Jet Blue, Get a Clue

Thank God, this is not my story. We in the Northeast are in the midst of a winter snow-and-ice storm that has netted over 1,000 auto accidents on Northern New Jersey streets today and stopped airplanes in the New York City area's three airports (JFK, LaGuardia, Newark). I had to go into the city today -- that's Manhattan -- and that was grim enough. I took little tiny steps on the superslick sidewalks, leaning forward to move my center of gravity to decrease my chances of falling. I hung on to the rail for dear life when I was descending the steps down into the subway. I made it back home in one piece, and my Nissan Altima is now safely and warmly tucked into my garage for the night. And I'm warm and dry and grateful.

On the 11:00 p.m. news tonight, they ran a story about passengers of a Jet Blue plane sitting on the tarmac today for 11 hours. People were cursing and yelling and sobbing, passengers reported. They had no food or water for several hours, reportedly up to six hours, supposedly, the airline says, so they could be ready to take off when the weather cleared.

Understandably, the passengers who talked to the news station were upset. Some didn't care that they got an apology from the airline (in a statement they issued) plus their money back plus a free trip anywhere Jet Blue flies. One guy who was interviewed said he never wanted to be in another Jet Blue plane again. No kidding! I'm not signing up for a Jet Blue flight in the foreseeable future either.

What the heck was Jet Blue thinking???? This is the kind of incident that gets Congress to pass an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights. It's the kind of incident that makes me wonder how the pilot resopnded when the flight attendants told him (or her) how bonkers the passengers were getting. One American Airlines pilot in January under similar circumstances had had enough after an unthinkable nine hours on the tarmac and defied official orders and pulled the plane back into an empty gate. No doubt he got chastised if not punished and penalized, but in truth he should get a medal.

I fly a lot and have been delayed for weather problems, traffic problems, mechanical problems and crew problems, sometimes for as long as two or three hours. That was torment enough even when drinks and pretzels were handed out, movies shown and permission granted to use cell phones. We were comfortable. Water was plentiful, the toilets worked and everyone was calm and cooperative. But after even four hours, I think people would be relatively nutsy and I can't even imagine 11 hours in those circumstances.

By and large, philosophically I'm a libertarian -- meaning that I advocate as little government interference and legislation as possible. Live and let live. But...the airlines shouldn't be allowed to make people sit in an airplane at an airport longer than maybe four hours without being made to let passengers off to get food, stay off the plane if they want to and just get sane again. And while they're doing that, they should service the plane to ensure that people can be comfortable on it. How inhumane it is to treat people the way airlines treat them on a good day -- with their narrow little seats that maybe half of the butts on the plane comfortably fit into, and their stingy leg room, and their inconsideration of people's needs and schedules -- let alone on a day when they make their so-called valuable customers sit on a plane on the tarmac for that many hours.

Jet Blue, get a clue. Congress, for God's sake, pass a law. If any one of those Senators or Congresspersons had been on that plane today, you can bet there'd be a law introduced within a week. As well there should be.

Miracle in My Mouth, Until...

One of my great medical gifts came a few years ago when a Michigan dentist I met online told me that a drop of Fluocinonide gel (0.05%) dabbed on a fledgling canker sore would get rid of it by the next day. I absolutely didn't believe him.

Those nasty little devils last for days, usually well over a week, sometimes nearly two. They get sore like a Bell curve so that if you get one on a Sunday, by Wednesday you don't want to eat anything that has any acid in it whatsoever, or anything at all, really, before they gradually ease off. Painful, cruel little mouth ulcers, they are.

I'd suffered from frequent multiple canker sores since childhood, at times as many as half a dozen at a time scattered throughout my mouth on my cheek walls, down where my lower gums met my inside lower lips, and even creeping toward the outer part of my lips that shows. Not like a cold sore -- cold sores can be "shared" with other people, whereas canker sores are not contagious, if that's the right word. But sore as hell. Anyone who's had them, especially frequently, knows how disruptive they can be to eating, talking, sleeping and just sitting. They pack a lot of pain into a couple of square millimeters.

Getting a doctor to prescribe the Fluocinonide for me was a challenge. It's approved for topical use only and inside the mouth isn't considered topical. But I convinced my local dentist at the time to let me try it.

Bliss!

It really sends those little nasties back from whence they came. If you put a little drop on the sore just as it's developing, and if you do it a few times a day, by the next morning it is really, truly gone. As if it never tried to exist. A miracle! (If you wait too long, until the canker sore has developed to be bigger than a pin prick, it's too late and it grows nearly as big and lasts nearly as long as usual. And don't get anything but the gel. The other forms just won't work the same and they taste medicinal, unlike the gel.)

That was a decade ago and I've made sure I don't run out of the miracle gel ever since. It takes me nearly a year to go through a 15g tube. The tubes as they are handled and jostled around in my purse tend to leak and I lose some from each tube. So I don't ingest enough for the steroids in it to do anything bad to me. At least as far as I know.

It hasn't been easy. I have had to argue with several doctors over the years to get them to prescribe it. "That's not what it's supposed to be for," they tell me. But I'm passionate about it, insistent that they trust me and give me that relief, and if they don't, I switch doctors. Any doctor who doesn't trust a person who knows their own body isn't worth keeping.

My canker sores tend to come in waves. Several will pop up one or two at a time for several weeks and then I'll be free of them for a month or two or more. I always have my handy gel with me to nip the little suckers in the bud so they don't blossom into anything. I'm so grateful for the Fluocinonide gel. It's eliminated an ongoing discomfort and helped my love life. (If I have to explain that, go read another blog.)

So...when my bleach for teeth made my mouth sore (see my previous blog entry, "The Price of Vanity") , much like it did when I first got braces in 9th grade, I turned to my old friend Fluocinonide.

Big mistake!

Apparently the bleaching gel and the steroid gel don't get along. They fought like siblings in my mouth, unbeknownst to me, and kept the fisticuffs up until my whole lower face was swollen like I've never experienced. I almost never react badly to drugs so I was thrown for a loop. I blamed the bleaching gel, or rather my ineptitude at keeping it within its little tray prison while in my mouth. But last night as the swelling was finally measurably subsiding, my mouth and lips were feeling a little raw so I put a light coating of Fluocinonide gel between my gums and my lips and even a little on my lips themselves. When I woke up at 4:00 a.m., I felt puffy-swollen again, even without the bleaching gel. I staggered to the mirror and was chagrined to see myself swelled up like I had balloons in my cheeks and neck and collagen-run-wild in my lips. Uuuuuuug-leeeeee!

That's when I got it. It wasn't either one of the gels that was the culprit, it was their chemical reaction when encountering each other.

So...I'm drinking a LOT of water today and now, mid-day, I look closer to my old self again. My jawline still looks a bit like a squirrel's but my top lip isn't fat-lip size anymore, which is a relief. When something like this happens, the fear is that it's not just simple swelling but that I'd permanently disfigured myself. I know, catastrophizing isn't productive, but those thoughts do charge through the mental gates of reason once in awhile.

No more gels of any kind for me for awhile. And no more medical tales here for awhile. That's what consumes a lot of people when they get old(er) and I'd hate for you to think that I'm in that category. Ahem.

The Price of Vanity

As I sit at my kitchen table this morning, I am swollen up like a cartoon character. Lips, cheeks, neck. Ugh! (See today's frightening photo on the right vs. how I normally look on the left.)

It all started when I realized that I had $1,200 left in my flexible spending account (FSA), the pretax money I'd had deducted from my paychecks in 2006 to pay medical expenses. A quick call to WageWorks let me know that I have until March to spend it.

What to do with it, what to do? So many things I could do: Get that pesky, ugly, jagged-edged mole removed (though nearly nobody sees it where it is, anyway). Submit myself to a luxury test, one of those full-body MRI-type things that's supposed to find every little thing that is going on in your body. Start psycho-therapy -- now there's an idea! Or...how about getting my teeth whitened? Yeah, that's it!

Teeth whitening is absurdly popular right now. The gradual yellowing of my teeth has bothered me and when some of my colleagues got their smile brightened, I saw that it made a difference; they looked younger and more alive.

So off I went to my beloved dentist, Dr. Ron Buro in Washington, D.C. I live in the New York City area, but I'll go to him no matter where I live. He rescued my teeth and gums from the damage my New York City heaped on me a decade ago and I've been fiercely loyal ever since.

And he reciprocates. Their office (1901 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20006,
202-466-3599) isn't open on Fridays but one week I was coming down only on a Friday for a business-related event and he agreed to come in to see me. That was impressive enough but when he was cleaning my teeth (himself!), a couple of other dentists wandered by and congratulated him. I asked what the occasion was. "I'm getting married later today," he told me nonchalantly. What?!?!? I expressed my shock and delight and he said, "Well, you come all the way to see me from New York -- it's the least I can do." How can you not be loyal to a guy like that?

Recently I saw his partner, Dr. Alan Marx, and I related that story to him. He said, "When you've been married as many times as he and I have, it's just another day." Har de har.

(In this picture, Dr. Buro is on the right, Dr. Marx is in the back, and Dr. Robert Caldwell, whom I don't know, is on the left. I got this pic from Dr. Marx's Web site. )

A rather grueling in-office treatment consisted of them putting some kind of bleaching formula on my teeth with my lips pulled away for four 20-minute segments of exposing them to a bright light. When Dr. Marx asked how I was doing, I said it's pretty uncomfortable. "It's the dentist!" he jokingly barked unsympathetically. Cracked me up.

Then they made a mold of my teeth -- fortunately, I don't have a bad gagging reflex -- and I got two little soft plastic "trays" that fit my upper and lower teeth a couple of weeks later, along with a less-intense treatment sans light. I took the trays home and tried to follow instructions for nighttime treatment for the next two weeks: Push a little dot of the gel (through the syringe it comes in) into each little tooth area in the trays, fit the mold to the teeth and immediately retire for the night. They don't want saliva to dilute the gel and they don't want the trays to move to secrete the gel.

Well, I'm an insomniac and rarely get more than three or four hours of sleep in a row before waking up. The first night went okay. Not too uncomfortable. The next morning, however, my mouth, especially my upper lip, was a bit swollen. I looked a bit like I had a fat lip. It took a few hours to get back to normal. Okay, use less gel, the instructions say, if you have any trouble.

The second and third nights went okay too but my lips were a little puffy then too. Looked like I'd had collagen injections, not all bad on my thin lips, but made it tough to talk. And I didn't look quite right. (No comments from the peanut gallery, please.) I think each morning I was progressively a little more swollen. But I liked how my teeth were looking and the instructions were to do this every night for two weeks and then to go back for one more in-office treatment.

I wanted the best result, but I was getting concerned about this swelling. So yesterday, Friday, when their office was closed. I called and was given Dr. Marx's cell phone number -- he was the dentist on call. His cell phone number is also printed on his business card. More doctors and dentists should do that instead of hiding as they do during non-business hours. (A whole separate subject that I could rail on about for hours -- I had a terrible experience with that on a weekend with my mom's doctor. I started a blog item on it but figured I'd get sued for libel, despite the fact that truth is a defense for libel.)

I didn't get home from an appointment until late evening last night, and I didn't check my phone messages (duh!) so I just plodded on with my gel-in-trays treatment. I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and realized that I was puffed up more than usual. I took the trays out and discovered a phone message that Dr. Marx had left about an hour after I'd left a message for him. He said to call him back and meanwhile to stop the treatments.

Too late.

I put some ice on my mouth, hoping to calm down the swelling. And after a few minutes of that, I went back to bed.

Imagine my displeasure when I woke up at 7:00 looking a lot worse than the picture on this page shows. I felt seriously disfigured. Major-league ugly. Interestingly, my first thought was that there are people I see every day who look like that. That's the way they look every day. So if I were to go to the grocery story, which I need to do today, probably nobody would think much of it. I don't know much of anybody in my little town so I am not worried about that. In another hour or so, I'll venture out. Otherwise, I'll be eating the dust bunnies off of the floor -- I am pretty well out of food!

I called Dr. Marx again and he reiterated his instructions to stop the treatment until I see him or Dr. Buro in another week and a half. Use warm salt water and that should calm things down, he said. If really uncomfortable, take a Benadryl.

In just the few hours since I've been up, the swelling has gone down quite a bit. I hope to be back to my old thin-lipped self by tomorrow. And I won't use the stuff tonight. He said he can give me some gel that's not quite so strong, but my vanity wants the stuff that'll give me the best result, the brightest, whitest smile I can get.

The main thing he said is that I must be using too much gel. It shouldn't seep out. Okay, okay. Maybe I'll try it again, with just a tiny dot in each tooth area in the trays, in a couple of nights.... Yes, I'm that vain.

Stay tuned. I'll let you know how it all turns out.