Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: health

  • Ragtastic

    I got my first period over 30 years ago. I had been told “the facts” and literature handed out in school included lovely positive affirmations like, “You may have heard negative slang terms, like ‘the curse’, but menstruation is a natural part of life and being a woman, and it isn’t anything to be afraid of.” I approached ‘becoming a woman’ with an open mind and solid scientific biological knowledge.

    It didn’t take long for me to figure out they’d been lying sacks of shit, and I spent decades looking forward to menopause and the time my body would knock that shit off. I heard about hot flashes, which sounded like hell, especially considering how much I hated being hot, but mostly what I knew had to do with NO MORE PERIODS. Ya-fucking-hoo.

    And stupid me, I just sort of assumed that somewhere between having that bitch like clockwork, and never having that bitch again, she’d just fade away, like a friend who has found another friend to spend time with.

    So imagine my delight to discover that the time between normal menstruation and menopause – PERIMENOPAUSE (which can last up to 10 years) is just another giant “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little cat too” from that evil witch of a universe. Really, who wouldn’t love symptoms like – I don’t know – MORE FREQUENT PERIODS as a way to ease on down the road to never having them again. It is just what I was always hoping for.

    For fun, let’s list some of the other symptoms:

    • Hot flashes – Yeah, I’d heard of this, but it was always portrayed as a wave of elevated body temperature, maybe some sweating. Turns out it can also just be being hot all the time, and not in the good way. Remember how much I hate being too warm? So for old age my body is just going to have me be too warm even when it is 60 degrees in the house? Fuck you, body.
    • Worsening PMS – Wow. That’s just adorable What about those of us who already had PMDD? Awesome.
    • Increased Irritability – Have you met me?  I’ve already got irritability covered. My entire life is an exercise in rage management, and increased irritability does not make this any easier.
    • PERIODS – Irregular periods; shorter, lighter periods; heavier periods, flooding; phantom periods, shorter cycles, longer cycles, more clots, mid-cycle spotting – ARGH! So many options, and of course my body goes ahead with HEAVIER, FLOODING, SHORTER CYCLES and just generally more fucking unpleasantness.  Because you don’t just want to have a regular period to hate, you sometimes want to suddenly find yourself standing in a surprise puddle of blood when you didn’t even get to stab anyone.
    • Crashing fatigue – This is super entertaining for somebody whose entire self-worth is measured by how much shit she can accomplish.
    • Depression – HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
    • Feelings of dread, apprehension, doom, anxiety – My super hero alter ego was already Worst Case Scenario Girl – so perhaps you can extrapolate how fun this is.
    • Difficulty concentrating, disorientation, mental confusion, disturbing memory lapses – Remember the self-worth measurement? Well at least I can still remember all the ways I am a failure. What I can’t do is remember what I walked into the kitchen to get.
    • Mood swings – I can swing from annoyed, to furious, to annoyed, to depressed in the space of 5 minutes. Sadly all this swinging doesn’t burn as many calories as you might think. Swinging with a dagger would probably be better exercise. Stabercize.
    • Trouble sleeping through the night – I’ve already been battling Insomnia since puberty, but it turns out Insomnia had some weapons in reserve. Because lack of sleep will definitely help my mood. Good times.
    • Incontinence, especially upon sneezing, laughing; urge incontinence – In case you don’t know what this word means, it means inability to control your bladder. Because it isn’t enough to have your bladder ruined by having a baby, with constant exercises to improve that bit of stupidity. You finally get to get older and just have everything go to piss because your body hates you, now more than ever.
    • Aching, sore joints, muscles and tendons, increased tension in muscles – A total party. It’s not enough that I’ve been suffering from chronic pain since I was 10 years old, now I spread a layer of new pain frosting on top of all that old pain.
    • Headache change: increase or decrease – I’ll give you one guess which option my body chose.
    • Hair loss or thinning, head, pubic, or whole body; increase in facial hair – Yep, thin pathetic hair on your head and the ability to grow a full beard. It’s quite an upgrade.
    • Changes in body odor – This is so disturbing. It isn’t even necessarily about it getting worse, just changing, so that the person standing closest to you all the damn time no longer smells familiar.  Gives the creepy sense of there being a stranger in the room when I am sitting all alone. I guess eventually it will just be that ubiquitous “old lady smell”, so at least I have that to look forward to.
    • Alcohol intolerance – Spectacular, so I can’t even drown my increased annoyance in booze because alcohol makes me sick. Yay!

     

    Don’t worry. There are lots more possible symptoms.  Cool shit like heart palpitations.  I just didn’t have time to write about all of them.  Clearly my days are numbered, and I need to spend most of them  looking for my… those metal things that open the door to the car, which I parked somewhere around here, I’m sure.

  • Whole Lotta Nothing

    Ever the one to jump on every trend that goes by (if you can’t hear the sarcasm here, you should probably go read a different blog), I decided a while back to give The Whole 30 a try.

    Well, not exactly.

    I’d seen it mentioned approximated 19208934293859048549 times on Facebook, and somebody had asked one of my facebook friends that was on it a very basic question, so in a moment of Let Me Google That For You, Moron, I looked it up and answered, so I was aware of it. I didn’t really care.

    Then I read an article, The Boy With a Thorn in His Joints, and suddenly I became interested in… something. The article definitely doesn’t talk about The Whole 30, but it talks about food and joint pain, and well, I’ve got a whole lot of joint pain, going back three decades. More distressing to me is the level of chronic pain my daughter is in. Since The Whole 30 is basically an elimination diet (although it allows a few things I think we probably should have tried to give up too. Anyhow, knowing it is easier to get people on board when there is a website with instructions, I presented The Whole 30 as the plan to my family, and we agreed to do it. It took a while to get started because we needed to try to find 30 days when my husband would be in the country. This is more difficult than it seems like it should be.

    Yesterday was day 30. My husband ended up unexpected leaving the country on day 28. See? More difficult than one might think. He made it through day 29 via snacks brought on to the plane, and then just tried to do his best on the final day.

    So – how was it?

    I totally want to be typing about how much better I feel. Unfortunately it just isn’t true. I feel better than when I eat like crap, of course, but I don’t feel any better than when I eat my normal version of “good”. Over and above how I normally prefer to eat, the major differences were giving up dairy (I’ve never done that before), giving up gluten (I often avoid grains, but have never worried about small amounts of gluten in things), and giving up soy (which I never really paid attention to, but is in fuck all everything, ugh).

    So, now we start adding things back in.. One thing at a time, to look for a reaction, treating it more as an allergy/intolerance elimination study. Today is the first day that I can add something back in, and… I just don’t care. I mean, I am super glad it is over because it is a major inconvenience to avoid all gluten and soy. but today I mostly just feel like crap, so I’ve felt decidedly disinterested so far. Definitely not the less pain, more energy feeling I was hoping for.

  • I’m Living

    Today in the car my daughter and I were discussing an assignment she needs to do, a series of photos based around poem or book, with a theme of “family”.

    I told her, “Oh, you could do that famous children’s book.”

    “I don’t know which book you mean,” she replied.

    I couldn’t respond because I had burst into tears.

    Okay… so THAT was stable.

    I pulled myself together and attempted to continue the conversation and immediately burst into tears again.

    WTF?  Back off emotional breakdown, I don’t have time for this.

    The book I was referring to is Love You Forever, by Robert Munsh.  Clearly the recent events with my father are shoving my parents’ mortality down my throat until I am choking on it.

    Things continue to be emotionally and mentally difficult in my life for a variety of reasons, and the health of my father is just one of those.  The recent heat wave has also been brutal on me, of course.  On the good news front, my frequency and severity of migraines is getting better under control.  Working hard on remembering and appreciating the bits that are going well.

    Deep breaths.

    But all day and into the night, a verse keeps echoing in my mind.

    “I’ll love you forever,
    I’ll like you for always,
    as long as I’m living
    my daddy you’ll be.”

  • A Turkey of a Holiday

    This year for Thanksgiving, I am thankful that I was sick.

    Okay, that is a lie.

    I mean, I was sick, that is true, but I was really pissed off about it.

    Actually, even that isn’t true. I was so sick I wasn’t pissed off about anything. I was just blah. I was really blah, and as bummed as I could muster the energy to be, about being sick for Thanksgiving.

    The week started out with a surprise sudden visit from my father, who sent me an email late Friday night while I was in Vegas (Vegas Baybee!) to say he needed to come down for business and would be arriving on Monday.

    Hmm, maybe I should start back even farther. On Wednesday of the week prior to Thanksgiving I got the husband from the airport when he returned from China. On Wednesday night we had dinner with a friend. On Thursday morning we drove to Vegas. On Thursday night we hung out with friends in Vegas and ditto on Friday (more on that later). There may have been a lot of eating and booze consumption. On Saturday we expected to leave after lunch to head home. We did, but that ended up being almost 4 PM. Why were we heading back on Saturday instead of Sunday? Because we had a party to attend on Saturday night.

    We drove into town, went home, ate a quick dinner and spoke to the teen monster, and said hello to all the animals, and then got cleaned up a bit, dressed and headed out to a party. We left when the police helicopter showed up. Don’t ask, I don’t know.

    On Sunday we had somebody over for dinner (braised pork in a apple Zinfandel reduction). Then on Monday I picked up my father & co. at the airport and ate too much for dinner and dessert and stayed up late talking. Indy woke me several times in the night. It is always a crapshoot (sometimes literally) as to whether she sleeps through the whole nights, wakes me up once to go out, or wakes me up every hour for one reason or another.

    My point is, that while I should probably not have been surprised to come down sick after all that, I was too out of it to notice that I was sick upon waking Tuesday morning. It wasn’t until I was about 50 miles into a 200 mile round trip with my father (decided to drive him to his business thing) that I realized I had a fever and all my skin hurt and my neck hurt.

    By the time business was over (during which I napped in the backseat of my car) and we made it back home, my hair hurt, all my muscles hurt, my joints hurt, and my bones hurt. My stomach felt mildly gross, and I was too hot and too cold. I fell into bed and stayed there for many hours, until my stomach advanced to feeling incredibly gross, at which point I had to sometimes leave bed.

    Around 24 hours later, I felt really, really bad, which was way better than I’d felt the day before. I decided I’d be fine to go pick up the teen monster instead of asking somebody else to do me the favor of picking her up (I’d already had somebody else take her). Clearly, I was still feverish and delusional, because I was in no shape to go pick her up.

    I finally made dinner on Saturday night because it was the last night the people I originally invited for Thanksgiving could do it. I still didn’t really feel very good, so I had to scale back on a lot of things. I washed my hands A LOT, and tried really hard to be extra careful about everything, and used gloves a lot of the time too, but really, I worried that I was serving Plague Feast.

    Anyhow – Menu (not overly traditional)

    Caviar (with little toasts and creme fraiche)
    Spicy Marinated Mushrooms, Garlic Stuff Olives, and Castelvetrano Olives (one my absolute favorites, even though my husband insists on telling the same lame joke every time I serve them. Frighteningly, some guests believe his joke.)
    Salmon (with cream cheese, sesame toast rounds, capers, onions and lemons)
    Cheese Plate
    Sourdough Bread and Garlic Butter
    Zucchini and Yellow Squash Salad
    Cranberry Orange Sauce
    New York Steak Cubes seasoned in salt, paprika and coffee, then wrapped in bacon
    Turkey (prepared with a dry rub and the cooked on the BBQ grill with a Turkey Cannon filled with beer and garlic and oranges)
    Rutabagas, Turnips, Parsnips, and Butternut Squash roasted in duck fat

    I also made Egg Nog (and spiced rum) Ice Cream with Ginger Snap Cookies in it.

    After I immediately made Turkey and Wild Rice Soup to send home with one of the guests. Mmmmnn, plague soup. Although he reported back that it was quite possibly the best soup he’d ever had, ever, and failed to come down with the plague. Maybe I just lightly seasoned it with plague. Kind of like eating perfectly prepared fugu, with just enough toxin there to feel it and remind you of life, without enough to kill you.

    Anyhow, I did nothing at all on Monday, and did very little on Tuesday, and just tried to recover. I am finally feeling not too bad. Now I will post this, and finish making dinner, which is currently on the stove (and in the oven, and in the rice cooker).

  • Unsteady

    I’m sleeping downstairs because Indy can’t reasonably make it upstairs tonight. I don’t want her to be alone, so I’ll stay down next to her. She did well, overall, but is having quite a difficult time as she is recovering from the surgery. The vet thinks that it is due to the aftereffects of the Morphine and Valium on her system. I don’t like it. It stresses me out. I want her to be okay NOW.

    She is getting better.

    She has absolutely ZERO patience for Watson right now, so we are keeping them apart. This makes Watson a bit sad. Poor little guy.

    Really, I’m just feeling stressed and sad. She has been part of the family for more than 15 years, and while I know it won’t last forever, I really need the downfall to not be because of a procedure I chose to let them do.

    But, hey, she struggled over to sleep by my feet. She likes being near to me, and I like having her near.

    I wonder if she is young in her dreams.

  • The State Farm Thing

    On Friday night I was driving on the freeway, with my daughter in the passenger seat, in stop and go traffic. The vehicles in front of me stopped. I stopped. The driver behind me didn’t stop. Well, he did stop, but he did it by running into us.

    I was driving a compact SUV (2006 Ford Escape Hybrid). He was driving a midsize SUV (2006 Nissan Pathfinder).

    He jumped out of his car almost immediately, stopped to pick up a hunk of his car and came up to my window. I was feeling a bit shaken and scattered, and was concerned about my daughter, so it took me a bit of fumbling to get the window down. The first thing he wanted to know is if we were okay. It took me longer to ask the same question of him, and while his immediately hopping out of his vehicle was a good indication, and my distraction over my upset daughter played a part, I am not proud that it wasn’t the first thing I wanted to know from him.

    We agreed to pull over before exchanging information. He gathered some more bits from his car off of the freeway. I put on my signal and had to wait and wait for enough of a break in traffic to move over two lanes and pull up onto an island dividing the long exit lane from the freeway. He followed me over. A police officer stopped to see if we needed an ambulance. We said we did not. The officer said he was on his way to a call so he could not fill out a report, but he would have a trooper come. It was raining, so began to exchange information inside the Pathfinder. We traded insurance cards. We were both with State Farm, but with different agents. I began to type his information into my phone. He was writing mine on a scrap of paper. Then a man from FIRST knocked on the window. He wanted to know how much longer we would be and if the cars were drivable. I said mine was. The driver of the Pathfinder said he didn’t think his could go very far. FIRST asked if we needed an ambulance and again we said no. He asked us to exit the freeway and exchange information in a hotel parking lot toward the top of the ramp. The exit lane was moving along at a good clip, and he said he would block traffic when we were ready to go. We gathered up our own insurance cards, and agreed to meet up in the parking lot.

    FIRST blocked traffic and then followed us to the parking lot. The drive to the parking lot convinced the driver of the Pathfinder that his vehicle was not really drivable, and FIRST called a tow truck for him. We again exchanged cards. He had lost the scrap of paper and needed to start all over again. I double checked the information I had put in my phone, and took a photo of his insurance card. He made some comment about his lack of technology. We traded drivers licenses next and I typed in that information and took a photo of it too. I also took a photo of his license plate.

    Our condition was not serious enough that it warranted Emergency Room care. We attempted to go to Urgent Care on Friday night, but everywhere was closed. I did email my State Farm office on Friday night and provided them with the information and the photos that I took. They were amused by the photos, since they were “not necessary” but I’d rather have that info on a photo, in case I copied down something incorrectly.

    On Saturday we spent the first part of the day in Urgent Care. Then we got a prescription filled, and then I went to bed. Saturday and Sunday was mainly about sleeping and resting. State Farm called and left me a message on Saturday. This was based on the other driver’s claim. I did not take or return the call as I was not feeling well enough.

    On Monday, I did take a call from State Farm. She was was following up on the Saturday message. The claim from his side already had a claim number and they were accepting all responsibility on the claim, so I just needed to decide where I wanted to have my car repair work done. I got information on how to look up their preferred shops, as that would be easiest for securing payment of the repairs, and told her I would call her back with my choice, and got her contact information.

    I also spoke to my insurance agent’s office on Monday. They confirmed that they would be handling the medical portion of the claim.

    Most of Monday was still spent sleeping.

    On Tuesday I selected a conveniently located body shop from the list and called and left a message about my choice for the State Farm person who was handling the auto claim. After close of business for the insurance company on Tuesday, the body shop called and told me that they had received an assignment from State Farm to give an estimate on the repair work and wanted to let me know when I could bring in my 2005 Toyota Prius.

    Umm…

    Okay. We do own a 2005 Toyota Prius, which is also insured by State Farm. This was annoying and a bit strange, but it seemed within the realm of a clerical error. I told the body shop that I would contact the insurance company and they said they would be in touch when they had the correct assignment from them.

    On Wednesday morning I called the woman who was assigned our claim and spoke to her in person. I explained that the body shop called and they had the wrong car down as authorized for repairs. She was surprised and asked which car it was, and I told her it was the other car on the policy, the Ford Escape. She said that she would get it straightened out at the body shop.

    Soon after, another woman called from State Farm, about the medical claim. She wanted to go over all the information of what my coverage was and assure me that everything would be handled.

    Thirty minutes after that, yet another call came in from State Farm. Like everybody else, this woman’s words were polite, however her tone and manner were different. She began by asking my about injuries. I gave her a surface answer and then interrupted to tell her that somebody had already spoken to me today to give me all the details on the injury claim. She said that was fine, she was calling about the auto claim. (Okay… then why ask about the injuries?) She then begins asking about the accident, wanting a description of events. This conversation is NOTHING like any of the other conversations have been. This is probing and adversarial in tone. I describe the events to her, and she is asking for details like how many lanes there were and exactly which lane we were in.

    Then she gets to asking what car I was driving. I tell her. Then she wants to know if the Toyota Prius was involved in an accident on the same day. I assure her it was not. She tells me that I can file another claim for my Ford Escape, but that they would not be covering that without an investigation. She the begins to go into details on how I need to get my car inspected. What for, I want to know, to prove that I am not lying about what car I am driving? She assures me that she did not say I was lying, she is just saying that there is “a dispute of the facts”.

    Right.

    I ask her who is disputing the facts, and she tells me the other driver is, and I tell her that I don’t believe her. I tell her there is no way that the other driver told anybody that he hit a Toyota Prius. That makes no sense, how could he just happen to claim he hit a different car that I happen to own. It is obviously some kind of clerical error in pulling up the policy. She says, that she was told by the claim adjuster that there is a dispute in facts and they have opened an investigation. She begins to tell me about how to get my vehicles inspected.

    I explained to her that I would not be getting my vehicles inspected because I challenge the very notion that there is an actual dispute of facts. I tell her to speak to the other driver.

    We go around and around and eventually we hang up, and I am just shaking with anger. I am in pain, I am on medication, and now the insurance company that I have been insured by for over 20 years. Yes, I’ve had my auto insurance with them for more than 20 years, and they have my home owners insurance too, and in that time I filed one single claim when somebody hit my car in a parking lot and didn’t leave a note (I am not 100% sure I actually filed, I might have been too worried about my rates going up, and that was at least 15 years ago and I just can’t remember what I decided to do). Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, my ass.

    She calls back more than an hour later and tells me that she has spoken to the other driver and “NOW he says that the other car was a Ford Escape.”

    Sure. NOW he says that, indicating that BEFORE he was saying a Prius and that it simply was not State Farms fault.

    I say bullshit.

    And here is the thing.

    There are two ways that the wrong car ended up in the system, and neither was by their other driver saying that he hit a Toyota Prius.

    Either:
    A) because we share the same company, it pulled up all of our details when they typed in our insurance info, and a slip of the mouse or whatever, managed to select the wrong car – and then never went over the info with the driver in a way that included mentioning the type car because it was such a straight forward case.
    B) he gave them the wrong policy number because I gave him the wrong card causing them to pull up the wrong car and then never went over the info with the driver in a way that included mentioning the type of car because it was such a straight forward case

    Now, I agree that B is a possibility. While I am 100% certain that I gave him the correct card the first time I handed him the card. I absolutely checked to make sure I did. He managed to lose that info and had to start from scratch when we moved to the hotel parking lot. We were both flustered and time number two I was just handing him back the card, and I probably didn’t really look at it again first. So, I could have given him the card for the other car. He was coming to realize how screwed up his car was and he might not have thought about the fact the car listed on it was the wrong type of vehicle. We were two people who were stressed after just being involved in an accident. That is possible.

    What pisses me off is that as soon as this problem appears where they have it assigned to one car, and I say it is another, they opened an investigation against me and started treating me as an adversary. That was their first step. A quick phone call to the other driver to just say, “Hey, by the way, did you rear end a car, or an SUV?” would have resolved it right away.

    The claim representative that I called back about the problem didn’t tell me she was going to need to check with the other driver. She didn’t tell me that there was any problem at all. She told me she would fix it with the body shop. Then she went and called the investigation department so they could start questioning me in depth about an accident that wasn’t even my fault.

    I also admit that it might be she was only following procedure, and if that is the case I am not one tiny bit less pissed off at State Farm, because then their official procedure sucks.

    I am not with a different insurance company, hoping to screw State Farm. I am in a state with NO Fault Personal Injury, so I can’t sue their other customer for pain and suffering. I am a State Farm customer too. I don’t care who first filed the claim, they should be treating each of us as covered and cared for customers. They make commercials claiming personal service and that it is about more than just a 20 page obnoxious full of fine print and loopholes policy. They claim it is a company that cares, so how about they make THAT their policy? Because a HUMAN looking at the situation, and treating both parties in the accident as valued customers of State Farm, would have thought that a clerical or some other mix up was a more likely explanation than insurance fraud. Seriously, they can see my record, because I am their customer too. Yet, their first reaction was to assume a person who had been paying them for 20 years without filing any suspicious claims was suddenly going to try to work some bizarre scam by which I substitute a compact SUV that is less likely to have been badly damaged and in which the occupants are less likely to sustain serious injury when being hit by a midsize SUV for the compact car which got listed by the computer as being in the accident.

    They just opened an investigation against me, looking at me for insurance fraud while I was trying to recover physically and mentally from being in an accident. An accident that wasn’t my fault. An accident that their other policy holder had already accepted full responsibility for.

    I’m pissed. Also, I’m still in pain. Also, my daughter is still in pain, more pain than me actually. Guess what upsets me even more than me being in pain?

    So yeah, I am just in an all around bad mood. There has been a lot of shaking and stress and crying this week. I am so tired and so far behind on everything I was supposed to get done this week, and I still need to keep dealing with getting the car repaired, and with finding us a doctor if we are not better by Monday.

    Oh yeah, and I can’t sleep properly and I’m having nightmares.

  • just call me hostile

    Hi.

    I am cranky as all shit, and on drugs. If you say anything that even remotely has a whiff of advice about it, I will lose my shit. You might think that I appreciate your wisdom, but you would be very wrong. Seriously, I am not even slightly fit for human interaction and I used up all of my patience dealing with medical people today. What I want right now is a Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bar and to be left alone. Oh, and dinner at Porterhouse Bistro, except with a restaurant buy out so that nobody else is eating there.

    Friday night we were on our way to the kid’s show (she is on light board). We were making our way to the theater in rainy stop and go and crawl and rush and creep and go and stop traffic. The car in front of me stopped. I stopped. The driver of the Nissan Pathfinder behind me was looking away in hopes of changing lanes, and utterly missed the lack of continue to go.

    BANG

    Ugh.

    Cranky.

    The first thing I did after making sure that Z and I were OKAYish, and the other driver was okay and not a hit and run sort, was twitter “Car accident. Fuck.” which wasn’t really about being geeky. I didn’t have time to call A yet, and my tweets go to both his cell and computer, so it was the easiest way to try to quickly give him a heads-up. It had the rather strange added side effect of telling 50 other people about the accident almost as soon as it happened.

    The guy was polite, a bit overly chatty, licensed, and insured. To illustrate the overly chatty, I can tell you he has three daughters in their 20s, he recently was laid off, and he was on his way to an AA meeting. Police stopped by, FIRST stopped by. Actually, FIRST blocked traffic enough for us to make it off of the freeway and into a parking lot, so that we could more safely exchange info. That was also as far as Mr. Pathfinder could drive. His transmission was not behaving normally, and it looked as though his radiator was cracked, but they could not look inside to see because the hood wouldn’t open anymore. He also had several chunks off of his car that he gathered up off the freeway, like sad toys, and tossed into his backseat. He requested that FIRST call him a tow truck.

    We decided not to do the ambulance thing, for reasons that I am not going to to bother justifying, but there are reasons and I stand by them. As we were close to the theater, and I needed to figure a bunch of things out, I went ahead and drove there and let the kid do the light board thing.

    I sat in the parking lot and looked things up on my phone and made some phone calls. I put in a call to her orthopedic sports medicine specialist back in California, and was able to exchange messages and he wanted her to have x-rays done. I tried to look up urgent care information, but the phone is very limited. The show soon ended and we made our way home. She was hungry, so she had some dinner, while I found the closest urgent care that accepted our insurance and verified that they offered x-rays. Some do not. By this time I was definitely experiencing pain. I had not immediately following the impact. My intention was to go ahead and get us both checked out, although honestly, had she not been hurting, I would not have bothered to go just for myself.

    We decided to wait until A got home since I didn’t really feel like driving. He got home, we made our way to the urgent care place and had trouble finding it. We finally got there, and they had closed a few minutes earlier. I had misread their hours and they are only open from 6 PM until 9 PM. We went home so I could look up other places, but all of them were already closed. A few were open as late as 10 PM, but too far away for us to get to in time. At this point I was in a lot of pain myself, was tired and stressed and pissed and really just fucking hating being in Minnesota instead of California, where I would have been able to deal with this with so much less effort.

    It was a night of not going smoothly, from the new (no choice in the matter) health insurance website, to the car insurance website, to urgent care, to fucking everything. I just wanted to be HOME, and by that I did not mean the fucking rental house.

    Anyhow, we determined that it was definitely not an ER level situation and we did ice and some meds and some bed, with plans to do Urgent Care the next morning at the place that opened earliest.

    Which, is what we did.

    It took hours.

    A few parts stand out.

    The nurse handed me the thermometer and said “Just put it wherever it’s comfortable.” I kept my mouth shut, but Z and I traded looks.

    X-ray techs really rub me the wrong way. When Z was done with her set of films she came out and said, “So… radiology departments just universally suck.” I couldn’t argue.

    The doctor came in after looking at the x-rays and was concerned by something she saw on Z’s and wanted us to wait longer so the radiologist could review it before we left. The radiologist ended up clearing her, and all was well, but it wasn’t a very fun wait, especially for Z.

    Anyhow, x-rays showed no injury to the bones. It is all soft tissue stuff, and just needs time to heal. Ice. Muscle relaxants. Ibuprofen. Time.

    She has a lot of soreness in her neck and shoulders, as well as some in her lower back. I have some soreness in my neck, but it is really pretty good, as long as I don’t tilt it or turn it. I have more pain in my lower back, plus my arms, pectorals and hands hurt.

    When all meds are on board I feel pretty damn okay for about an hour, and then I want to sleep. Mostly we have been sleeping the day away, and drinking a lot of water because we feel very hot and parched.

    Unfortunately my husband goes out of town tomorrow. I’m really not looking forward to dealing with dog walks yet.

    So, yeah.

    How is your weekend?

  • Too Cold

    It is really cold right now.

    It is painfully cold. The wind chill really really has a significant impact at these temperatures.

    Today we bundled up to take the dogs out for a walk. We took the excited dogs out through the backyard and out the back gate. Then we follow this trail through small ravine and get up to the big path behind out house. We even managed to get up to the patch without either kungfuzap or I slipping and falling.

    As soon as we got up there, Indy trudged off to the side and squatted to pee. Then she started to sniff around, and then… Suddenly it was obvious she was miserable and in pain. She was on 3 legs with one foot dangling, but her other foot was hurting too, so she tried to switch favored feet, but the one she put down, she wasn’t controlling properly, and she set it down, standing on the top side of it. This of course made her stumble. Her legs were shaking like crazy, her tail was firmly between her legs.

    I leg her immediately back inside, worried the whole time that she would fall, and I wasn’t sure how on earth I would carry her if she collapsed, because the thing about dressing up like the little brother from A Christmas Story, is that you just aren’t very physically functional. She limped and shook the whole way back in the house. I got back in and sent the kid and London out for a quick run. I told her to run him so they both stayed warmer and to keep an eye on him for signs of discomfort, etc. I then attended to Indy.

    She was just pressing up against me. I was checking her feet for signs of injury. Her legs were still shaking. Then Willow came over and was rubbing against her and boofing and rubbing against her face. This has NEVER happened before. Willow doesn’t like the dogs. Xander likes Indy, but not Willow. It completely freaked me out. I thought that maybe it wasn’t the cold and their was actually something else wrong with her and she was dying and Willow knew it. Ugh.

    Anyhow, slowly has she warmed up, she started to be able to put normal weight on her feet again and eventually she laid down to rest. After she seemed recovered, I just took her out in the backyard so she could finish going to the bathroom. She hurried and did her business with NO extra sniffing around or playing and happily rushed back inside.

    So. Apparently? “Feels like -24” is too cold for Indy. London was still okay, but he obviously felt it.

    I went out to look for booties for her, but didn’t find any in stock. I hadn’t gotten any before because most people report pretty poor results with older dogs who are not used to them, but she needs to be able to get out there and go to the bathroom without injuring her paws, and if this is going to be an extra harsh winter, I need to work something out.

    If I ever were to custom build a house here, I think it would have to involve an indoor dog bathroom room. I have a design all planned out in my head.

  • My Maternal Instincts

    I do not feel great.

    Sinus Pressure

    Achy

    Icky

    *sigh*

    Kid also does not feel great.

    Kid shuffles over to me, looking sleepy and puffy and blah.

    kid: Am I hot?
    me: I’m not sure. There’s a website. We could post a photo and let people vote.
    kid: *gives me a look* No.
    me: *feels kid’s forehead* No. You seem normal.
    kid: I feel hot.
    me: You sure about the photo?
    kid: Please, no.
    me: hrmph

    Even when I am feeling icky, it is the little things that keep me going.

  • Cold (bland) Turkey

    I haven’t been feeling very well, physically. I am extremely busy right now, and very distracted by all the crap going on. When that happens I often forget to take even halfway decent care of myself. I need a chance to reset.

    Starting tomorrow I’ll be cutting out:

    • caffeine
    • all sweets (fake or real sugar)
    • wine (because of the sugar content)
    • carbonated beverages (even unsweetened)

    I will also be cutting way back on sodium.

    I do this every once in a while when I just feel that my body, my needs, and my cravings have gotten out of whack. It usually takes between 2 weeks and 5 weeks for me to perform a reset. Basically as soon as the thought “I really need a cup of coffee” isn’t coming up all the time, I’ll try a cup of coffee. If that one taste triggers me to start desperately wanting coffee, then I know it hasn’t been long enough and I wait another week.

    At some point things go back to what I consider normal and I can, for instance, eat a sweet thing and think, “Oh, that is really good,” and feel completely satisfied, instead of thinking “Give me MORE, right NOW.” Usually some items can be added back before others.

    Also I need to make a concerted effort to take my meds as scheduled each and every day. I am way behind on my blood tests and there is no point going in if I have not managed to keep things regular for a decent amount of time before the test, the results won’t be accurate enough to be worth the bother.

    I am not posting this because I particularly expect any of you to give a shit, it is something I am doing for myself. It is just sort of a warning because the first couple of days I am usually in an extra foul mood. Also a warning to those who eat with me regularly, because I get somewhat boring food wise for a few weeks, the cutting back on sodium has the most impact because I have to be really careful about restaurant foods.