On Our Way

I am writing tonight from the home of good friends of ours in Maryland. The kids are all sound asleep (finally!) and I have a moment to write a brief update.

The movers were swift and efficient on Monday. Although, what took them 7 hours to load would have taken us days, so we were incredibly thankful for their service! After the weeks of intense packing, it was a needed luxury to hire professional movers. They loaded the last items by 7:30 PM, and we hopped in our car behind them to stay at Jon's parents' house for the night, where the children were already, having a blast. As predicted, I took my last Biaxin pill on Monday, but was not 100% better.

Yesterday was a cleaning day, and it was an all-day affair. By afternoon, the house was in good shape but my body was giving me signs that I still had not cleared the infection completely. No more achiness or fatigue (if you can even sense fatigue when you are working as hard as I was for several days straight, I am not sure), but still complete congestion in my right nostril. Zero air flow. Slightly better in the left, but overall stuffy, and certainly not the healthy type of evidence you would expect when blowing your nose. So, I called my ENT's office during the day and was told to leave a message. I received a call at 6 PM from a nurse who said he would call first thing in the morning. I informed her that we were planning to pull away at 9 AM, but there was no call by 9:30, and when I called his office, they could not tell me when he would be able to get back to me, since he was in with patience. I completely understand that, but it was so tough that it came down to the last minute, and it is difficult to get a quick response in this type of situation. Because I did not want to leave the state with no instructions or new prescription, I ended up making a last-minute appointment at my primary care doctor's office (thankfully it was within 30 minutes of my call), leaving everyone waiting at the house with the car all packed.

An hour later, I had a script for a different antibiotic (Augmentin) for 10 days and a week course of Prednisone (the steroid). My family doctor was really great about it and listened to my full story (I see different doctors there, and since I started seeing an ENT almost exclusively more than 3 years ago, none of them really follow my status). Everything that he questioned me about has already been explored, which confirmed to us that, as we believed we had, we have truly exhausted all of the typical avenues for this illness, to no avail. My perfectly healthy post-surgery sinuses must have been exposed to some irritant or trigger. The mystery is finding out just what that is, and this move is just one piece of that puzzle, a rule-out if you will. A big one, granted, but one that makes sense to make after we have already ruled out everything else that we could control for in our current environment.

So here we are, Day 1 of our 8 days-on-the-road moving adventure (or Day 3 of 10 if we count Monday with the emptying of our house, since we haven't slept there since Sunday night). The expected arrival of our belongings on the moving van is exactly one day today, possibly a day sooner. So, tomorrow we head out of here to the home of another wonderful family in North Carolina, where we will stay for a few days so the kids can catch up, we can relax, and to avoid the holiday traffic on key days this weekend. After that there will be one night with my mom in South Carolina, and then the long 8 hour haul across Florida, where we will be spending the Fourth of July this year in a hotel. We hope to see fireworks over the nearby Cape Coral bridge. What a way to begin our life in this new town!