| Oh...right. |
[Apr. 22nd, 2008|08:38 am] |
I've got this line in my userinfo:
I used to announce these purges in my journal, but it was pointed out to me that making such announcements was likely causing the drama I was attempting to avoid.
Clearly, I forgot about that again.
So I've done what I'm going to do about realigning my f'list, made the other entries private, and I'm moving the hell along. |
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| It is my blessing, and my curse.... |
[Dec. 30th, 2007|09:35 pm] |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kshandra: I am a Koosh of very little brain...
firestrike: ...but oh, so very much heart. |
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| Good news/bad news |
[Oct. 23rd, 2007|02:21 pm] |
The good news is I have a doctor's appointment scheduled to get back on my anti-depressants.
The bad news is the only thing available was a week from tomorrow at 12 noon.
This would be bad enough on its own - but, of course, a week from tomorrow is Halloween. So either I show up at work with no costume and have No Fun At All for the four hours I'm there, or I try and have a serious conversation about my mental health wearing a black brocade corset and vampire fangs.*
And so help me, I did NOT front-load the music - Radio IO just has a finely-tuned sense of irony.
*Costume still subject to change, not least because I don't know that anyone here will be able to lace me in properly, and I'm REALLY not hyped on the idea of Doug trying to do it at 0600 before I drop him off at work. |
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| ...and another passes.... |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|12:20 pm] |
(copied largely from a comment I left elsewhere)
Author Madeleine L'Engle, whose novel "A Wrinkle in Time" has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88.
Amazingly, I only read L'Engle for the first time in the past decade. dafydd introduced me to the books...and then, at a time when I most needed to learn how to Be, he Named me. The Naming at the end of A Wind in the Door was his contribution to my graduation from therapy. I needed that concept so desperately in my life, and I will ever be grateful, both to dafydd for sharing it with me, and L'Engle for sharing it with the world. |
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| More updates - most of them good |
[May. 25th, 2007|06:37 pm] |
I've spoken with gridlore several times throughout the day, and he's made several fantastic advances thus far. As of 1040 this morning, he stood up unassisted for the first time in days. As of 1230, he had successfully negotiated a flight of 15 stairs both up and down. He's still feeling weak, but he's miles beyond where he was when I took him in yesterday.
In labwork-related news, they've discovered a thyroid issue (he didn't tell me + or - and may not have known the difference anyway), and started medicating him for that; the folks I've talked to here with wonky thyroids heard that and all said "Yeah, that explains a lot." They're still doing the 24-hour test, but the improvements we've seen thus far make it look at least possible (if not quite likely yet) that Doug will still make at least part of the con.
I was unable to locate an oversized get-well card - so damnit, I made one. I opted for a box of 30 gel pens in lieu of a collection of 10 micro-point Sharpies, and am regretting the decision; anyone reading this who is either staying off-site or won't be at con until tomorrow and can bring me multicolored Sharpies will be saluted as a Hero of the Revolution (or at least get one of our limited-edition badge ribbons).
( And how am I, you ask? ) |
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| Welcome to the roller coaster. |
[May. 24th, 2007|02:12 pm] |
Five minutes after I hit post Doug called me to take him to the hospital. (I made a phone post while I was in the car coming to get him, but it doesn't appear to have made it to the server.)
I just got back to the office for the afternoon; he hasn't been admitted yet, but almost certainly will be. The MD we spoke with (who was fabulous - almost everyone we've dealt with today has been great) explained what a normal potassium level is (5-6 - it's an exponential measurement, like earthquakes) vs. what his actually was (2.2 in yesterday's labs, today's weren't back before I left) and the dangers of putting too much in the system too soon ("I'd just squirt ya and send you on your way, but too much potassium is how Kevorkian's machine works"). They had finished the first infusion (both K and magnesium) as I was leaving, and were going to be doing follow-up labs to see how well he was absorbing it. There is a possibility (pending his response to the infusions, discovery of a root cause, etc.) that he could be released as early as tomorrow
I have a Crappy Cellphone Picture™ of him in his hospital bed that I will be emailing the newsletter staff. ;-) (He's sticking his tongue out at me, it's great.) I'll also be stopping on my way up to the hotel tonight (Yes, I'm still coming up - if only so I can get all the crap for the party offloaded into aurictech and ataniell93's room) to pick up one of those absurdly oversized get-well cards and parading it around Meet The Guests tomorrow if he isn't on-site by then. (As well as a bottle of Nair - they did an excellent job of attaching the lead pads for the monitor and the EKG, but there's still some hair stuck under them, and it'll be easier to just kill all of it before pulling the pads off.)
Apart from a few moments in the car where I desperately wanted dafydd with me (not simply as someone to hang onto, but as someone who Speaks Doctor), I'm actually doing remarkably well. If anything, Doug going into the hospital makes things easier for me, because I'm no longer on eleventerhooks (these go to eleven) waiting for my phone to ring with the call I got at 0930 this morning.
BTW, thanks to all of you who made food suggestions for increasing his K levels, but remember that this is Doug Who Won't Eat Anything we're talking about. (Alas, literally - one of the other things that has been wrong these last two weeks is that he's not producing any saliva, so none of the few things he will eat taste right. They gave him crackers and cheese this morning, and he wasn't even able to finish one cracker...on top of the saliva issue and still having no matching molars, he was actually so weak he was having trouble chewing.)
Anyway. I've finished inhaling the burrito I picked up on my way back here, and really should do some actual work in the three hours I've got left. I'll see some of you later this evening; sylvan is my Point of Contact on-site until I get there. kevin_standlee, Doug would like me to sit in for him on Match Game, even if he is on-site; if you have an alternate, I'm okay with that, but I think it'd be a blast to do. (And I can pimp ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) tas_baycon and the Minions of Doug while I'm up there. *grin*) |
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| Here we go again. |
[May. 24th, 2007|09:30 am] |
(edited from an email I just sent my boss)
gridlore's appointment with Kaiser was yesterday afternoon; they called us at 0624 this morning (yes, I checked the timestamp) with the labwork results. His potassium levels are apparently through the floor, with a corresponding rise in some muscular enzyme whose name Doug didn't catch. (The doctor who called asked if Doug had fallen recently. His comment? "I'm a delivery driver – I land on my ass about once a week.")
They actually wanted him to come into the hospital today; as all of you already know, Doug and I leave as soon as I get out of work today for the con. So he’s been advised to get "three bananas' worth of potassium a day" (about 800mg) and hydrate like crazy all weekend, and we'll go in as soon as I manage to get the car unpacked on Tuesday.* I'm incredibly grateful they were willing (and able, frankly, in light of some of his previous medical stunts) to cut him that much slack.
I have no idea what kind of access I'm going to have during the con (it's my understanding that there simply wasn't room in the hotel for a netlounge this year, though I think murphymom is bringing her laptop), so this may be the last you hear from me until Tuesday. I'll update you then with whether Doug was admitted (I expect he will be), how long they expect he'll be in, etc. For today, let me apologize in advance for any lapses in judgement, bad attitude, or the like, as, well, I’m rather brittle at the moment.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
* Oy, but y'all should see the car. I commented more than once yesterday that I felt like I was driving Fibber McGee's Closet; Doug correctly noted that if I were, everything would fall out whenever I opened the door. So far, so good. |
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| Here we go again. |
[Mar. 5th, 2007|12:50 am] |
(crossposted to kshandra and gridlore)
At roughly 5:30pm on Sunday, March 4th, Doug was admitted to Kaiser Santa Teresa with complications of acute sinusitis.
Asplenetic patients such as Doug are at increased risk of infection from encapsulated bacteria such as pneumococcus and meningococcus. In addition to receiving booster vaccines against both of those, he will be undergoing a course of intravenous antibiotics and a probable head/neck CT scan to determine the scope and extent of the infection currently on display around his right eye. Treatment is supposed to last two or three days.
Doug is still feeling pain in the superorbital sinus cavity, though the Augmentin he's been taking since Thursday night does appear to be having a positive effect on that, as the pain is no longer as pronounced when the Vicodin wears off (though an earlier attempt to reduce the V. dose was premature). The fact that he's feeling pain around the eye, as opposed to within it, is a good sign according to the doctors.
I am, as one might expect, completely out of spoons at this point (hence the timestamp on this post; I collapsed when I got home from the hospital, after an only partially-successful attempt to eat something for the first time in nine hours). I have to be up at 0530 to call Doug's boss and give him the lovely news that no, he really IS sick and won't be coming in to work for at least a week. From there, it's likely a trip to the laundromat down the street, as Doug and I both need clean clothes (I have to bring him the lounge pants he got for $WINTERHOLIDAY, as Kaiser apparently doesn't keep pajama bottoms in stock, and wearing just a gown depresses him), and then I get to figure out whether or not I can actually manage going to work - my boss at my current temp gig has been incredibly understanding this past week, but they do need me to be there, and with Doug out of the picture for at least a week, we really need my income. And I'm trying to balance all of this against the fact that I'm still sick, and as you can probably figure out, it's not going too well. :-P
I'm leaving comments enabled on both of these posts, but I'm disabling email copies as an exercise in spoon conservation; take it as read that your good wishes, positive energy, etc., are welcome and appreciated. As I noted above, Doug is only supposed to be in hospital for a couple of days; if that should change, I will post a locked update to both journals with room numbers, visiting hours, and all that jazz. |
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| PING joedecker |
[Jan. 28th, 2006|04:58 pm] |
Any idea when the next Boundary course is likely to be scheduled? |
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| We are everywhere - even the bridge of the Enterprise.... |
[Oct. 28th, 2005|09:38 am] |
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- George Takei, who as "Star Trek's" Sulu was part of the Starship Enterprise crew through three television seasons and six movies, has come out as a homosexual in the current issue of Frontiers, a biweekly Los Angeles magazine covering the gay and lesbian community.
The news has been all over my f'list the last 24 hours; I'm just getting around to reading more of the Frontiers interview. That man has always impressed me, learning about his history in the internment camps, hearing his passion for mass transit (gridlore and he spent most of a convention Dead Dog party discussing BART once)...watching him draw from both of those to portray Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (a local boy who made damn good) in an otherwise atrocious TV movie...and I think what has impressed me the most so far in the interview is not the coming-out itself (which he recognizes as an ongoing process), but that he and his partner took care of his mother as she descended into Alzheimers disease.
Alzheimers and senile dementia are all too familiar to me and mine, alas; watching someone you love forget you a little more every day, becoming another person entirely as the illness changes the personality you remember, is draining in ways you can't possibly imagine if you haven't been through it yourself. I did some things the last couple of years before Nana died that I'm not proud of, including blowing off what turned out to be her last birthday. I never would have had the strength to live with her. |
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| zzzzzzzzzzzzzHUH? |
[Oct. 11th, 2001|09:17 pm] |
I've been sleeping a lot this week. Twelve hours Tuesday, twelve hours last night, and a four hour nap this afternoon. This could be any one of several things.
- I'm really bad about getting enough sleep during the workweek - four hours a night is my average, and lately it's been less than that. It could just finally be catching up to me.
- I have a tendency to "hibernate" the last day or two before my period; having just changed birth control meds, it could be hitting me later than it used to.
- "Somnolence" is one of the listed side-effects for the Effexor. I've had a couple of the others show up (and no, I won't go into detail - you're welcome), so I wouldn't be surprised.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's actually #3 - despite having slept so long Tuesday night, I still found myself dozing off between runs on Wednesday. Should this actually be the case, here's hoping it gets better the longer I'm on the meds.
I'm due to increase my dose tomorrow; this should be interesting.... |
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| "Eureka!" "That's nice, dear, now go back to bed." |
[Jun. 19th, 2001|11:37 pm] |
Why am I only capable of making breakthroughs in my head when I'm supposed to be asleep? |
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| Spring cleaning |
[Jun. 18th, 2001|10:18 pm] |
Yeah, I know it's June. But it needs doing. And not just physically.
dafydd wound up staying at work two hours past the end of his shift talking to me...I don't know how much we actually accomplished, but it became painfully clear to me that I need to do - something. I'm not sure what yet. But I don't think I'm going to be able to figure it out unless and until I start blocking out most of the noise I've surrounded myself with.
I'm unsubscribing from several mailing lists outright, and setting most of the rest of them to no-mail; anything I don't actually find myself missing in two weeks is gone, too. Usenet is also on notice - not that I read more than 5% of what gets posted to the groups I follow, anyway, but even that can be too much sometimes. I may lurk on IRC from time to time, and I'll still be posting to my journal, and my inbox is always open, so if you want/need to touch base with me it'll still be possible. But I have no idea what-all I've got buried in my head, let alone how much of it is stuff I need to keep, so I'll be up to my elbows in metaphorical boxes for a while.
Wish me luck.... |
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| Bride of the Son of Hmmm.... and a few other things. |
[Jun. 12th, 2001|10:51 pm] |
My fortune cookie after dinner with Rose this evening:
Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. Couldn't someone have told me that last week?
But really, it's been a good day and a half or so. As Rose mentioned elsewhere, she and I seem to have figured out where we're going. I've said for some time that I needed a small-g girlfriend at least as much, if not more, than I needed/wanted a Girlfriend. I think we're GIRLFRIENDS - we know we can express our feelings for one another physically if we want to, but it's not a central, or even a necessary, part of our relationship. I have had so much fun just going out and running errands with her.... It sounds boring as hell, I'm sure, but it's nice to have the companionship. Doug simply doesn't have the energy to up and go to the store most days...and to decide on the spur of the moment to make a trip to the mall while we're out...and then grab dinner before heading home. I've missed that.
And I think that dafydd and I FINALLY have all the lumps left over from last week's fight smoothed out. (Heh. I started to type "smooched" - and considered leaving it for a minute....) I don't seem to be articulating myself nearly as well online as I once thought I did; it took sitting down over a late dinner (if you can call it that - neither of us had much of an appetite) last night with a copy of our most recent IRC logfile and hammer it out. Literally, in some cases - I slammed both fists down on the table at one point because he kept interrupting me when I was fighting for the words to make myself understood. (I do not blame him for this, for the record. I'm prone to very long pauses in my speech anyway, and having to work so hard to make the concepts I needed come together in my brain was making them even longer. I commented at one point that I envied the hell out of Rose - when she doesn't know the right thing to say, she still has the ability to keep pouring the words out until she hits on a concept that seems to at least be in the right neighborhood, and work from there. I can't tell you what I'd give to be able to do that....)
Damnit...I'd've sworn there was something else I wanted to ramble on about tonight.... But I should sleep. Busy couple of days ahead of me.... |
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| RTFM |
[Jun. 10th, 2001|10:14 pm] |
So when my doctor first put me on Wellbutrin SR, she advised me not to take my last dose later than 3pm, to avoid running the risk of further problems with my already-poor sleep habits. Since I go to work at 4am, this wasn't a problem for me.
Or so I thought.
When I got the new scrip on Friday, I was reading the monograph the pharmacy gave me with it, and I got to this part:
If you miss a dose of this medicine, take it as soon as possible. If you are taking 2 doses a day and it is less than 8 hours until your next dose, skip the missed dose and go back to your regular dosing schedule. Do not take 2 doses at once.
I've been taking my doses during the workweek at 4am and 12 noon (or thereabouts). I haven't gotten out of bed before 11 at all this weekend. You see my problem. ;-) So I'm going to have to start getting used to setting the alarm for 7am on the weekends so I can take them at 7 and 3 all week. We'll see if this means getting up, taking my pill, and going back to bed or not. |
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| I really should be in bed... |
[Jun. 5th, 2001|11:24 pm] |
...but I took a long, late nap this afternoon, and I needed to write this before I got distracted again.
When I got up from the aforementioned nap, there was a message on the machine. (Actually, it was there when I got home, but when Doug cleaned up this weekend, he stacked all the CDs that won't fit in the racks - and that's a lot of 'em - in front of the machine, so I have to walk over and look rather than being able to see it from the top of the stairs. Must do something about this....)
It was the doctor's office (meaning it didn't matter that I didn't see it when I got home from work, as they leave at noon on Tuesday). They got the override approved. I can FINALLY go back on Wellbutrin SR, and won't be utterly reliant on the kindness of others to afford it.
I have to call the office back in the morning, as I no longer have the original scrip my doctor gave me and they'll need to call it in to the pharmacy. (Which reminds me that I need to put the pharmacy's number in my Pilot....) But if all goes well, I'll be able to pick up the new scrip on my way home from work tomorrow.
And I'll finally have my ticket out of this hell. |
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| ...but I have to scream now. |
[May. 24th, 2001|03:58 pm] |
The instant-release Wellbutrin has been completely ineffectual this week. I managed to get through the weekend with dafydd and TS without doing anything overtly stupid, but I've been overanalyzing everything I did and said since. All my old wiring is working like a particularly bad dream again - thinking of leaving so nobody has to deal with my damaged goods, a complete inability to understand why anybody wanted to in the first place, you name it, I'm soaking in it.
I was planning on waiting till after Baycon to call the doctor's office, but after a really bad day Tuesday, I took an extended break at work to call and see if I couldn't possibly come in today.
As if either Doug or I was capable of having a physician who isn't on vacation whenever shit goes wrong.
Dr. T is out of the office until Tuesday. The earliest appointment on the book was two weeks from now. So I took it and grumbled all the way home that afternoon.
And oh, yeah - remember those memory problems I've been having? Well, I had to go get my scrip refilled this week (I don't care if it isn't working, I've got to do SOMEthing), and I was looking at the monograph that came with it.
CHECK WITH YOUR DOCTOR AS SOON AS POSSIBLE if you experience confusion, rash, itching, or seizures.
Confusion.
You don't know the half of it, buddy. |
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| My Weekend |
[May. 20th, 2001|10:56 pm] |
The good, the bad, and the ugly....
The Good:
- Having TS greet me with a lovely sweet kiss as she got off the plane on Friday, and generally getting to be very subtly out with her all weekend.
- Getting to spend almost 48 uninterrupted hours with dafydd where we weren't spending half a day on the road in one direction or the other.
- Bargains. Found a brand new purse - two, actually - at Ross Saturday afternoon: A purple (yay purple!) one for everyday, and a smaller gray one with a detachable strap long enough that I'll be able to wear it as a hip pouch at the convention this weekend. And then we stopped by Office Max that evening (TS wanted a mechanical pencil for the conference Sunday), and I found a copy of 7th Guest reformatted for Win98 for ten bucks. (We'd tried running my old copy on the new machines, but the soundcard drivers weren't there, and you lost most of the dialogue...which really kills the game, imo.)
- Feesh. Red Lobster for dinner Friday night, Truya Sushi on Saturday.... I don't often get to have seafood of any variety, since Doug won't eat it and I tend not to think about ordering it if I'm not at a seafood restaurant; this was a very pleasant indulgence.
- Various other pleasant indulgences I won't detail. Suffice it to say a good time was had by all. ;-)
- Seeing Shrek and laughing our fool heads off.
- Calling Doug Saturday afternoon and having him ask, "Did you read my journal entry today?" He was seriously considering giving it up for a while; I'm really glad he didn't.
- Having dafydd show off his first paycheck as a permanent employee of SGI, and watching him giggle about it only being one week's pay.
The Bad:
- Not communicating clearly with Doug, leaving him under the impression that dafydd had to be at AMR at 0700, not 1900, and having him rather disappointed when I wasn't home by midafternoon.
- Not getting to kiss dafydd goodbye. He was out running errands when I called Doug and he asked me to come home; dafydd and I had planned to grab dinner when he got back, and I had to call him and cancel.
The Ugly:
- Further signs of how ineffective my current medication is.... After my miscommunication with Doug, I wound up trying to both overcompensate and over-apologize. This is a hallmark of PMS for me, and I was extremely disappointed to see it happen.
- Signs of increasing short-term memory loss. Perhaps the most disturbing example of this: Saturday night, I look up at the clock and say to myself "Okay, time for my babyrepellant." I get up from my seat next to dafydd's computer (we'd installed T7G and were working on Bishop's Challenge), walked the two steps to where my purse was sitting...and proceded to grab my pillbox and take a fourth (my daily dosage is three, and I'd had the last one several hours earlier) Wellbutrin.
And didn't realize what I'd done for another half hour.
I can only find information on Wellbutrin SR, rather than the immediate-release formula I'm taking, and it only lists memory problems as occurring in less than 1% of the test group - but I can't help but think this is related to the medication somehow.
Overall, the good far outweighed the bad, and is at least managing to neutralize the ugly. I really did have a lovely time.... |
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| Just a song before I go.... |
[May. 20th, 2001|09:01 pm] |
No time to write at length currently about my weekend (and oh, WHAT a weekend!), but I realized I didn't mention something that happened Monday night....
dafydd had a meeting to go to here in SF, and we decided to meet for a late dinner after I dropped Doug off at work. We talked about this, and about that, and the subject of my medication eventually came up. I haven't been doing nearly as well on the basic Wellbutrin as I did on the sustained-release formula, and it's been getting increasingly obvious.
"How much was the SR going to cost you?" he asked. I told him what I thought I remembered, then corrected myself shortly thereafter - the number I was remembering was for three months, not one. (Yeah, it was ugly, but it wasn't that ugly!)
And then I looked at him and said "No."
He chuckled.
"No, damnit. Rose already offered, and I wouldn't let her, either. I'm tired of being everybody's fucking charity case."
And then he took my hand, and he smiled, and he said "Sweetie, if it's what it takes to make you better...."
Jesus, I'm crying again just thinking about it.
So I'm gonna make an appointment with my doctor for after Baycon, and talk to her about getting a fresh scrip for the SR.
And someday, somehow, I'll find a way to repay him. |
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embarrassed
reply hazy, ask again later
exanimate
drained
contemplative
annoyed
accomplished
blah
relieved
depressed
loved