4 hours at this point with no health professional checking to see if my pain levels were worse, same or lessened. This is an uncivilized hour on a Thursday morning with 1 or 2 other people in the waiting room. I think that one of them might have been homeless and just wanted a warm place to sleep for the night. My boss had said that there might have been more important patients to attend to than a stomach ache. But my retort was that it could be something incredibly serious like a ruptured gallbladder. I decided to say screw it and have them take my IV out and leave. I was feeling a bit better but my GI system still feels yucky. My only directions were that I make a follow up with my regular doctor. I am still pretty pissed. It's almost like I was being treated like I was drug seeking or I just wasn't important enough to be seen. I have already made a complaint with the patient advocate because I should not be waiting over 4 hours in a level 2 trauma center that was at a slow point patient wise. What if it is still serious? What if I can't wait until next week when my GP appointment is?

I was finally able to see the aurora borealis later on that day. I wasn't expecting much since I wasn't able to see them the last time they came to my neck of the woods in Ohio. This time, there was a mention of using a cellphone camera to capture it and that is what I did this time around. And this time, I managed to get a few pictures. They might not be as good as a professional photographer but I am going to post a few down below as well. The one up top is probable one of the best pictures that I took of the whole thing.