(no subject)

I'm going to try to do a bunch of smaller updates because, each time I look at trying to sum up what's going on and what's happened, I stall out without starting or start and don't finish.

So, summer of 2019 has sucked and has gotten worse as the weeks passed. I think that the combination of anxiety and pain with the meds I'm taking to deal with both (propranolol, wellbutrin, Tylenol, CBD (both oral and topical), and naproxen) is making it hard for me to focus enough to get anything done. Not that I'd likely get anything done without the meds. I just might feel less as if this instant in time is unconnected to anything else.

Basically, it's really hard to get myself to start anything or to keep going after I do. It doesn't feel like depression so much as it feels like a very pleasant mental disconnection. I'm kind of wondering if the CBD oil that I bought at Plum Market still contains some residual THC. The disconnection is much pleasanter than the physical pain, though, and that's bad enough that I can't do things because I can't get my hands to cooperate.

I have an appointment with orthopedics about my hands tomorrow. I don't think the appointment will do anything except get me another appointment. From what they said three years ago, the only remaining intervention is surgery which might help pain but also might decrease function. I might get decreased function with no relief from the pain.

I'm also not sure that surgery will be an option given the likelihood that I have EDS-h. I healed okay from gallbladder surgery and from the lumpectomy, but this is a joint. If surgery is a viable option, I would go for my left hand (I'm right handed) and see how that healed. My definition of decreased function might be different from that being used by the medical folks. If I simply stop getting spikes of pain in the middle of doing things like brushing my teeth, I would consider that increased function even if my grip is weaker.

(no subject)

Our cleaning lady has been gone since the end of July. I'm about 95% certain she went on the Hajj. She didn't use that word, just said she'd be out of the country and praying. We gave her some money as it was clearly important-- at least at the level of a graduation or wedding-- and she said she'd use it to sponsor extra prayers for us.

I've been having Cordelia do intermittent cleaning while our cleaning lady is gone. I'm trying to get her to learn the chores, and I really can't do any of them. At this point, I can't even do the chores that I normally have done-- the dishes, the laundry, changing our sheets, taking out the trash and recycling. I can do that last one time in three. The others... Doing the dishes isn't safe. It's possible, but I'd drop things and hurt myself. The laundry requires going up and down stairs which I can sometimes manage and sometimes can't. I'm more worried about problems going down the stairs than I am about difficulties coming back up. Changing the sheets is really hard on my hands and is going to get harder as it gets colder because part of the problem is that I need thumbs for the task. Just gripping the edge of a sheet is Very Bad.

Cordelia will be taking two AP classes this year, US government and European history. She considered AP English but wanted European history more. The European history class was one of those that only happens if enough kids sign up, so we didn't know until this week that it would happen. Last spring, when Cordelia did class selection, I told her to sign up for the European history and to use AP English as her fallback because there wasn't any chance that Skyline wouldn't offer AP English.

She's getting hit by a downside of the way Skyline schedules, though. Her third trimester classes will be chemistry, physics, pre-calculus, choir, and English. She has to have two trimesters of science this year, but as chemistry and physics aren't considered sequential, they can happen simultaneously.