the_rck

I have to return something I ordered for Scott for Christmas because they shipped me the wrong item. I'm cranky about that because I'm not convinced that they actually have the right item. It's been hard to find for a while.

Mom has received our signed letters, so she'll be going forward with things over the next few days. I'm hoping that the management company will decide that we don't need to go to court once they see that I have an attorney and that I'm not going to run out of money to pay her.

Social Security has sent me a short form to fill out as a review of my status with them. I read the instructions last night but didn't completely understand them. They're asking about the last two years but only gave three lines for me to list medical appointments I've had. I need to figure out if they only care about the most recent three (hands, persistent cough, bronchitis) or if I need to attach a supplemental list. The latter makes more sense to me, but the ways of bureaucracy are mysterious.

At least I can honestly say that I've discussed going back to work with my doctor and that she's said it's a terrible idea.

Scott is working today. He'll be off tomorrow and then will start working 2nd shift on Monday. He and I still haven't quite worked out the scheduling logistics. I know that that really needs to wait until we see how late he gets home and how long it takes him to wind down, shower, and get to bed.

I suspect that the best sleeping schedule I'm going to get out of it will be bed between 1 and 2 a.m., up at 5:45 a.m., back to bed at 7 a.m., up for the day at noon. I may need to take something at 7 a.m. in order to go back to sleep as it can take me two plus hours to fall asleep again at that point. I kept a similar schedule during the first couple of years after I stopped working, but that was before Cordelia, and I don't know if my body will cooperate now.

I'm having a friend over for a couple of hours today for a scheduled at the last minute write-in. She's going to work on her Yuletide sign up; I'm going to try to get one of my UCon games ready to go. If I manage that by the end of the weekend, I'll probably sign up for Yuletide. I'm not holding my breath that it will happen, though.

Today is, hopefully, the last day that Cordelia's friend and her brother will be on their own. We've been checking up on them, but I've worried that they wouldn't tell us if they needed something they see as small. They live close to a grocery store and have money, so things like needing fresh milk or what-have-you aren't likely to be difficult for them to deal with.

Their parents are due back around midnight tonight. They're returning from a funeral in Pakistan, and I worry about the bit where they're coming back into the US. They're both US citizens, but I don't trust the way that such things are currently handled and fear they may have trouble due to traveling while Muslim.

Is it entirely paranoid that I kind of want to have the kids here tonight, just in case their parents do run into trouble? I don't want to explain why to the kids since it all might be fine (although it may well be a thing they're worried about, so I suppose the real question is whether or not they see the potential benefit).

Maybe pizza and movies for them and Cordelia? They live across the street from a library branch and could pick out some DVDs to bring. They're also only a short bus ride from here and could manage that part of things without needing me or Scott. It's even a reasonable walk in good weather.

So the cold turned into bronchitis. There was some risk that I had pertussis as it's around in the schools right now. My having gotten exposed in the middle of September's run of prednisone was entirely likely as I accompanied Cordelia to her physical and could easily have picked it up in the waiting room.

We ended up going to urgent care last week for the cough. The clinician there took a sample for the pertussis culture and then freaked out because me having antibiotic allergies meant that her check list of things to do didn't work. She had no idea what to do. She gave me more prednisone, this time at a much higher dose, but kept asking if I was really sure I was allergic to Augmentin and Zithromax because her checklist said she needed to give me prophylactic antibiotics while we waited the week it would take to the culture results.

The second run of prednisone made me feel much worse which was terrifying. I felt like I was never going to feel any better because each dose was worse. Fortunately, I started feeling noticeably better once I finished the five days. Pretty immediately so. I ended up seeing a doctor at UHS that same day, though. There's not much to do at this point but to rest and hope to feel better quickly.

I haven't been able to use my c-pap in a couple of weeks because it makes me choke and cough. I had a few nights when I was afraid to fall asleep. I breathed much better when lying flat on my back, but I wasn't breathing strongly and worried about sleep making that slower/weaker. I cut my sleeping medications entirely for a while and then went to 25% of my normal dose.

My current plan is to try the c-pap tonight and see how it goes. Scott's not working tomorrow, so if it doesn't work, he'll still be able to get a reasonable night of sleep. I'd probably have tried it a night or two ago, but he worked Wednesday through Friday.

( Talk about my hand issues )

I think I'm not going to sign up for Yuletide. I'm not 100% sure that I'll be able to prepare the scenarios I've committed to for UCon. I don't want to make any other promises at this point.

My LTD appeal is still in process. I need to proofread, edit, and sign a statement that my mother has drafted for me. I simply haven't been able to cope with it this month.

Scott's going to be working 2nd shift from the second week of November onward. He says it's temporary, but I'm worried that it won't be. Him working 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. will be incredibly awkward even short term, and it will mean that he and Cordelia don't see each other at all during the week. It will also mean that I'll need to sleep roughly 2 a.m. to noon and won't have any time when I can be noisy.

My hands and wrists were very cranky with me last night. I think I’m noticing it more because the prednisone lowered my pain levels for almost a week.

I’m still wobbly and having issues with my ears feeling blocked. I’m not all the way to dizzy, but I am at a point where I feel unsafe without a wall or counter or something else solid within a step or two. Heat helps with the drainage and so do certain ways of sitting/lying. Sadly, the useful ways of sitting make other things hurt. As far as I can tell, the problem is mostly muscle tightness in my jaw and neck. Sudafed and mucinex help considerably less than heat does, and the blocked feeling doesn't include pain, so I'm currently assuming it's purely mechanical.

I’m not sure I’m going to sign up for Yuletide this year. I’m feeling overwhelmed without taking that on. I love the exchange, and I got some amazing stories last year, but I don’t know if I can write anything to order right now. Maybe I can treat, but I think it's entirely likely that I'll not write anything new during the remaining months of this year.

Of course, some of this is me looking at the nomination coordination posts and not seeing things I’d want to offer. I tend to feel discouraged during early Yuletide discussions anyway simply because there are so many things I've never heard of or already know I'm not likely to enjoy. I might nominate a couple of popular for Yuletide fandoms that I'd like to treat in order to free up other people to nominate less popular things, and I'll look at the 5 minute fandom requests once the tagset is complete.

Mom came to town Monday afternoon. She rented a small apartment outside of town. She spent most of Tuesday trying to get her computer (brought from their house on the other side of the state) to admit that the rental's WiFi existed. She got that late on Tuesday by plugging her phone into the computer. She's not sure why that helped given that the phone doesn't have any sort of data plan.

She spent most of yesterday afternoon asking me and Scott questions about things I can and can't do and about the times when I respond irrationally (Scott and Cordelia agree that I do that much more than I thought I did. I don't actually necessarily notice when I have done it, though, so they're more likely to be correct than I am.)

I think I need to explain that my agoraphobia has two branches. The first is fear that I'm going to misjudge what my body can handle and fall or otherwise injure myself. Historically speaking, I've done this a few times a year. The less I go out, the less it happens. Any plan for going out also has to include a plan for what I do if my body breaks on me, for how I get home if I can't breathe or can't see or can't walk or can't spend more that a few minutes away from a toilet.

The second fear is that I'm going to get upset or be surprised by something and not be able to handle it without raising my voice and/or punching someone. I haven't punched anyone since I was about 12, but when I'm panicking, my physical and mental energy shifts to attack mode. It's much harder to walk away from an interaction with a clerk in a store or with a bus passenger than it is to walk away from an email or chat exchange.

It’s not so much that I’m afraid of going out and/or being in places with a lot of people. I’m afraid of the side effects of me getting surprised. Places with more people have more likelihood for me not to be able to withdraw or to put my strategies for retreat/self-protection into effect. There’s also more likelihood that I’ll be startled and respond without thinking.

I don’t like dense crowds because they make me helpless to take care of myself. The people are obstacles rather than threats.

Scott's work schedule is kind of ridiculous. Monday and Tuesday, he worked 12 hours on the factory floor. He had yesterday and today off (I think he has tomorrow off too) but will work 12 hours both days during the weekend. It's going to be 12 hour shifts with odd days off up through Thanksgiving (which makes UCon an iffy proposition. He's scheduled to work the Friday, and I'm supposed to run a game that morning. Probably the best solution is going to be me getting a room for Thursday night). He's finding the work physically exhausting in ways that worry me. There's a dangling possibility that he might be able to go back to scheduling if he can reach the point of that not wrecking him psychologically, but I hate to hope for it because it really was bad for him.

The coworker (now back on the factory floor) who had the scheduler job before Scott has told Scott that he, too, had a panic attack during his first cider season. Not too surprisingly, this makes me more frustrated with the company.

I need to see if I can get Scott out of bed. It's 11 a.m., and I need to make phone calls. I'd rather not do them while he's home, but that would mean delaying them about a week since none of them can be made outside of business hours. I also can't, in good conscience, make them while he's asleep because I get loud. I can't really put off the call to the dentist because I need a note from them by early next week and because they're closed on Fridays.

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.

I mostly didn't manage to do much Thursday or Friday. I'd known that I'd be exhausted after Wednesday's evaluation, but I always think that I'm exaggerating my memories of how much my brain stops working after I get through something that stressful. It only hits when I stop moving and am no longer under that stress, but the longer I've been stressed and the bigger the thing was, the more I fall apart.

In this case, I was at the 'yes, a load of laundry is a big deal' stage on Thursday. I might have been able to manage more on Friday, but Thursday is the day the cleaning lady comes, so I spent everything I had left to get through that.

My IBS became a problem Thursday and Friday for the first time in weeks. I'm pretty sure that that was stress related because I hadn't altered my diet.

Our cleaning lady is going to be away for most of August. I'm not clear on the dates because she said 3-4 weeks. She also said that she'll be praying, so I think she might be going to Mecca. Google tells me that it's the right time of year for the Hajj.

Scott and Cordelia have been working on figuring out how to sell things on eBay. They've got three items ready for shipping and two still on sale. We've got a box of stuff still to post.

We had a good session of the Firefly game Wednesday evening. One of the players had to bow out at the last minute, so the rest of us did a flashback episode to figure out how my character joined the crew. It was fun, but I was a little surprise to realize that they basically needed a competent general manager to cover things like supply inventory and making people rest when they were exhausted.

With my character, the ship has a crew of five people, and my character is officially the cook. She has retired from her previous job (espionage and infiltration, no combat skills to speak of) and changed her name and was just looking for some place to lie low and found this ship convenient. Now, she's attached to the other characters. Also, the being paranoid about people's motives and seeing patterns and anomalies isn't a thing she can just stop.

I worry a little that my character's tendency to see conspiracies and shadowy maneuvers everywhere is giving the GM (Scott) ideas. Then I worry that I'm breaking his plots by guessing things that are actually going on.

( To-do list )

I'm not sure if our cleaning lady is coming today, but as she now lives close enough not to need the bus to get her, I think she might. That means I need to do a bunch of tidying so that she doesn't put away things that we need in places where we can't find them.

Scott and Cordelia plan to binge watch the new season of Stranger Things, so I think they're hoping that the cleaning lady won't come because that will take a three hour bite out of their afternoon which will come on top of me making them go out for lunch so that we can spend it together. I'm not sure where we'll go because I'm not sure what's open. Also, my sister and her son will be coming for lunch tomorrow, and we agreed on Japanese as likely to provide both food I can eat and food she can eat. I love Totoro but maybe not two days in a row's worth.

Scott had a mini meltdown yesterday, via text, because he couldn't figure out how it was going to be possible to do everything that needs doing this weekend. I made a list, figured out how long each thing would likely take, and spread them across the next few days. He has to work tomorrow, and his parents want us to visit for a day. The family thing had to be either today or Saturday, and we weren't sure when my sister would come (she made herself sick by driving from Atlanta to Kalamazoo in one day with just her 12 year old for company).

I read two books yesterday, and the backs of my hands and the backs of my wrists went numb. They're better today, but I think I spent too much time holding the books up and open. I think that the holding things open is harder on my hands than the weight is, though the weight isn't great. One of the books was a volume of manga, so it wasn't dreadfully heavy, but (possibly because it was the second of the books) I dropped it a few times. I took about three times as long to finish it as I expected.

I have a 14 page form to fill out. They sent me an 'editable PDF' which is only very vaguely editable and prone to crashing Preview if I try to put too much into a text box. There's also no text wrap and no control for font size. I can't read most of what I typed. At this point, I think I'm going to have to type all the questions in a separate document. It's going to take me days, and a good chunk of that will be anxiety wear and tear.

Some of the questions ask for details that I no longer have. I haven't worked in 20 years, and I have no idea what I made per week at my first full time job. I was there for seven years, and it changed every year. Oddly, I have not retained paystubs from the 1990s. I also don't remember what the terrible outdated software that the library used for payroll then was called. I just remember that they'd paid a lot for a long term license and so kept using it well past the point that it was creaking and about to collapse.

Possibly it was called Enable? Something else? At any rate, I don't think that experience with data entry and/or word processing with it is a potential money earner.

I don't even remember all of the places I worked in the university library system while I was an undergraduate. They were student jobs, and I skipped around a bit because I liked learning how different units worked. I don't think I've got a resume in a format I can actually still open. I may not have a resume at all.

Some of the information, I have but can't access immediately, things like my current monthly Social Security payments. The digging through files will take some time, and I'd rather do it with Scott's assistance.

( Extended family stuff including medical issues )

( Today's to-do list )

Scott’s father arrived around 10:00 this morning. He mostly worked on pruning. I’d hoped to get him to focus on the raised beds in front of the house, but he didn’t touch them. He’s of the opinion that we’re organizing our garage Wrong.

He drove me to my appointment this afternoon. We discovered on the way that there’s construction on State St. It didn’t affect our route getting there, but it complicated my trip home because it meant that the bus I wanted was seriously detoured.

This appointment was a referral for biofeedback and meditation to make my muscles relax. After getting a bunch of readings on my trapezius muscles and my neck, she said she couldn’t do anything for me. My muscles are tight but not tense. She seemed to find that very weird. She’s going to talk to my physical therapist to see if the PT has suggestions for things she might usefully do for me. If not, we’ll cancel.

I hope that I can point to this in the future to avoid doctors telling me that my pain will improve if I relax. This tightness may not be something I can do much about because my joints will give out before my muscles stretch. This is also not a problem of my muscles being too weak.

I decided that I didn’t want to cross Eisenhower after the appointment, so I walked along it toward S. Industrial. That was where the detoured bus was going. I wandered further and ended up catching the inbound Packard bus instead of either of the S. Industrial buses. I walked between four and five kilometers.

I’d probably have walked farther if it had been earlier in the day.

Part of yesterday was very nice; the rest of it was swallowed by a headache I couldn't get rid of.

We met with Scott's parents and with his sister and her husband for lunch yesterday at Palm Palace. I got a dish of chicken and mushrooms and rice that was pretty good.

After lunch, we went to the botanical gardens. I walked around a bit, playing Ingress, while Scott and his parents looked at the plant sale. I'm not sure if they bought anything; Scott mentioned thinking that the plants were overpriced.

I enjoyed walking around, but right around the time that I met back up with the rest of the family, I really wanted a bathroom. Sadly, the only one I could find was being cleaned, and I ended up having to wait for about fifteen minutes to get access. Then I fumbled trying to hang my water bottle on the hook of the stall door. I thought it had broken.

That's when the headache started. I took a few different medications that would normally help. A hot shower helped for about fifteen minutes, and the heating pad helps only while it's on. My PT stretches fo my neck and shoulder also help very briefly. Sleep helped, but it came back this morning.

It's been getting steadily worse since I got up. We haven't done much today because of it. I'm frustrated about the whole thing because it came on so abruptly and simply won't go away for very long. It's reacting like muscle tension but not responding to anything I try for that.

I don't often get this sort of persistent headache (I've been headachy something like five days out of the last seven), and this one has several potential culprits, including the possibility that two or more of those are both happening at once. It might just be stress/anxiety. It might be menstrual. It might be that one (or more) of my new PT exercises is causing problems (I'm backing off on all of them, just in case). It might be some level of seasonal allergies upsetting my sinuses.

Scott and Cordelia just got back from going out to get me bubble tea. I suspect we'll have waffles for dinner or some such because my dinner options are kind of boring. My current other plan is to finish two library books so that we can return them today. They're both graphic novels, so finishing them in the next two and a half hours shouldn't be a challenge.

I didn't do much yesterday except dishes and getting the trash out. The second chore, I only half finished because there was a car parked where the second bin needed to go. Scott ended up taking that one out to the curb later.

I've got five audiobooks out via Overdrive. They all have long waitlists, so I won't get another chance at them for months. I'm trying to prioritize them. I have one library DVD that can't be renewed, but I'm at least 80% sure, without having played any of it, that it's terrible (Kim Possible live action). It might make decent background noise for writing, though.

All three of us are having seasonal allergy issues. We're in that bit of spring when it's too warm for the heat but not yet hot enough for the AC. My current plan is to turn on the furnace fan and see if running the air through that filters anything out. Those filters are a big reason we actually use the AC.

At this point, I'm thinking that daily propranolol is over-all helpful. I just can't figure out a way around the problem of sudden spikes of crushing depression and/or panic whenever life throws something unexpected at me. The 'unexpected' part means no warning, and it's a thing that could happen any time. I could forget my glasses at a restaurant. Cordelia could dislocate her knee again. Scott could get six calls from third shift while we're trying to sleep.

It's a hard call because the difference in pain levels isn't vast. It's not a suddenly all better. It's-- at most-- maybe a point on the pain scale, and it doesn't help with the functional pain issues with my hands and neck. Is the difference between a 7 and a 6.5 or a 6.5 and a 6 worth an occasional few hours of mental non-functioning?

I do know that I'll need to not take it Sunday this week because of Easter related family gathering stress. Curling up in a corner and crying during dinner at my SIL's would be awkward. Why is embodiment so difficult?