Monday, July 10, 2006

Sweetie

I feel like the latest Kennedy congressman/addict with this one--

I was unaware of what I was doing till it was too late.

This was a cinch to knit, and fun, despite being mindless stockinette. I suppose the beads helped mitigate the monotony.

Pattern: Beaded Sweater, from Vintage Knits by Sarah Dallas with Yesterknits
Yarn: Bernat Softee Baby, less than 2 balls, pink
Beads: Czech glass from Hobby Lobby, purple
Needles: US 3 and 4 circulars for the body, straights for the arms
Modifications: Minimal swatching here. It's rather comical, my swatching. I cast on the body for the smallest size and quickly saw I would have to decrease through the waist. I adjusted the number of stitches from there on. Only one row of increases through the bust, a total of 4 stitches. I like my tops to be form-fitting. The drawback to this is that it may end up too small. The benefits is that I use less yarn! Again, I'd make this one about an inch or two longer. I'd definitely knit this one again!

Apologies for the blurry pics. I don't have someone readily available to take pics for me.

In other news, it seems my nickname is coming full circle. I was given this moniker by an uncle, because all my teeth came in before I was one (lots of teeth, sharks, jaws, get it???). Now, though, it is looking like I will be having surgery on my jaw (maxillo-mandibular advancement surgery). Apparently, after three sleep studies and a multiple sleep latency test, trying steroids, getting a CT of my head and undergoing a minor ENT procedure, the issue at hand is that I have a relatively under-developed or under-advanced jaw (retrognathia) which falls back even more when I sleep, causing me to have low oxygen levels all night, which leads to literally hundreds of nighttime awakenings (no, this is not sleep apnea, I don't stop breathing, I just wake up a lot). The next step in the workup is to see the oral and maxillofacial surgeons (OMFS), which I did, and they want to operate. They want to advance my upper jaw (maxilla) by 1 cm and mandible by 1.3 cm. This, as you can imagine, is a fairly major operation and will require having my jaw wired shut for about 3 weeks. E-medicine has a good article on this, complete with a step-by-step list of intraoperative procedures.

I'm getting a 3rd opinion on this in a couple of weeks. My doc said the only other places in the country that would have more expertise would be Stanford or Mayo Clinic. So off to Mayo we go. Which is rather odd, because I interviewed there for my general surgery residency, and now I'm going back as a patient.

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