whew

This has been a big week, my friends. I stayed home sick three days. (And only worked a few hours on the other two days.) I finished knitting one project, started another, and went shopping for yarn three times. Or was it four? S.Ball, She Gre, Chatty, Ogram, and my parents came over at various times to keep me company.

Finally, yesterday I wrote a polite, reasonable 1250-word e-mail to the person who I think has primary responsibility for my misery of the last four months explaining exactly how I have been feeling and exactly what behavior and actions by that person have led to my feeling this way. So far, response to the e-mail (from that person and the next person up the management chain) has been good.

This is no fun, people, and I don't know where it's going to lead. But I feel super tough and awesome for actually standing up to the meanie. Rawr. And today I got my appetite back. I hadn't seen it in a while.

mmmm, white food

I mentioned my stupid stomach? This is the kind of thing I ate while I was in Oregon:

Saturday night we went to the house of one of Kay Ray's friends, who is a fabulous cook and made beautiful food for everyone. Including some special boiled starches just for me. Sigh. (I'm back on normal food now, pretty much.)

oh, my stomach of stupidness

Hey - things are looking up at work. (I know, I have said this before, but let me have my moment of optimism, please.) I may feel this way partly because I'm taking a bunch of sick days starting tomorrow. It's legit, folks - my doctor wrote a note and everything.

omg I thought I was the only one

Sometimes when I drink certain things I get a shooting pain around my jaw joint. (The TMJ, if you prefer.) Usually it's sweet alcoholic drinks. Hard cider can be lethal, and last night's May Punch started stabbing me toward the end of drink #2, particularly when I ate the alcohol-soaked strawberries. But it doesn't have to be alcohol. I've had it happen with orange juice, too.

Today for the first time it occurred to me to google this thing and see if I could come up with any explanations, and the *only* thing I could find was this. It's a forum on some kind of health site where basically everyone says, omg I thought I was the only one! Which I did. But people seem to be describing a variety of different pains and anyway, nobody has any idea what it is. Well, people have many ideas (allergies! blocked salivary glands! Hodgkin's disease!) but no evidence.

Ever heard of this? What the heck?

intestines

I just wrote a blog post about my digestive issues of the last 24 hours, then decided nobody really needs to read that. I'll summarize by saying I'm limiting my greasy food intake from now on, and that this applies double to tempura at so-so Japanese restaurants.

feet

Today I went to the podiatrist about my dumb feet. After the doctor saw me, an assistant guy came in to set me up with new insoles and heel lifts. While I was putting them in, he was like, "I have those same insoles." He said he has the same foot thing as me, and when he had it really bad he was working three jobs and was on his feet 16 hours a day. "At the end of the day, my feet hurt so bad I just wanted to take them off."

Yeah...I mostly sit down at work. It kind of put my complaints about my feet (poor me, I walked a lot when I was on vacation in Europe) into perspective.

let the blogging commence

I'm back home, and I have pictures! I took nearly 1,200 (yikes) so you will be seeing a verrrrrry small selection.

A brief vacation overview: I was away for a little over two weeks. Most of that time I was in Berlin, but I spent last weekend, Thursday to Monday, in Poland. This trip had large quantities of history, music, good people, and reading. Also, sleep. And art. Also, a heck of a lot of drizzly rain.

It turns out Berlin is a pretty casual-dressing town, so I didn't feel conspicuous wandering the streets in my giant white sneakers. Unfortunately, wearing my giant white sneakers was not enough to keep my feet from hurting almost all of the time. Stupid feet.

whine

I'm still sick, and this is lame. I keep having nasty coughing fits. Like, the kind where you think you're going to throw up. (This was the secondary soundtrack when Miss Shirley and Her.Cat came over to watch Serenity last night - lucky girls!) This morning I woke up and coughed for an hour and a half before I got out of bed. My stomach muscles are starting to hurt. Once in grad school I coughed so much, I pulled a muscle in my rib cage. That sucked.

cold virus is my nemesis

Guess what? I'm sick. Less than two days after I filled in for someone who'd lost her voice, my own voice started threatening to leave. It's just a cold, but a lot of people in the chorus this fall have had something that started as a cold and turned into a days-long bout of laryngitis. Gah. Also, it hurts when I talk.

I'm going to try to not to talk until Friday. I stayed home part of today (for the three hours I was at work, I used charades and note-writing), and I probably won't go in tomorrow. I hate being sick. And I can't call anyone. And I'm planning the cast party, and it's stressing me out. Sigh.

pillow love

The other day S.Vix and I were talking about insomnia over empanadas, and I said I'd never understood people who are all into their pillows, but then I got this weird new pillow and now I totally sleep better and have fewer headaches in the morning. The pillow was sent to me at my former employer - some company seemed to think I was going to write about pillows, so they kept sending different ones. And S.Vix was all, and you've never even written about them on your blog!

So. For the record, I am in love with this pillow:


(I came across the box today and threw it away after I took this photo...maybe now I'll remember to look here the next time I'm in the market for a pillow.)

mem'ries

This book quest is pretty much out of control. This week I finished two memoirs.

One was Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon. It was a bestseller, like, 25 years ago and it's been my bedtime reading for the last several months. After the writer lost his job and his marriage fell apart, he packed up a truck and drove a loop around the country on minor roads. It took forever to read because it's just really dense. He went to a lot of places and had a lot of conversations with a lot of people in bars and stores and with cops who wanted to know why he was parked on a side street in the middle of the night. (Toward the end of the journey: "I'd traveled ten thousand miles and had not encountered a single hoodlum. But I'd been taken for one several times.")

Blue Highways is a really lovely portrait of small-town America circa 1980. And he spends very little time on his inner ruminations. He starts a brief early chapter like this: "A pledge: I give this chapter to myself. When done with it, I will shut up about that topic." And he basically does. Contrast this with Eat, Pray, Love, another memoir that I read this summer and loved but which is 100% about the writer and her thoughts.

Similarly, the one I just finished is all about the author. It is Acquainted With the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children. I started it about three years ago because I'd recently met Paul Raeburn, and an advance copy appeared in the free pile at work, so I thought I'd, yknow, learn about this near-stranger's dying marriage, innermost thoughts, and extraordinarily troubled kids. It's fascinating and infuriating and depressing all at once - his kids come out ok, but they had devoted middle-class parents with health insurance and the energy to fight the endless battles required to get care for a mentally ill child. A lot of kids are not so lucky. So, yay for Paul Raeburn writing a book about it. And yay for the relentless light he shines on his own lousy parenting moments and the crappy relationship between him and his wife.

baby (no baby yet)

In case you're not keeping track, it is now (now!) past Miss Shirley's due date. In 7.5 hours, she's scheduled for an induction. Since this baby is approximately the size of Rhode Island, it could take a while, but by this time tomorrow, we should have a whole new human being walking - no, wait, crawling - no, wait, lying around - the earth with us.

I'm not sure what to call the baby. Little Miss is already taken, so.... Baby Miss? Orlando? (That's an initials-based joke. Might be a little complicated, though, not to mention this unfortunate resonance.) Baby O? Piglet? (Name joke.)

Well, whatever I call her, I bet she's going to be pretty darn cool. Welcome to the world, Piglet!

Piglet. Heh. Ok, ok, Miss S gets veto power, but...any suggestions?

public service announcement

If you have a dog, you should not bring it to a party at the house of people who own two cats. Particularly if those cats do not like dogs. Here's why:

I got to a barbecue tonight just a few minutes after a couple with a new dog (a pound dog, so he was a year old, but very puppylike and very interested in the cats). One of the cats was downstairs, but, as I stood in the kitchen door, decided he'd rather not be downstairs anymore and used my foot to launch himself at the stairs. Awesome. The cuts were more dramatic four hours ago, when they were all bloody. Fortunately, the wife of the birthday honoree is a doctor. Ok, so, she's a pathologist - not necessarily the first doctor you look to in a trauma situation - but she set me up with some neosporin and some bandaids and all was good.

She felt really bad about it, but I don't blame the cat - I blame the idiots with the dog.

sunscreen

In honor of the sunny season, this New York Times article points out a fun fact I've learned from reporting on skin cancer: the link between sun and melanoma (the deadly kind of skin cancer) is weak. Very very weak. Sun causes the other kinds of skin cancer, for sure, but they don't usually kill you. I still wear sunscreen, obviously - sunburns suck, and anyway, I don't want to turn all wrinkly. I've always thought the wrinkle angle would be a better one to work when you're trying to discourage teenage girls from tanning. Skin cancer? Might happen. Wrinkles? Heck yeah, you're going to get wrinkles. Premature wrinkles and nasty, leathery skin.

take a monkey break

Yesterday the monkey fell off something. Given the monkey's lifestyle, which involves much climbing things and running into things, this could not really be described as a surprise. But, unfortunately, he broke his arm and had to have surgery and stay in the hospital overnight. Ugh. Inconveniently, Monkeydad is in Hawaii at the moment.

So last night after work I hung out with the monkey for an hour and a half while Tall L went home, showered, and collected the preferred stuffed animals and comfy clothes. The monkey had pins in one arm, an IV in the other, and a healthy whine all over. And, really, who can blame him. Most of the time I was there, he was either asleep or transfixed by the Jimmy Neutron DVD, which was good, because the rest of the time he was saying "I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home!"

I took a three-pronged approach: sympathy [I know, monkey, I'm sorry]; reason [when you feel better you can go home. you can go home tomorrow. when are you going home? tomorrow. see the sky outside? it's getting dark! that means it's almost night! and after night is tomorrow!]; and pudding. Pudding was the most effective. Tall L and her mom (who flew in last night) told me I pretty much have the parenting thing down.

The latest news is that they expect to be discharged very soon.

lepramuseet

You know how the proper name for leprosy is Hansen's disease? Well, Dr. Hansen was from Bergen. Apparently Norwegians did a lot of leprosy research. So I was mighty disappointed that the leprosy museum is only open in summer.

hospital drama

So, it turns out they don't list *all* of the possible complications of cataract surgery on the consent documents. I think the increase in intraocular pressure and the resulting extreme eye pain weren't out of the realm of possibility - it's rare, but it happens. However, the cracked ribs and fainting came as a bit more of a surprise. Ask me for the funny story someday.

She really is fine now, other than the extreme rib pain. I pulled an intercostal muscle once and oh my GOD I've never felt pain like that.

REI sale

Here's a hospital picture I'm proud of.
That's my brand-new down jacket, the green spot on the floor behind the wheelchair. I went to the REI winter clearance sale Friday after work and...kind of went crazy. The thing is, this nerd workshop in Norway, it's not only for dancing - it's also for cross-country skiing. And I don't really own cross-country skiing clothes. And, uh, they had a lot of them at REI. (But the sale was so *good*! And, ok, the down jacket isn't actually for skiing, but it's cute! and warm! and lightweight!)

Anyway, nice of REI to schedule their winter sale (a) in the middle of the coldest cold snap we've had in years and (b) a week before I leave for Norway.

bad day

I'm going to tell you the only things that struck me as funny all day, and also tell you who saved the day from irredeemable badness.

1. I can't find this guy on the internet, because I'm too tired, but I swear I saw a plaque on the wall in the hospital commemorating a doctor named Daniels Park. Which means Johns Hopkins wasn't the only prominent Baltimorean of his era with an inappropriately plural first name. Heh.

2. My mom went through this phase where she'd just woken up from a nap and was talking absolute nonsense. It was a little scary but hilarious at the same time. She was talking to me about black sheep and asking if I'd gotten them together. (My contribution to the conversation was mostly, like, "What?") She mumbled for a while, then one of the mumbles ended like a question, but I thought maybe I could maybe get away with ignoring it, since it made no sense, and then she went, "MMM?" like she was waiting for my answer, and I continued to not say anything, and finally, she said, totally annoyed, "[TOWWAS]? Did you make it to the birthday party?"

3. Tall L saved the day. Thanks, Tall L. I called her when I needed a ride home from freakin' Baltimore, and she said she could do it, and I almost burst into tears right then. Thanks, man. Strictly speaking, some hospital staff saved the day, too, but whatever - that's their job. It was purely recreational for the L.

My mom's totally fine, by the way. (They didn't even admit her to the hospital.)

I'm a failure

Last night I didn't get home til about 1:30 a.m., and I hadn't had the foresight to blog before work, so that means my streak is broken. This is what happens when your silly company won't let you blog at work. Fools. Apparently they expect me to WORK or something.

Ok, I was so busy yesterday at work, I didn't really have time to blog. But if I had, I would've shared this quote from a transcript I was working from. So, I'm writing a huge (huge - it's about 35 pages in Word) thing for our website about a sensitive medical condition. It's one that, if you don't have it, you might not understand that people who have it are really sensitive about it, and you might ask a lot of stupid questions.

So I talked to a totally cool counselor about all the issues surrounding this condition, and here she was talking about how to avoid someone's questions about the somewhat controversial decisions you may have made about your care:

"But overall, if you're okay, everybody else is okay. So, if you feel
comfortable with what you've done, and you present yourself that way,
people generally are a little bit more interested in talking about
themselves anyway."

That totally makes me laugh. Because it's so true - it's like distracting a small child (or me) with something shiny. You get them talking about themselves, and indeed, most people probably would completely forget to bug you about how you got pregnant at age 45.