As uneventful as yesterday was, today was a beaut. I woke up ready for a day of kayaking and teaching the dog to swim in the water. But as I sat up it felt like my ear was wet. Well it was but not with water but blood. My whole right ear was covered in blood and so was my pillow. Now it wasn’t gushing blood but it was red blood coming out of my ear and there was still red blood after I washed it out. So instead of kayaking, we spent the morning looking for and going to the urgent care in St. George, Utah. I looked up Urgent Cares online and found one that had pretty good ratings. Now I know it seems silly to look at ratings for an urgent care but having worked in the medical field you know that these ratings do mean something. This particular urgent care was operated by 2 nurse practitioners. And they were awesome. The first came in to look in my ear and said she saw that it wasn’t normal but couldn’t really see what was going on. So she had her associate come in. He looked and thought my eardrum could be pulling away from the side of my ear canal. Bottom line was that I needed to see an ENT to determine what was going on. They and their staff worked really hard and were able to get me an appt for that afternoon. I didn’t really have any more blood coming out of my ear but since we were heading for the Rockies, I didn’t want to do that with a perforated eardrum so I made the appt with the ENT. The urgent care didn’t even charge me for the visit because they said they didn’t really do anything. I disagreed but it was not my call.

Since my appt was not until 2 we went back to camp and Keith made me breakfast. It was french toast and it was really good. He was so sweet. I wanted to go kayaking but didn’t want to risk any water in my ear if my eardrum was perforated. So Joey and I just went for a walk and I let her splash a bunch in the water. She loved it so much. We went back to ST. George for the Dr. appt at 2. They were very very prompt calling me back at 2:05. Given that they had to squeeze me in that was awesome. The Dr. looked in my ear and didn’t say much. He said he needed to look at it with the microscope so after suctioning out all the dried blood and stuff he say that I had a cut in my ear canal. Now how that happened I have no idea. He said the eardrum was intact and the the ear canal is very vascular so that’s why all the blood. It made sense. We went back to camp feeling so much better.

It was still early enough so as soon as we got back we put the kayak (and the dog) in the water. It was amazing.  The water was smooth with very little wave but there were a fair number of boats and jet skis on the lake so there was a fair amount of wake. I stayed in the no wake zone because of that. I felt so free paddling along just me and the kayak. I looked back at shore and saw that Joey was having just as good a time as I was. I went back to shore to say hi and tried to coax her into the boat. She looked like she wanted to so bad but she couldn’t bring herself to get in. So she just followed me out as far as she could go and i continued to kayak along.

After an hour, the wind picked up and the waves came in. I was getting tired anyway from my “traumatic day” so I had Keith meet me at the boat ramp and we put the kayak in. But I really had fun. So did Joey.  She so wet!!! We had brats with mac and cheese (a staple) and carrots for dinner and took another walk down to the lake with Joey. She really loves the water. Then it was time to pack it in for the night. Travel day again tomorrow.

Bloody Day 30

 

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