the_rck

Most of the last several years has been my physical functioning declining steadily but in ways that either don't respond to normal treatment or that have treatments that that aggravate other physical problems I have.

Since 2016, I've lost somewhere between 70% and 80% of my hand function. I can still type, and I can still do some things on my phone, but my ability to do anything at all goes downhill as the day progresses and my pain levels get higher. I don't think that my doctor is actually listening about the hand function because she's chosen to focus on my blood sugar as the primary thing.

My hands, she says, will feel better if we get my blood sugar under control. I do not think that's how osteoarthritis works. I really don't.

Also, I think that, if she were actually serious about the blood sugar control, she'd have given me a testing kit years ago instead of just assuming that my a1C tells all. I can't tell what helps/hurts in the short term, and I'm prone to physical exhaustion and mental issues that are helped by food (exponential improvement from food relative to improvement by sleep or rest) and not affected by caffeine or by hydration.

I've asked about a testing kit, but she keeps putting me off. Right now, she's saying that only an endocrinologist can do something in that direction. I'm pretty sure that's bullshit because the prick the finger testing kits are pretty basic equipment.

I don't particularly want to have to prick my fingers, and the hand issues might be a problem, both the tremor and the osteoarthritis, but we need more nuanced information. I'd really like to know where my blood sugar is when I'm experiencing certain physical and mental symptoms.

( Cut for discussion of medication side effects, both physical and emotional )

It's been a long month. I've written a few posts and then not gotten around to posting them. At this point, I'd have to edit so extensively that it doesn't seem worth my time to make an effort to get those to the point of being postable.

( The disability review/appeal stuff )

Earlier this month, evalerie came over and provided help and moral support while Scott and I got everything out of the bathroom cupboards and I decided what to keep and what went where. I think we got rid of more than half of what was in there, possibly as much as 75% of it.

I now know where everything is in there, and our cleaning lady is no longer putting things I need in places I can't reach.

( The eye related stuff )

( Experimenting with workarounds for physical issues )

( Scott's )

I'm a little frustrated because I have a very small window of time when I'm alone in the house and can work on things I find physically difficult or can easily watch DVDs or listen to CDs or audiobooks. (No, headphones, earbuds, etc. are not an option.) The watching and listening thing is not helped by the fact that the CD/DVD drive on my laptop has decided to die. Judging by how it sounds and what happens, I suspect a mechanical failure.

( Computer stuff )

The bloodwork before my doctor's appointment last week shows that my A1c is up, so I'm going to have to work on that. Being able to go outside would help considerably. At this point, I can handle the bright light, but ice underfoot is still potentially an issue. I usually fall due to ice at least once each winter, and I would really rather avoid it if I can.

I have one exchange assignment still to complete. Chocolate Box 2020 is due on the 7th of February, and I've barely started writing. I have an unrevealed story in the Past Imperfect collection. I've also got a list of a dozen one shot WIP that I think I might be able to finish if I just give them a hard push for a few days. My current plan is to work on those rather than signing up for any other exchanges. I may take pinch hits or write treats, but I'd very much like to get these things done and posted.

I've gotten a couple of 'it's so sad this will never be finished' comments on Rheotaxis this month. It's made me look at it and wonder if I ever will go back to it. I know how it ends (I have a draft of a final chapter so I know where I'm aiming). I know what happens after. It's just been years since I worked on it. My style has changed a good bit, and I still don't know how to make that next chapter work.

I spent yesterday rereading an rp that hopeofdawn and I did years and years ago. It was a post-Rheotaxis thing, and I think it was a good story. We never finished it because the things we were interested in playing out diverged too much (I like writing claustrophobic discussion scenes, and she likes writing action scenes).

I'm a little tempted to see if I could pummel those chapters into something postable on AO3 or if Hope would be interested in working on it with me. I'm not sure it would work well because rp relies on the head hopping being okay. The scenes would lose a lot from being put into a single limited 3rd person POV, and I'm not good at putting that sort of thing into an omniscient 3rd. There are also gaps in the story that we left because they would have involved one person writing solo due to which characters each of us wrote.

I don't know if anyone would want to read that even if I did write it up. I don't know if I could come up with an ending that was even remotely satisfying.

I feel like there are a lot of interesting stories out there that don't end up archived because they're written as an rp narrative.

Scott and I ordered glasses yesterday. I got a pair with progressive lenses and a pair for more or less the distance at which I keep my laptop. I may order another cheap pair of reading glasses online, but I wanted to order the progressives face to face so that all the measurements were more likely to be accurate.

We had lunch at Bob Evans before the glasses shopping. The place was pretty empty, so the waitress gave us a lot of attention in terms of refilling my coffee cup and such.

Scott's going to take Cordelia back to order her prescription sunglasses that she can use for driving. The place where we went gives a big discount on a second pair. I don't know that it will happen today. It should, but it's really, really cold out there. We should go to the credit union before the end of the month, too.

There's no school today or tomorrow due to the cold which is compounded by the windchill. The district cancelled for today after the university (which never closes) cancelled almost everything for today and tomorrow. The school cancellation for tomorrow came at 10 a.m. today. I'd been expecting it any time the last twenty hours. I'm not sure why they didn't cancel for tomorrow sooner. If the university had already cancelled for Thursday then Hell really is freezing over.

Scott will have to go back to work on Friday. He's been on vacation because he was using up vacation days before losing them on his anniversary of hire on 1 February. Naturally, my one appointment this week is Friday morning. If it's anything like this cold then, I'll be taking a cab. It's worth the $11. Getting home by bus is less dangerous/unpleasant because it doesn't require standing at a bus stop.

I'm in a weird space right now because part of me wants Scott and Cordelia to go away and give me the time alone that I'm used to. I love them both dearly and enjoy spending time with them, but having them home for this long disrupts my routine. I tend not to do my PT or household chores. I also tend not to write. Given the weather, I really can't just kick them out.

( House related stuff )

Monday, I got four loads of laundry done and changed our sheets. I got no chores done yesterday apart from making Scott and Cordelia take the trash to the curb. Then pick up was delayed until Friday (or next week) due to the cold which is for the best since the work would be extremely dangerous in that sort of weather but also is something we found out five minutes after the bins went to the curb. I think the timing is the part I wish had been different.

I'm worried about the mail carriers. I haven't heard anything about suspension of service, but sending them out in this is potentially lethal. If we routinely got these temperatures, it would be different, but we don't. Having my mail would be nice, but it's not risking someone's life levels of necessary. I suppose it's hard for the USPS to sort out which bits of mail are that urgent.

( Cut for discussion of sleep issues and headaches )

( Cut for discussion of salt and bodily functions that may be TMI )

Experimenting with this many variables and a sample size of one makes drawing conclusions hard. I have found some studies that indicate that low salt diets increase insulin resistance and increase blood sugar generally. I've also found some studies that indicate no correlation at all. None of them are big or, I think, well controlled in terms of other variables. I do know, though, that I'm much less interested in sugar since I've started adding salt. I'll still eat sweets if we've got cookies or something, but when I eat them, I can tell that they're not actually what I want.

Kroger brand vanilla ice cream sprinkled with salt is surprisingly delicious.

I saw my doctor yesterday. She's not pleased with the endocrinologist because she thinks he's wrong. I pointed out that, even if she's right and he's wrong, there's damn all we can do about it. I eat the things I eat because I know that they don't make me sick in the short term (less than 24 hours). Most of the things she would like me to eat actually do make me sick or require preparation that I'm not physically able to manage.

She was a little astonished when I told her that beans are excellent (canned only) because that's completely against accepted information about IBS.

No advice on this, please. You're unlikely to come up with anything I haven't tried and can afford.

Getting home after the appointment was a serious PITA. I had to schedule an ultrasound before I could leave the building, and that took a very long time. I had, at that point, just barely enough time to get to the bus stop and then home to be able to eat and take my lunch meds. When I got to the stop, I saw that the street the bus would usually take to get to the street where the stop was was blocked. I checked the bus website to see if the bus was rerouted. Nothing. I looked for any signs in the vicinity to tell me there was a detour. Nothing.

Then I saw the bus I needed turning onto the street I was on from the next cross street down, bypassing the stop where I was completely. That bus is once every 30 minutes and takes about 15 minutes to get me all the way home. There's another bus that's every 15 minutes and takes about 25 to get me all the way home. I'd have had to walk about 10 minutes to get to a stop for that, so it wasn't going to help at all.

I realized that I was going to have to buy food out in order to be able to take my meds, so I walked from downtown to the diner that's about halfway home. I got there in about 20 minutes. Cordelia joined me for lunch. Then she caught a bus to the library, and I walked the rest of the way home.

Our cleaning lady had been panicking a bit over me not being there when she arrived and not having left a note (I should have told Cordelia to leave one. I didn't think to). The cleaning lady was afraid I was in the hospital again.

I ended up spending three times as long at the credit union as I'd expected, but I think things are straightened out at this point. I hope so, anyway.

At that point, I should have gone and gotten lunch, but I kept doing just one more Ingress mission and then realized that it was almost 3 p.m. and that, if I got food, I'd have to start my levothyroxine fast late. If I just went home without eating, I could take the damned pill and eat half an hour after. I got home around 4 p.m. and ate at 4:30.

I did seven Ingress missions and hacked and captured some new to me portals. I have almost enough AP to advance to level 12, but I'm a very, very long way from the badges I need for that. None of the ones that are currently silver are much more than halfway to what I need for gold, and it's taken me years to get to the halfway point, so... I may be level 11 for a couple more years.

I overslept this morning, falling back to sleep after Scott got up even though I needed to be up not long after in order to help Cordelia with breakfast. Scott's time-to-leave-the-house alarm woke me at 7:00 which meant we had 45 minutes before Cordelia needed to leave. She had gotten up at 6:30 and then fallen asleep again on the couch. She was a bit indignant when I asked her if she'd eaten yet. Preparing her breakfast on early mornings is apparently Not Her Job.

I had had trouble falling asleep because I was stressed out about today's doctor's appointment. I fell asleep some time after 12:47 a.m. (when I got up and went to the bathroom), about an hour and a half after Scott finally shut his laptop and stopped watching West Wing.

When I got out of bed, I was exceedingly groggy. I managed to get the kettle going for my tea, but I couldn't figure out how to make the toaster oven (which we've owned longer than Cordelia has been alive) work. I couldn't get the buttons and their labels to come into visual focus, and I couldn't remember the proper sequence for pre-heating and setting the timer.

Three swallows of honey sweetened tea, and I was steady again and suddenly had zero trouble with the toaster oven. By the time I had had breakfast, I was fully awake.

evalerie gave me a ride to my endocrinology appointment. The doctor was running late, so I sat in the examination room, waiting for him, for an hour. He did a bunch of poking and prodding me while having me do various things.

He didn't actually say that my primary care doctor needs to chill the fuck out about my A1c, but that's the subtext I got from what he said. He puts my odds of developing type 2 diabetes at 'low.' He said that my A1c should not be checked more than once a year from here on (my pcp has been doing it every three months) and that I should keep eating as I have been and exercising as I can. He said that giving me metformin to begin with had been unnecessary and that he found no signs of any other hormonal issues.

My suspicion about my primary care doctor is that she knows my health is crappy but can't really help and so has focused on the A1c as a controllable variable, something she actually has tools to address. I think she keeps hoping that she can find a key to solve everything because she can tell that things are broken. I'm glad that she's still willing to try and that she'll pursue avenues for trying to make things better.

I'd like that magic solution, too.

I was more than a little surprised that the endocrinologist didn't lecture me about my weight or try to terrify me about dire health consequences for not Eating Right and Exercising. He actually seemed to listen when I explained that a lot of my every day function is a balancing act to keep ten different physical things from falling out of balance to the point that my body breaks down (or my mind does). I told him that my coping strategies are working less well as I get older and as I get hit by serious acute issues and that I know that the whole thing will crash eventually. I just don't see a way to balance all of this crap in a different way. If someone offered me suggestions that didn't bang into other things that are broken, I'd be all over it.

I kind of live in terror of having two or more things crash all at once because, when that happens, addressing any one issue will make at least one other issue worse. I can't temporarily not have asthma or not have sleep problems or not have hypermobile joints in the same way that I can stop eating strawberries or avoid secondhand cigarette smoke.

I did a little bit of Ingress and walking at the Domino Farms complex while I waited for evalerie to pick me up after my appointment. I'd expected to have more time for it, so I only did about a third of what I'd hoped to.

Scott and I went to the science and nature center yesterday, on our way home from the library, because the other side knocked over the Ingress portals. It was nice to get a small walk in, and we went back and forth a bit.

I'm debating a walk today because it's not too hot and because I suspect I really won't want to take one tomorrow or Wednesday.

I woke with a headache again today. As usual, it went away with my morning tea. I'm still tired as if I didn't sleep properly last night, so a nap is very tempting.

Scott and I finally got around to playing a two player cooperative game that he gave me either last Christmas or for my birthday in 2017. Maybe earlier? It's a complicated game for me because it relies on icons on the cards to shorthand information. I'm bad at parsing those and need to take time to triple check that I'm interpreting them correctly. I'm not sure if it's that I haven't done it often enough or just that my brain doesn't like being made to remember new symbols.

At any rate, it's a fantasy dungeon crawl with fighting monsters. We got extremely lucky early on with a skill for my character that made two of my dice wild with regard to color. We actually won the game, but we were surprised to win, so it wasn't overly easy. We're not sure we followed the rules properly. I got the impression that the rules booklet was kind of poorly organized with a lot of back and forth referents of the 'go to page 3 and read the 4th paragraph then come back here' type.

I had promised Scott that we'd play on Father's Day but then got sick, so this was for Father's Day. We'll likely do it again, but it took us about two hours to finish, so we'll need that much time. The process of play involves skipping a lot of cards as one goes through the encounter deck (to simulate time passing. Each completion of the deck changes things), so the game's likely to be different each time. There are also about half a dozen characters, each with different stats and abilities.

The game can be played solo, too, just with slightly different rules. I don't think it's a thing that would appeal to me. It might to Scott if he didn't have access to the internet (say during an afternoon power outage).

We went out for breakfast this morning. We got to Bob Evans around 10:00 and got home about 11:30. We stopped at Kroger on the way home because Scott missed getting the toothpaste and dental floss that I had on the list yesterday.

I started feeling unwell about half an hour after we got home and have been in that weird stretched out time that goes with being sick and feeling like it's been days when it's been minutes.

I don't think it was breakfast; given the symptoms, it's much more likely to be something I ate yesterday. I started the new iron supplements yesterday, and I had 3/4 of an apple and about a cup of sugar snap peas. The apple ought to be fine because apples usually are. There were a couple of years when I had half an apple as part of my breakfast almost every day.

I took the iron supplement again today, so I suppose I'll know tomorrow if it was that or the sugar snap peas. I'm more suspicious of the peas because I don't usually have that many and because my body doesn't seem to like raw or partially cooked veggies all that much. Cooked to mush makes my digestive system much happier.

Of course, it's possible that it's just my body reacting to stress over the upcoming biopsy and the uncertainty. My anxiety manifests through physical symptoms like that much more frequently than it does in any sort of thoughts or emotional reactions.

( Discussion of foods and their effects on my digestive system )

I'm really hoping that the iron supplements aren't the problem. I can't go back to my multivitamins until, at the earliest, I get the biopsy results back. If I need surgery, I'll be off them quite a long time.

I'm running out of charge on my laptop, and my current cord isn't long enough to let me recharge safely in the bedroom, so I'll be putting the laptop to sleep until I can handle getting it to the living room to charge. It's not that I can't stand up; it's that it seems like a really, really unpleasant prospect.

So my primary care doctor wants me to see an endocrinologist. She's sent in the referral and suggested that I call the managed care office at her clinic for help in scheduling. I'm am 85% sure that the managed care people will tell me that I need to call the clinic myself because it has happened before with referrals like this.

I think that the advice I've gotten about small, frequent meals actually doesn't work best for me. A bowl of spinach bean soup with a lot of added cheese and some triscuits or corn chips can keep my brain and body working and satisfied for about six hours (which is actually longer than I really want because it makes scheduling later meals difficult) even when I go out and do things. I'm trying to figure out if I can go smaller and get it down to four to five hours which would be better for my schedule, but calibration is an issue.

The thing is that, when I do crash right now, I can't see right, and I can't type right. My typing speed drops to a crawl, and I make a lot of typos that aren't my normal sort. It's more in the direction of typing 'halibut' when I'm thinking 'television' than a b for a v or even an f for a j. I touch type, and I rely on my fingers just knowing what to do for the words I want. I know that I'll have problems with their/there/they're because I'm not thinking the spelling when I think the word; that's a different thing. This is also not the part where I think I've typed a word but have dropped it completely.

Cordelia's school had their performing and visuals arts student awards last night. All choir students were 'expected' to attend. Scott had PT that overlapped when Cordelia needed to leave, so she traded a ride there with a friend for Scott giving the friend a ride home after.

My sinuses are staging a revolt. I'm pretty sure that it's because we had the windows open for three days. I've taken sudafed, closed the windows as well as I can, and set the AC fan going so that the air coming in goes through that filter. It's still cool enough outside that I'd love to have open windows, but the itchy burn is so not worth it. I'm going to see about getting the trash and recycling out and then use my neti pot (I don't use it regularly, just keep it for times like this).

I've broken 90K words on the Sky High AU of Doom. I've got five distinct sub-arcs in the series. Three of them are absolutely chaptered fics. The other two, I'm less sure about. The one I'm currently writing could work either way, I think.

The middle arc, though, is a mess from that perspective. There isn't a consistent thematic throughline or plotline. Some pieces are much longer than others and will work better subdivided, but I'd like to have the parts feel better balanced. I don't want four 2K chapters and 2 7K chapters. I also don't want to jam together things that happen years apart, even if they're in the same POV and relatively short. I've got things happening in between from other POV. But then there are these three things that could be split so that things are more even but that both go in chronological sequence and are from one POV.

I will probably try to keep the third set as a chaptered story just to cut down on the mess. It's 36K words in eight pieces, and I don't know that any of them make sense without reference to earlier parts of the series as a whole. Five chaptered fics is much less sprawling in terms of how it looks than twenty six fics in a series all dumped on AO3 at once or even (given that this is a small fandom) posted over a period of days or weeks.

We had three friends over last night. Two were coming off of a twelve hour drive and so weren't 100% there. I also wasn't 100% there, and Scott had had a miserable day with essential things breaking for lengths of time that can't easily be made up between now and deadline.

We played a four player co-op game involving a haunted house and trying to retrieve magical gems. The guy who'd driven all day sat out and just managed the deck that determined where ghosts would turn up. We played two games, one at the easiest level and one with another level of difficulty. At the easy level, this would be a good learning game for kids. It is one of those games where the loss can arrive abruptly and rapidly. One moment, everything's good, and then, everything that you've been ignoring bite you all at once.

I've broken 80K words on the Sky High monstrosity of a fic series. I've also found another plot thread (focused on different characters) that might also get long.

( Health and medication talk )

The eye doctor says that progressives may not help because I change the distance at which I read and at which I work on my laptop pretty frequently. Progressives assume that I'll always have things in very specific configurations.

I got a cab in for the appointment and had 25 minutes to sit outside the locked clinic before they came back from lunch. Fortunately, there were comfortable benches inside with a view of the door.

My distance and reading prescriptions haven't changed enough that the doctor thinks replacing my glasses is worthwhile, not unless I'm going to progressives. The eye ache I've had is almost certainly just dryness (which may well be part of the anemia), so I'm to take lots of breaks and to use artificial tears frequently.

The doctor said that I'm doing a lot of my laptop stuff using just my right eye rather than using both. She didn't suggest a fix for that or even say that it was a problem, but it sounds like something I don't want to do, so I might try doing some laptop work with just my left eye.

I'm going to wait on the decision about progressives or laptop distance glasses or not getting another pair at all until after we figure out the anemia part. I think it's possible that the problems I'm having come more from that. I don't want to pile on extra solutions all at once. Limiting the variables is generally a good idea.

My blood pressure at the eye appointment yesterday was not as high as it had been before my appointment last week, but it was very high. I was also light headed and had hand tremors, so I think I was freaking out. The eye doctor suggested getting a machine for checking my blood pressure at home. Scott wants to go to Amazon. I would rather find someone who knows more and consult with them, probably the pharmacy at the university hospital.

( More on the health issues from yesterday )