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My physical therapist wants me to start wearing the compression pad 24/7, except for showering and such. The difficulty is that I do want to wash it occasionally and that it needs to air dry. That doesn’t take too long since I can only wipe the dratted thing down rather than truly washing it, but it still takes some time, more time than it takes me to shower. The therapist says I may need it for two or three months which is not great news since I don’t really feel able to go out while wearing it given that I have to keep, er, rearranging myself every five minutes or so. Hopefully, Scott’s family will be understanding when we get together in a week and a half (for Scott’s birthday and our nephew’s birthday), and hopefully, they won’t decide to do it in a restaurant instead of at Scott’s parents’ place or Scott’s sister’s place.

This week’s PT involved some sort of laser device. I don’t actually understand how it worked, and the therapist didn’t explain beyond that it does. The thing looked a little like an ultrasound head but flat on one side. The therapist pressed the flat side to me then pressed a button to start it. She held it in place until it turned itself off and then moved it to another spot and repeated the process.

I slept a long time this morning, but I didn’t sleep very soundly. I spent a lot of the night in that weird halfway state of being aware of my body while still having absurd things going through my head. Those dreams are always either text (going through infinite lists that keep rearranging themselves) or verbal without images. Sometimes I have the idea that there’s something physical that I need to do (or not do), often a series of things in a particular order, but of course, I can’t move. I don’t panic, fortunately, I just keep running over and over the ever changing sequence of strange things I’m supposed to do the moment I can.

Scott thawed some chicken in the fridge, and it leaked heavily. He thought that putting the package in a plastic grocery bag would prevent that, but (no surprise) it didn’t. So he ended up spending about forty five minutes last night pulling things out of the fridge and washing them. Judging by what he was muttering, he broke either the crisper drawer or the meat/cheese drawer.

We finally got our copy of the new Bujold book yesterday. I haven’t opened it yet. I want to finish the library book that can’t be renewed first. It’s an interlibrary loan book, so getting it back again isn’t as simple as putting a hold on it. Well, from my point of view, it kind of is, but I know that ILL is relatively costly and requires work from a number of people who are not me.

Speaking of the library, something odd is going on with the online catalog. Either they’ve completely stopped adding/cataloging new materials in the last five days or they haven’t actually made the new records public in that time. Usually, they do the previous day’s new materials every week day morning. It’s not at all a big deal. Mainly, for me, it just means that I’ll have a big wodge of entries for new materials to browse all at once instead of smaller batches over several days. I prefer the latter, but I have time to deal with the former.

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Bah. These colonoscopy instructions are not as clear as I’d like. It’s more in an annoying way than anything, but…

First, they tell me to drink the clean out solution in eight ounce doses until I’ve had two liters worth. Would it have killed them to stick to one unit of measure? It’s not hard to figure out what they mean, but really? English or metric, please.

Second, they specify a one hour window for me to do something that they specify should take two hours to complete. I’m pretty sure that the one hour window is meant as a window for when to start the two hours, but they don’t actually say that.

They say not to drink anything red, orange, or purple, but they don’t say when to start that. A week before? Three days before? I guess I’ll go with a week just to be safe.

I’m going to have to get up at 3:30 a.m. that morning in order to complete all the medications and such at the intervals that are necessary. If I didn’t have to deal with the thyroid medication, I could sleep another hour, but I can’t get back to sleep in between taking that and needing to get up an hour later.

And the GoLYTELY/NuLYTELY website is absolutely unwilling to tell me what’s in the flavor packets. I need that information to know whether or not I can use them. If I can, I want to, but… Listing a bunch of ingredients that are in the actual solution and then ending with 'flavor ingredients' is decidedly not useful. I’m also worried that I won’t be able to drink the stuff because I can’t drink anything thicker than water unless it’s at least partly frozen. That is, I can drink a milkshake or a smoothie with lots of ice in it, but I can’t drink, say, mineral oil or a liquid antacid or kefir. I can sometimes manage something the texture of mashed potatoes or applesauce or yogurt and sometimes absolutely not.

I suppose I should call the nurse and ask about all of that soonish. My colonoscopy is scheduled for a Monday in March, and it would be bad to discover on Sunday morning that I can’t do the prep because there won’t be anyone I can reach to get help right then.