Category: Health

so sad for Buster

The cone doesn’t actually come off until tomorrow morning. After the cone shenanigans when he was neutered, Jeff with my cooperation is being a stickler for following the vet’s instructions. Sutures are out at least so he’ll be less itchy. He healed like a total champ.

Here’s an interesting article about Indigenous accomplishments in Australia, dating all the way back to the dreamtime.

I’m helping look after Ryker tomorrow.

I won’t talk about it in public, but I did something very stupid yesterday and made myself barf again. Jeff knows about it.

Booked a mammogram for August. Still have not been able to get hold of the doctor’s office but hopefully they’re open today.

so happy for Buster

Today’s the day! CONE COMES OFF, STITCHES OUT. … also today I phone the doc’s office and ask why the fuck she didn’t email me my requisition which she said she would do on the phone during our last appointment.

Three months of rent cheques off to the landpeer this am.

Feeling pretty good, except my nose is running. The grass pollen is insanely high.

Still plugging away at TB (65K words and NO SIGN OF WRAPPING UP) and Handyman Special (12902 words DITTO)

while I was helping Paul pack

I took sick and vomited up everything I’d eaten or drunk since that mango. I mean, I’ve been feeling punk but this is tiresome (and thank god my meds have cleared). Having gotten rid of my burden, I cleaned up after myself (I didn’t make it to the toilet, although I did make it to the bathroom) and went home. Alex was there because he was under the weather. The puke itself was spectacularly multicoloured – white for the egg, orange for the carrots, brown for the mushrooms, red for the tomatoes, and as soon as I made the mistake of saying that Alex insisted on viewing it and b’lieve me, he was taken aback.

I think I’m going to drink some water and run a bath, I feel really cold. Okay my appetite came back and I just ate an enormous bowl of pho and it stayed down. I threw out all the veg I laboriously prepped this morning, just to be sure.

Ryker was so great. He’s exactly the same amount of busy when he’s in a good mood but it’s way more fun.

My doppelgänger says hi!

pollen so bad

My eyes are not actually dry but they are very gummy. My nasopharyngeal parts are gummy too. I’m not coughing but my chest feels tight. (AQI good pollen counts moderate)

Tried Fatburger yesterday. White Spot is superior in virtually all ways, and not that much more expensive.

I miss my grandsons. Spoke to Keith yesterday. No word on whether Janice has left.

Watched John Wick Chapter 4. The clunkiness of the script poses a bit of a challenge but the fight scenes were exactly the way I like them and Donnie Yen was fucking perfect as always. (I mean how do you get typecast as a blind martial artist??? by being fucking good at it.) IT’S A COMMITMENT it’s like 3 hours long. All action movies should be ninety minutes or so. It is a law. Unobserved, sadly.

I am continuing to practice la la la on the ukulele. My brain appears to work okay today.

I am continuing to wrestle with edits on TB. The last pass was to make sure that every word of every line of dialogue in the first part is a) to the education level b) in character c) germane d) unmagical (ie there is a plausible way the character could know it to say it). I suppose editing dialogue without cementing the plot bunnies in place is useless & pointless (deck chairs, Titanic, Augean stables, etc.) but still I endeavour to persevere in the worst way possible – which was standing up in a hammock last time I checked.

Elon Musk is going to turn Ron DeKrampus loose on twitter in an effort to help him get elected.

I don’t get these people, but I guess I don’t have to.

For the first time, Russian nationals fighting for Ukraine have made incursions and captured enemy weapons and tanks inside the Russian border. What impact that will have to escalate the war is anyone’s guess.

 

 

Oppressive sky

brown to the horizon – supposed to lift tomorrow.

We tried to go for a brief walk and it was like holding your breath and trying to swim. For me, chest and head pain, which lightened but did not vanish when I got home.

Practiced and worked the Kaossilator for a while. Setting 75 continues to provide more mindless entertainment than you can imagine. Practiced Smokey, Otto, and Rowena. I have finally decided I’m going to call my most recent gifted uke Mahu (goldingit the diacritics don’t appear properly) (the word’s literally ‘in the middle’ which is the Hawaiian term for gay and gender non-conforming people). Appropriately I will call the first ukulele Kameamua which means ‘the first one’.

Still laughing to myself about singing Que Sera sera last night. I don’t know why I think it’s funny but –don’t I deserve to laugh.

errands

Accompanied Paul for a meal and errands yesterday. It was a beautiful day again and I kept my temper for most of it, but learning that he had received a new bank card and just thrown out the last one without calling the number and getting it authorized meant that we now had another errand, meaning going to the bank and stooging around for half an hour while the world’s most patient bank clerk dealt with Paul not being able to enter the same pin number twice running and not being able to remember his own home phone number that he’s had since 1996 and laughing about it. Then we learned his credit cards were buggered up too, and the clerk squared what he could away. Two children from a five child family screamed and moaned right next to us the entire time this was going on, just to give you the true, “If it’s Thursday this must be the third level of hell” feel to the occasion. Anyway, I paid for the banker boxes he bought and he paid me back at the bank.

I got him lunch at Nando’s at Market Crossing and realized that Paul is having more and more and more trouble handling food and I should have gotten him something less knife and fork to eat. The meal took almost an hour and he had a beer too. I was shrugging it off so I asked him to sit in the car while I got more babby plant pots and some embroidery hoops while I poked my head into Michaels.

While we were picking up banker boxes, something funny happened. We miss Jim, of course we do, and in Paul’s case the missing him comes out in song; it was Jim who told us about Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers and gave us our first few cassette tapes, which we listened to constantly. One of them, a traditional song, is called Sarah, and has the following chorus:

Sarah, Sarah won’t you come out tonight,
Sarah, Sarah the moon is shining bright,
Put your hat and jacket on, tell your mother you won’t be long,
And I’ll be waiting for you round the corner

Except that when Paul sang it, it came out, “The moon is brining shite,” at which point I laughed helplessly for about a minute.

BRAINz working okay today, tiny amount of writing, but the real big cognitive news is that I got eight hours of sleep.

Medical advancements

Imagine going in a panic half an hour early to your eye doc appointment because you’re not sure which suite it’s in. Imagine getting on the elevator and there’s a sign.

The eye doctors are on the second floor.

The optometric clinic is on the seventh floor.

AWESOME, I know it’s a specialist so I go to the second floor. I’m greeted by someone who examines my services card closely and then tells me to sit down. Within about two minutes (it’s still 20 minutes at least before the appointment time) I’m getting pictures taken of my eyes. I sit down and just as I pull out my pen to write a poem about how people in health care settings don’t wear fucking masks (all the staff were masked thanks), my name gets called again and I get a basic eye test and hand over the list of medications they asked me to prepare WHICH I HAD ON ME because I have a care sheet on Google docs, and then I barely sit down and have to get up again when they call my name to freeze my eye and bounce a pencap off it a couple of times (what it sort of felt like) and then the dreaded drops, which have by no means worn off. Then I get stuck in another room while the doc, a Desi woman in her late forties, takes a good long look inside my eyes. She is happy with the results and says my eyes are about as good as they can be for my age, to watch my sugars, and to expect my eyes to change from day to day with my sugars. She told me to use hot compresses and to clean my eyelids more thoroughly and suggested eye drops.

Got there by cab, walked from the Professional building to the cab stand at 6th and 6th (was thinking longingly of having a coffee and croissant at Waves, but oh well, why should I clog some poor bastard’s toilet) and then went home by cab as well.

The medical advancements I’m twittering about were the fact that everything ran like a machine, I got good and thorough care, and everybody patient-facing was masked, polite, competent and efficient. I JUST AIN’T SEED NUTHIN LIKE IT BOYS SINCE BEFORE THE PANINI!! (internet speak for ‘the pandemic)

TL;DR my eyes are fine, that eye doc practice runs like clockwork.

 

discussion of diseases

Morgellon’s, today… my response to a post

 

As someone with both the mental health and the physical promptings to end up a victim of this disease, let me tell you that there are three things that feed into this ailment:
You have to already be an anxious person, which is an easy problem to have.
You have to have sensations of insects crawling or digging in your skin, in particular locations, repetitively, which is easy to have if you’re working on diabetes or nervous system problems. One can also get it psychogenically.
You have to have little benign growths of the skin which when you pick at them seem to have filaments in them. They’re most likely keratoses of some kind.
Your anxiety makes you want to find a cause for the ‘formication’ (tactile hallucinations of insects crawling on you.) Then you start ‘really digging’ and you now are anxiously trying to get rid of your ‘bugs’.
When I’m lying in bed at night, feeling like I’m covered with crawling, biting insects, I remind myself that it isn’t real – it’s an artefact of my aging nervous system. Sometimes there’s a real insect in my bed, but they move – the places that my nervous system says I’m being bitten or crawled on DO NOT.
Please have sympathy for people with this ailment. It’s a bear to treat and it’s horrible to live with…. I have most of the symptoms but I don’t have the disease because I know I don’t have bugs.

 

 

Paul got eight bags of clothes out the door yesterday in preparation for packing. I am so proud of him I could explode. He still accused me of taking away his drivers licence and I didn’t get angry. I just walked him through what happened again and told him that he was doing the right thing.

You don’t stop loving people when they change – some people say you shouldn’t but that’s not right either. I’m having to change my behaviour and that’s okay, my parents modelled it for me. I know I’ll get downcast, upset, frustrated, sad. The work doesn’t care. And I wrote 850 words yesterday and it was glorious, and set like a pearl in the rest of my day.

a little Easter humour

An image of Jesus has been applied to a clock; his beard is almost touching the 'IV' The caption is JESUS CHRIST WILL YOU LOOK AT THE TIME

Lou-ann Neel cross posted this on facebook.

Also I learned how to say ‘stupid person’ in an Indigenous language from across the Salish Sea and it’s a simply lovely word…..

Three top five scores in Lumosity. Time to roast almonds. I may walk over to the Rona for the silverfish killer if it stays so pleasant.

SO MUCH RUNNINESS. I think the forsythia are blooming, but this is what we’re sneezing over today:

High:
Aspen, Poplar
High:
Cedar, Juniper, etc.
Moderate:
Alder

pleasant times

Lovely indoor walk with Paul yesterday at Lougheed. He seems very beaten down and oppressed by his illness but cheered up for the walk. It always cheers folks up to eat, so we got some lo mai gai, which was particularly fine in comparison with previous outings, and there was a lone har gaw in there because they were out of enough lo mai gai to fulfil my order, and the hot and sour soup was as good as I ever remember it being there. We went to Cobb’s but I didn’t buy treats, just spongy crusty white bread which is my kryptonite for stuff I’m s’posed to lay off for my liver.

Continue reading pleasant times

sunshine

Got a couple of turns around the park in yesterday.

Suzanne came, cleaned and departed. We had the back door wide open most of the time she was here and it really felt wonderful, a ginyouwine spring clean. Should have seen Suzanne’s face when I told her that Daxus and I had had an adult conversation about something of import to both of us. (And that I ran away with my tail between my legs, yes I did, but it’s all good.)

Still feel empty and irritable but nothing like earlier this week. Jeff has news on the client front that I’ll let him share when he’s ready.

We’re rewatching Zone Blanche and my very parasocial love affair with the adjutant known as “Nounours” (Teddy Bear, which he is) is renewed.

https://64.media.tumblr.com/13a885350d42e08383550b11382a7ced/5c31f4593020b6e5-68/s400x600/11c41aefd2bc867d9d0365ea1630e2563fc1e02e.gifv

abovenoted is a tyrannosaurus on a skateboard

Apparently Keith and Paul are off to the States this weekend.

Laundry and fridge duty today I fear.

“Margaret’s Hope” tea from Great Wall Tea tastes like frikkin soap.

(later) I just got off the phone from North York General Hospital and Dave’s been admitted. He’s in room 334 on 3 North. He’s in isolation but I’m hoping to contact him later today as he was asleep just now.

I swore I’d never get on an airplane again. I may break my vow.

 

today’s reason to cry

I’m fighting a viral infection according to my bloodwork – let’s just say it came as a complete surprise since no fever, no cough, no real symptoms except gut raunch and I can’t really relate that to illness thanks to how weird my gut has always been – and my liver and kidneys are not working properly. The kidneys part I’m not worried about since I was dehydrated for literally the first time in weeks, but the liver enzymes are worrying.

I’m taking steps but I’m just messed up right now. One of my few consolations is food. I just want to die. (This is what is known as an exaggeration for effect. I want a cessation of effort regarding nourishing food, which is different.)

Keith was here and cooked and fed us beef and bean chili and it continues to be nom. I made biscotti. They turned out excellent, but texturally quite different to what I’m used to since I added the butter to the flour and not the eggs. I now have to get them out of my house before I hurt myself eating half a batch. That should not be a problem. Keith has warned me not to just leave them where Paul can find them; like me he has a hard time not motoring through them.

mood

All I did yesterday was change my clothes, post to my blog, roast all the remaining almonds (fit for three batches of biscotti), do the Wordle, complete Lumosity training for the day, get Jeff some tea and a fried egg sammy (I just had the eggs with the bell peppers I roasted the other day), take my pills, throw out some compostables, empty the sink, train the cat with paw claps and running catches, police up my eyebrows, run the dishwasher, watch TV including the most recent TLoU and Vera, talk to Aunt Mary on the phone, work on Totally Boned, post shit on twitter and facebook, and order Japanese food (finally got the amount right, we had virtually no leftovers.)

I also read a lot of stuff on the internet about long COVID. Anyone reading this has survived a mass disabling event, and we’re either irritable or transfixed with our grief. When will we come to an understanding that we’ve globally:

Normalized people dropping dead from cardiovascular issues…. at any age.

increased the number of children who will never be able to pursue gainful employment in a fashion that is useful to end stage capitalism due to thymus collapse; as adults they will be immunocompromised for their entire lives.  You know how in Victorian times there were ‘delicate children’, well, this kid over here will have had a stroke at age three and have a withered arm; this kid over there will die if she doesn’t get her allergy medication and her albuterol; that kid over there had a series of mini strokes in utero and will never take herself to the toilet unassisted; this kid over here will move to the city with his parents at the age of five and never be healthy again; these kids will catch fungal infections from playing in contaminated water after an earthquake and slowly die as their lungs turn black from the inside out; and all these kids here and there will die of childhood ailments because no group of people is consistently vaccinating against them any more and water treatment will get harder and harder as there’s less and less water.

reduced the fertility of the smallest upcoming generation in history and so we will thus be subjected, over and over, in family after family, to our own little version of the ‘children of men’. The current fertility data for younger people is horrifying. Many young men simply aren’t producing enough motile and healthy sperm to be able to count on fathering children if they get the opportunity. For young women, the problem will not so much be getting pregnant (although anecdotally this seems to be an issue) as maintaining a pregnancy for 8 months and then not dying of the consequences of gestational diabetes, like eclampsia, or losing the child late in the pregnancy. Eclampsia events during pregnancy have increased (according to the CDC (US)) by 30 PERCENT IN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS. (If you don’t hear the original Star Trek klaxon at this point you’re not getting me, here.) Since the pando started. COVID hides in reproductive tissues as easily as anywhere else in the human body. Fertility gods and goddesses are planning a comeback.

 

and so ….in sum …. we’ve fixed it so that we’ll, as a species, have fewer kids and more of them will be born disabled, or sacrificed to disability after they’re born because of terrible public health policies.

The people who will bear the brunt of all this are women. Because we carry children. Because we birth them. Because we care for them. And because the patriarchy would rather that we women die and the children be born.

So my mood is bleak, on this day after ‘family day.’