Odds & ends: The aches & pains edition ;)

• American Thanksgiving is always kind of an odd day to be online, when you're a Canadian and already had your turkey and pumpkin pie and declarations of gratitude a month & a half ago. I kept refreshing my tab pages yesterday for new Facebook and message board & blog posts that never popped up, people south of the border being otherwise occupied with food, family & football. ;)  It suppose it's a little how non-Christians might feel on Christmas Day. ;)  
• I banged my head on Wednesday afternoon -- I bent over to pick something up as we were going into a store -- and brought my head up on the handle of an automatic door that was closing.  OW.  
• I'm feeling a lot better today, although it still aches now & then.  
• Besides an ice pack and ibuprofen when we got home, I decided to try the Peppermint Halo essential oils roller by Saje, which is supposed to work miracles on headaches.  I don't know if it really helped, or if the minty tingling just distracted me (lol), but it did feel good & smell nice. 
• This is not the first time this has happened to me (although it's far from the worst):  
• (1) The first time I remember being hit in the head was by a neighbourhood kid with a baseball bat (accidentally) when I was about 6 or 7.  I remember crying and going home -- but kids are resilient, and hey, I was walking and talking, so I guess I was fine. 
• (2) The second time was when I was 18 & the car I was in -- being driven by my friend's dad -- was rear-ended, giving both her & me whiplash, and I banged the back of my head against the edge of the backseat/on the back window ledge of the car. I suppose we should have gone to the hospital to get checked out, but we were en route (and already late) to the closing ceremonies of the Canada Winter Games -- and, being young and foolish, we didn't want to miss it, so my friend & I hailed a cab while her parents stayed with the car to sort things out with the other driver & with the police. I remember my head hurt so bad that night I wondered whether I was going to wake up in the morning. (Spoiler alert: it's almost 40 years later. I did.)  
• (3) 13 years ago, almost exactly at this time of year, I was vacuuming the bathroom in the basement of our house. I was bent over to get into the corners behind the toilet, brought my head up & cracked it hard on the knobby end of the towel rack. I watched the Grey Cup (Canadian Football League championship game -- this year's is on the this weekend) that afternoon with an ice pack pressed to my head. It ached for days afterward. 
• (4) 10 years ago, dh had one of those "club" things that locks onto the steering wheel of the car to deter theft. He was taking it off & swinging it around to drop into the back seat of the car -- at the same moment that I happened to lean over in that direction. CLUNK. At first, I didn't think it was that bad, but within a few minutes, I realized it hurt. A lot. I probably should have had dh take me to the hospital to get checked out -- and I did get checked out by our family dr a few days later when the aching still hadn't subsided. He was a former professional baseball player, and he didn't seem too concerned. Nevertheless, it was months before that achy feeling disappeared.  (That was the worst.) 
• Today, we know a whole lot more about concussions and their lingering effects. I'm not an athlete, and I know people who have had far worse concussions. But I also know that the effect can be cumulative and effects can still show up years later, which does worry me sometimes. :(  
• Between my allergy to tomatos and my gallstone issues, it's getting increasingly hard to find stuff that's "safe" for me to eat, especially when we eat out.  I think that, in the new year, I am going to have to bite the bullet & (a) investigate having my gallbladder removed and (b) get another referral to my allergist & do an oral challenge test. 
• It's been almost 10 (!!) years since I started having issues with eating tomatos & tomato products (ketchup, salsa, tomato sauce, etc.). I last saw my allergist not quite two years ago, and had some scratch tests and bloodwork done that (promisingly) showed little reaction to tomato. The next step was probably to do an oral challenge (i.e., slowly eat a tomato in increasing-sized portions in her office while being monitored for any reaction), to determine whether I'm still tomato-sensitive (I did one about five years ago and, encouragingly, I managed to eat almost an entire tomato before a hive popped up) -- but that was right around the time we moved, and I never did follow up.  
• I'm just a little leery about having my gallbladder out, because (a) I've never had surgery of any kind before (unless you count having my wisdom teeth out?) and (b) my great-grandmother died of complications after gallbladder surgery when she was just 44 years old. Granted, that was in 1928 and in a small, rural hospital -- I think medicine has probably come a long way since then. Plus she had NINE CHILDREN to look after (the oldest was 26 & the youngest was 11 -- my grandfather, somewhere in the middle, was 16), plus her husband, two hired men and a farmhouse. No running water or modern conveniences in those days, either. As my mother sometimes says, no wonder she died young...!
• I recently bought a pair of Skechers shoes after hearing rave reviews from several people, including both SIL & dh.  They make all kinds of running shoes, etc.  The ones I got are slip-on canvas walking shoes. OMG... So. Comfortable!!  My feet are nowhere near as sore & tired now when we come home from walking around a mall (on those hard concrete/tile floors) for a few hours. They even have wide widths, which is a must for me. :)