the_rck | Entries tagged with perimenopause

I'm concerned that I'm not going to finish my Fic in a Box assignment. I'm at 2400 words out of a minimum of 10000, and the characters aren't cooperating. I can't find interesting things for them to do. I'm doing procrastinatory house cleaning and cooking rather than writing, and my body is extremely displeased about it.

I'm also feeling generally down. It may be hormonal. It may be anticipatory stress about having to wait until January to find out what the hell is going on medically that makes my doctor thing I need an urgent neurology appointment (experience suggests that, whatever it is, the specialist will shrug and say that it's some other specialty's problem). It may be having just listened to my daughter and her friends do a lunch Zoom thing with one of the girls sounding desperately depressed. It may be me working on my Christmas list for Scott's parents and realizing (again) that it grieves me that my parents are insufficiently interested in any of us (including my siblings and my nephew) ever to ask what we want or need.

There's also a certain amount of me knowing that Scott's parents will look at my list and buy something that's almost what I asked for but sufficiently different that I can't use it all while congratulating themselves on having found something better for the purpose. I have four things on the list that I need and will have to buy for myself if I don't get them for Christmas and three things that I'd like to have but won't buy for myself.

I've showered to try to break my mood, and I might go for a walk. We have a tele-appointment in an hour, though, so a walk might not work since I can't be sure how long I'd be out. After the appointment might work, but it will be close to dusk. I don't know.

Cordelia went to a socially distanced gathering for choir last night and had a lot of fun. This is the first time she's gone to a high school social gathering that she enjoyed. I regret the three years of her not having that but am grateful that she has it now.

We've gotten notice that the high school has sent out Cordelia's transcripts, but we haven't yet heard confirmation that any of the universities have received them. I'm assuming that notice will come in the next day or two.

I'm still not reading here regularly. I'm reading more library books, both ebooks and paper, and finding other ways to fill my time. I get a bit overwhelmed when I think about trying to catch up.

I'm also still having a lot of hand/wrist issues. I've figured out how to minimize the pain and numbness, but I'm still prone to misjudging how long I can afford to keep typing. It doesn't usually hit me until hours later, sometimes, even a day later. The problems accumulate.

Cordelia took part two of drivers' training last week. It was several hours of lecture followed by a test. The class was held in the parking lot with each student bringing their own chair. They skipped the films they'd normally have shown.

We haven't tried to schedule the actual licensing test. Cordelia wants more time to practice parallel parking since she's not comfortable with that yet.

I've written a couple of exchange stories that haven't yet been revealed, and I'm working on three different writing projects and trying to figure out how I want to deal with UCon. That last requires some experimentation with platforms and with what our WiFi can handle in terms of me and Scott running games at the same time. I've asked Scott for help, but this is the worst time of year for scheduling anything that needs his participation.

The two probable options are him running in BlueJeans while I run in Discord or both of us running in BlueJeans. He's spending a lot of time working on investigating other platforms so that UCon can give their potential GMs some solid information about their options. I could probably get by with audio only and maybe some stuff on Gdocs, but I'd like to have video, too.

My body has reset the clock on menopause again. This period has been going for two weeks now.

( Stuff about writing )

( Cut for COVID discussion and risk taking relatives )

I'm having trouble managing my library holds. The decontamination delays and low staffing levels make it difficult to judge how long something will take. I've been trying to request only things that are actually on the shelf at the branch where we pick up holds, but it still sometimes takes two weeks for those to be available. I don't think there are good options in that direction in terms of predictability.

I want 4-8 CDs, 1-3 DVDs, and about 10 books (counting comics/graphic novels) a week. I'll only ever finish about half of those books, but it's usually not due to running out of time as much as there being a lot of things that I get a little way into and just don't want to finish.

During July, I started and abandoned a lot of everyday posts for DreamWidth. Sometimes, I got distracted. Sometimes, I realized that I was having stress and/or perimenopause mood swings and doing nothing but complaining about trivialities.

Cordelia tried trimming my hair when the only other option was me doing myself. She became less anxious about the process as we went on, and she told me that it was because I wasn't at all agitated or concerned. The trimmings looked like a lot of hair, but she didn't get it short enough to help with my c-pap headgear (when my hair reaches a certain length, my headgear starts coming off in the middle of the night. I end up waking to put it back and thus sleeping less well than I would without the c-pap).

Scott made an attempt at trimming my hair yesterday. He had me lean on a wedge pillow with my head off the upper edge. This got my hair closer to the desired length, but it also left a layer of hair in back completely untouched.

We have now ordered trimmers so that we won't need to use scissors again.

Cordelia has an SAT seat in late September. I'm not really optimistic that it will happen or that it will actually be a safe thing for her to do. It'll be about an hour drive to the test location. Nothing closer had a seat still available.

Cordelia's crochet hooks and one skein of yarn have arrived. We're still waiting for 2-3 more skeins of different kinds of yarn. Cordelia is has managed about three rows of single crochet so far. Turning is a challenge she has yet to master; that is, she's doing it, but it's uneven and clearly not right.

I've been watching some Netflix cartoons aimed at tweens. They seem to be much more my speed than anything aimed at adults. I don't like violence, and I don't like stories that expect me to take them Seriously and to get stressed out about what terrible things are going to happen.

Scott and I had to make a trip out to the bank last week to transfer money from Cordelia's account to ours in order to cover the laptops. The nature of her account means that I have to be there with picture i.d. The teller said that we could have done the transaction through the pneumatic tubes, but we couldn't use an ATM.

The teller encouraged me to put a banking app on my phone, but it's not happening any time soon. I try to minimize what's on my phone. I assume that anything I do on there ceases to be private. I'm not sure what I'll do if I'm ever without Scott; without a car, access to ATMs requires a considerable expedition.

Washing my hair with Dr Bronner's was not a success. As my hair dried, I started having itching in my throat and sinuses. That went away overnight while I was using the c-pap but came back shortly after I got up. I've washed my hair again with my normal shampoo because breathing takes precedence.

I'm disappointed because I had thought the Dr Bronner's would be safe that way, at least, based on being unscented and being something that I've been using on my hands for weeks. I mean, I knew that some things that were okay on my hands aren't on my hair (I'm assuming proximity combined with the fact that my hands touch other things and the scent or whatever gets rubbed off. Hair's more difficult that way). I just hoped.

The ingredient list is so very short that I'm boggled. Water, coconut oil, potassium hydroxide, palm kernel oil, olive oil, hemp oil, jojoba oil, citric acid, tocopherol. There's nothing in there that ought to be new to my respiratory system. Then again, rosemary wasn't new to my respiratory system, either; it just abruptly became a problem.

My body has also decided to reset the clock on menopause again. I had hoped that I was done since the last time was in October. At least it explains the oversleeping and general crankiness earlier this week. I'm still pretty tired, and I'm trying to figure out a good way to get myself a dose of iron without bringing anything into the house that might harm Scott.

Over the weekend and through this week, I've been battling a cold that I caught from Cordelia. My body has also decided to reset the countdown on menopause. I don't usually end up with wheezing from colds, but I'm feeling this one in my chest and having to be careful as I don't want it to escalate to bronchitis.

I wonder if this cold is hitting me differently because I took prednisone for a week in mid-September? I hope it all settles soon. I'd like to get my flu shot; it just feels like a bad idea to do that when my immune system has already taken a beating.

Scott worked 12 hour shifts on Wednesday and yesterday and is working a third now. He might be on the hook for tomorrow, too, because there's someone scheduled for a vacation day. He'll certainly have Sunday off, but he's scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. I really hope that he actually has next Wednesday through Friday off. There are medical appointments for both of us.

I have emails I need to read and answer, and I still have phone calls to make. I don't know if I'm going to manage all of it today or not.

I managed a burst of writing over last weekend, five short things for a flash exchange. I hadn't signed up because I wasn't sure I'd have energy to finish anything. I wrote one of the stories, from beginning to end, while sitting in the cafeteria at Cordelia's school for the pancake supper fundraiser.

The fundraiser was difficult because I was wobbly for most of it, wobbly enough that I didn't trust myself to go into the bathroom while we were there. I had to have Scott get my food.

I still firmly believe that marching bands should not perform in indoor spaces. My ears hurt so much during their performance. The drummers were all in one place about fifteen feet behind us.

There will be links to those exchange fics later today or some time tomorrow.

Monday, I did laundry and ran the dishwasher. I roasted some chickpeas and baked some potatoes. I also scheduled some PT appointments with the therapist I saw last year. She doesn't have openings until June, so I'm on her waiting list in the meantime. After that, I lost the rest of the day to a migraine and to hangover from it.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Scott's parents. They were in town for Scott's mother to have a bone density check. We ended up at Applebee's which wasn't particularly exciting but did feed all three of us safely. I lost the afternoon to utter exhaustion as my body decided to reset my clock on menopause one more time.

Today, I was exhausted and had another migraine. I made Scott and Cordelia get up without me and actually managed a few hours more sleep. I took naproxen and Amerge, but I didn't get much relief from those until after I took a long shower.

I'm still working on my Wayback story. It's due in a couple of days, and I'm not 100% sure I'm going to find the ending in time because it keeps wanting to open up and become something that needs tens of thousands of words. I don't think I can finish more than another 3-4K words on it, not in the time before the deadline.

March's word count was just shy of 12K, bringing me to 20K for the year to date. That's 10% of my goal for the year written by a quarter of the way through the year. The goal is still possible. I don't know that it's probable, but it's possible if I manage a few months of high word count.

Taking claritin and sudafed last night seems to have helped the cold symptoms, but I slept very badly anyway. Around 3 a.m., I woke feeling overheated and never managed to get back to sleep. I kept throwing off the blankets then getting chilled then overheating again.

The roasted chickpeas I had for breakfast this morning tasted terrible. I can't tell if it's me being sick or if the container was insufficiently clean or what else it might be. I made them Saturday and put them into six containers. The one I had yesterday was fine. Today's tasted like nail polish remover, so I threw out most of it. I'm hoping that the remaining four containers will be okay because them being inedible will put a large hole in my breakfast plans for the week.

I very much want more sleep, but I also don't feel like I'll be able to manage. I'm kind of too awake. I also have a list of things that need to be done today.

Scott went back to the urgent care clinic yesterday. They concluded that it's bacterial (but not, according to the x-rays, pneumonia), so he's got augmentin and a cough suppressant. His supervisor sent him home early on Friday, and on Thursday, one of his coworkers told him she'd cover things so that he could go home early.

( Menstrual stuff )

I've had to put off a lot of household chores over the last several days. Laundry only happened yesterday because I drafted Cordelia for it, and I've had to skip one of my PT exercises the last two days. I'm not sure it will happen today, either. There's still more laundry left, but the dishwasher is currently running, so I haven't considered yet whether or not I can manage it or if I need to ask Cordelia.

Changing the sheets in our bedroom needs to happen in the next few days, but I will likely wait until I'm feeling better. Also, Scott's still in bed, and I don't want to force him out when he's so sick.

I placed a grocery order for pick up last night. Doing that costs us an extra $5, but neither Scott nor I are up to walking through the store to get groceries. I considered asking Cordelia to do the walking part while I sat in a nearby coffee shop, but I don't think that would go very well. I think it's something we should try at a point when it's less generally stressful for the family.

I will have to go inside the store because, when Scott picked up his prescriptions yesterday, he forgot to get more sudafed and because we're running out of half and half. I had to throw out half a loaf of bread because it was moldy, but I can use the bread machine today. Better yet-- Cordelia can use the bread machine.

I also asked Cordelia to do the library run by bus. I didn't want to ask Scott to drive, and I pretty definitely wasn't up to taking the bus in. Cordelia's not thrilled with being asked to get my library books, but she said she would if she had to.

I'm at 15.6K words written this year so far. That's way below my goal in as much as I need 16.6K per month in order to hit the goal I set for the year. I won't be particularly upset if I don't manage it, but I'm also not really sure where all the writing energy went.

My body is being thoroughly uncooperative. I haven't had a period this bad since the first one or two after I got off the Tamoxifen last year. I'm pretty sure that part of the problem is that I didn't plan my food properly in terms of having access to what I needed actually in our room. I kind of ran out of spoons on the planning side, and most of what I planned needed a freezer or a can opener.

Scott keeps running aground, regarding my food needs/scheduling, on the fact that I'm still figuring out what works and what doesn't and on the fact that my needs change depending on other factors like where I am in my cycle and what I expect to need to do in the next few hours and what time of day it is. I told the extended family that I'd manage my own meals because there really is no way anybody but me can track everything I can't have.

Last night, my sister-in-law (the one from Seattle, not the local one) took great pains to try to cook a meal I could eat. She just didn't ask me and therefore had an out of date list. Everything was cooked with oil. I ate it for breakfast this morning. Dinner for me was instant oatmeal and some shredded chicken with ranch dressing (not the oatmeal and the chicken together). Everyone else had roasted potatoes, grilled salmon, stir fried pea pods, and grilled asparagus. There were portions of each for me seasoned just with salt and rosemary.

Sadly, there was olive oil even on the veggies. Salmon would be a risk at dinner time, but without the oil, I could have microwaved the veggies a bit and eaten those. There were carrot sticks and celery sticks on the table, but they were jumbled in together. I've discovered this week that carrots that have been stored in the same container as celery make me sick.

Scott set aside yesterday afternoon for me, but I was too sick to do much. I slept a lot of the day. We went for a brief walk after dinner. It was sprinkling when we started and raining moderately hard when we headed back about fifteen minutes later. It wasn't much of a walk, but it was very nice to get some time out. I'd have liked to walk longer.

Scott's brother's family flies out of an airport half an hour away at about 5 a.m. tomorrow. They'll be taking our 16 year old niece's car and leaving it at the airport to be picked up at a saner time of morning. We all have to be out of here at 10.

Scott and I have had a couple of talks. I'm not sure that he completely understands that the underlying issue isn't my health so much as the ways that my disabilities mean that I'm dependent on him and on other people. He doesn't notice it because it's alien to his experience and because working full time eats his time and energy.

I think he and I need to have some talks. It's just hard to do when we have zero privacy at home. This is not something that can happen when Cordelia is around, and I don't see it working well when we're strolling through our neighborhood or any of the other out of the house options. I'd opt for text, but Scott has a very difficult time with writing due to a learning disability. He's fine with reading, but he takes a paragraph or two. I'd be monologuing.

I might be monologuing anyway. We don't have the same approaches to figuring things out. Writing/talking and finding things through that is my approach. He's more prone to fixing on something as The Problem and fixing that. If the problem isn't concrete, he can't address it. Fix one thing then go on to the next. If something can't be fixed, everything breaks down because he doesn't have a script for how to deal with that.

Yesterday was overall awful for me in ways that were due to other people being completely thoughtless in understandable ways. I'm still kind of mad at Scott because we've been married for 25 years. I ought to be able to count on him to be paying attention and to advocate for me when I can't do it myself.

He feels that it's unfair for me to expect him to understand and to keep current on all of my health issues. From his point of view, I need to tell him specifically when there's an issue and then remind him when it's pertinent. Every damned time it comes up.

( Details and venting )

I was upset enough last night that I just stayed in our room and didn't interact except with Scott and Cordelia. I was afraid that I'd either break down crying or actually punch somebody. (One BIL mansplains loudly and constantly. My FIL is evangelical about whatever he's currently into and won't accept the possibility that the research is questionable).

Nobody intentionally hurt me. I had hoped to avoid having people realize that it was more than me feeling physically unwell, but Scott tells me that everyone knows I'm upset.

Scott went out and got me a tiny container of Haagen-Daaz last night. I watched a bunch of episodes of Murder She Wrote and tried to calm down. I just still found myself getting cranky and picking at inconsistencies and misuse of vocabulary and generally not being to sort of person who could handle being around extended family.

Today, I ended up with both a menstrual migraine and cramps and so only went downstairs briefly for breakfast. I took Tylenol when I got up. I took naproxen two hours later and an Amerge not long after that. I took another Amerge four hours after the first. I can sit up without dizziness/head pain now. I still have nausea and cramps.

I don't usually get both cramps and migraine, so yesterday's upset may be contributing. It might also just be perimenopause and crap timing.

I expect to go down for dinner, but mainly, I want to go home and not have to deal with this.

I got one beta read done yesterday. It was the shorter one that required less focus, so I've still got the harder one to tackle.

I'm at the point on the new long story where I just want to post it and not care at all that parts of it don't work. I'm stomping hard on the urge, but since I'm not currently doing anything with it, part of me just wants to be able to check off that it's done. This waiting thing is hard.

My body has let me know that, no, I'm still not getting out of perimenopause. That means I slept badly last night and likely will again tonight which, in turn, means this week is going to be bad in that direction. The odds of my still being sentient by the time we get to the game session on Wednesday evening are abysmal.

I was hoping to sleep in a bit, but I reached the point by about 8:00 where any sharp sound made my adrenaline spike. That included things like Scott passing gas.

I worked a little bit more on my idea of a pain scale. I realized as I did it that I was making more of a chronic pain scale than an acute one. Doctors tend to ask about the acute side, but the chronic side is a lot more important to my ability to function.

( My rough draft pain scale )

I'm not sure how to classify things like waking up in pain and having it slowly go away over the course of 30 minutes to an hour or what sort of modification for the scale occurs when I have one bit of me that hurts sharply or overwhelmingly enough that I temporarily lose track of the other things that hurt.

Scott is anxious about doing well at his new job. Nothing terrible has happened, but he's feeling like anything going wrong could destroy his life and therefore mine and Cordelia's. Vast responsibility. From what I can tell, he's really well suited to this job, and the people he's working with are being really supportive, so I'm treating it as jitters rather than as something with a strong basis in reality. Big change is really, really terrifying.

I had an appointment with the sleep disorders clinic yesterday.

evalerie gave me a ride there. I took the bus home. Climbing the hill was interesting because I was feeling both really, really cold and really, really overheated. My hands and ears ached from the cold, and I knew that my bare arms would be unhappy if I took off my coat, but I very badly wanted to because my down coat felt like too much. It was in the mid-20s F, I think, and it was windy, so this was not about my coat being too heavy for the weather.

The PA I saw at the sleep disorders clinic thinks my c-PAP stuff is all really good. The fact that I don't feel like I'm sleeping particularly better isn't under consideration, just that I'm averaging 0.3 apnea episodes per hour. I think that, mostly, she was of the mind that the real problem right now is my window for sleeping meaning that I'm not getting more than six hours any school night.

The Story I'm Not Writing is something like a dozen words short of 22K now. My Worldbuilding Exchange story is almost at 500 words (I've used some html tags which Gdocs counts weirdly, so I need to see how AO3 counts the dratted thing). I did some brainstorming about it yesterday. Right now, I just have to buckle down and keep going back. I can only manage about thirty words at a time because it's a weird style for me, one that's not poetry but more in that direction in terms of the effort to get the pieces in the right places. I don't have time to count on rewriting, so this may end up being it.

Anyway... 500 more words on this. I can do this.