Are you serious?

Are you serious with this whole sick thing? I am totally done with it and yet, like a bad boyfriend who refuses to take the hint, it seems not to be done with me by a long shot.

All day in bed yesterday, I really thought that would have done it. But no, today I get a hugely swollen right eye. Fuck that noise. Oh illness, why can’t you just fuck off and leave me alone? I am tired of sleeping, but can’t go anywhere or do anything looking like this. So what now, more sleeping? I cannot recall a time in my recent history when I have slept this much, this many days in a row. And yet, it seems to be what my body is in the mood for.

I am trying to be all positivity and defeating this thing by sheer force of will, and yet my EYE IS SWOLLEN SHUT.

Fuck.

Blah and Blah

Whine, whine, bitch-whine-moan, sick and tired, aggravated, bored, ill, exhausted, fed up, frustrated and irritated.

Also did I mention sick?

OK that’s all. Move along. Back to your day. Nothing to see here.

Tempted

Really want to work from home today so I can nap when I need to – but I am afraid that tomorrow is going to be even worse, sickness-wise, than today. Of course I can’t stay home tomorrow no matter what, since I have a presentation to give. Damn. Why can’t the common cold be defeated by force of will alone? Hopefully I will feel better as the day goes on, at least that’s how it worked yesterday.

I am possibly a bad person because my main reason for wanting to take care of myself this week and get better quickly is so this stupid cold doesn’t cut into my weekend going-out plans. But then again, I am a bad person in a lot of ways, so this just gets added to that long list.

On being an adult

Today I am sick. Today I have a cold and a sore throat and I am tired and I want to stay home in bed and have someone bring me soup and take my temperature and call me sweetheart and rub Vick’s Vaporub on me. Instead I get to haul ass to work, sit through three interminable meetings, give a presentation to 25 people and then come home and try to figure out what’s for dinner. I also have to do laundry.

Being an adult sucks donkey balls.

Random crap of the day

• There are two inches of hard-packed ice in my parking pad, and last night I almost fell and cracked my head right open. Ice melt isn’t helping and it seems like the sun never reaches that area.
• I am listening to too much industrial music right now, and I don’t know if that’s feeding my anxiety, or my anxiety is fueling my need to hear it.
• I got my doctor to switch up one of my medications for an extended release version, which may in fact make me feel slightly less sick. Fingers crossed because if this doesn’t work I am going to stop taking any of this shit, and damn the consequences.
• My soul is deeply dissatisfied, and needs some stimulation. Usually this results in my doing something really, really bad for me in order to have something to worry about. Should be fun – stay tuned for the upcoming breakdown, and feel free to tell me later that I have no one to blame but myself.
• I am really over slutty stupid t-shirt graphics. If you want to be a big attention-seeking whore then fine, but the unfunny t-shirt on top of that is just annoying.
• I am enchanted with writers like Neil Gaiman who choose to share so much of their lives and processes with us. What a wonderful way to be in the world. What unimaginable access the internet gives us. How exciting technology can be.
• Right now I am also loving Paulo Coelho’s blog.

His current question regarding “Saving the Planet” speaks to the way I feel about the terms in which our approach to conservation is couched. We talk about “saving the planet” as if the planet is a thing we control. Something we could possibly destroy. Our hubris is astonishing. By destroying our habitat and the environment we’re destroying many life forms, and possibly ourselves – but this planet will be here long, long after we’re gone.

If you think of the Earth as an experimental closed system, and take the part of an outside observer, what do you see? What one factor in this system throws all the other factors out of balance, and creates non-sustainability and chaos? What uses more than it gives back? What part of the system causes the other parts to fail? That’s right kids, it’s us. No other species or life form in this system is so out of balance with its surrounding environment. Everything else finds ways to adapt, live in harmony with its surroundings. Not us. We’re a uniquely destructive force, bending the world’s limited resources to their breaking point, destroying that which sustains us and ultimately marking ourselves for extinction. It’s unfortunate that we’re taking so many other things with us on our flaming death spiral, but in the end I can’t say that the extinction of humans is a bad thing. Think how the planet could restore itself to balance without us fucking everything up.

We are the cockroaches of the universe; devouring, infecting, using our giant hive minds to adapt the world to our needs rather than adapt ourselves to the world. For now we’re entrenched and as long as we’re here we’re going to keep destroying everything we touch.

As an observer seeking order and trying to maintain some kind of workable system, guess what dysfunctional life form I would pluck from this equation? You got it.

If there were a god, he’d totally disappear us. The fact that we are suffered to exist is enough proof to me that no one’s in charge. So no, we’re not going to save the world. We may save ourselves, but I doubt it. Since saving ourselves is a net negative for the planet, I am not even sure that it should be encouraged.

Anyway, that’s not meant to be depressing, that’s just how I see it.

Everything that I said I’d do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
I just got lost and slept right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on

- The Weepies “World Spins Madly On”

The Last of the Foot Drama (we hope)

Fascinating, ain't it?

So doctor’s appt today, much limping to get there, much things wrong with my car’s transmission, etc. Surprisingly the staff remembered me, which means I must have been a highly-amusing and beloved patient, right? Or an unholy PITA, whichever.

X-rays (I think that exhausting my $250 medical co-pay 5 days into a new year is a personal best, by the way.) and waiting around for the doctor, who prods at me and makes everything hurt, then makes up for it by showing me all the cool insides of my foot. There’s a weirdness where the break was, all lumpy up the sides, and there’s still a line there with the original fracture, but NO NEW FRACTURE, bitches. None.

After telling me that he starts explaining something to me about torque, and wrenched tendons, and monkey paws, but by that point I wasn’t listening because all I’d heard was: NO NEW FRACTURE (bitches).

So basically he said I was all injured and stuff, but it wasn’t a break, and I was going to be OK. Then he said if I wanted to wear Das Boot for a few days/week he would support me in that, but he’d also be happy to see me in a shoe. Doctors are so weird-talking. Anyway, I said no way to the boot, asked if I could walk barefoot (I can) asked if I can haz pain meds (I can) and asked how long until it was better (2-3 weeks). And I can SO DO THAT SHIT. In fact, even though it hurts just as badly now, I DO NOT CARE because I know it’s not broken, and that walking on it is not making it worse. I can stand anything if I know what’s causing it and when it’s going to stop. I ain’t ascairt of some pain.

So anyway, that’s me, twisty monkey paw torque foot. Healing. With meds to ease my way. Wearing shoes. Hopefully this is the last time we’re going to need to discuss my feet on this here blog, unless I am rhapsodizing about a pedicure or having someone massage them.

On a side note, I wish I’d asked him for copy of my new x-rays, but I thought that if I was too weird he wouldn’t give me the pain meds. To soothe you I have posted a pic of last year’s x-rays and the terrible, horrible, no-good, really bad Jones Fracture.

I hurt on my everywhere

Not that I want my vacation to be over, but I seriously want Monday to get here so I can go to the doctor. I am in so much pain right now, it’s awkward to be awake, much less moving around. There’s not a lot I can do comfortably between now and then, other than sit and kvetch. And on Monday I will either find out that I am outrageously hardass for walking around on a broken foot for six days, or an incredible whiner with nothing wrong with me at all. Although I think that last one is possibly too good to be true.

Right now not only is my foot painful to walk on, but walking weirdly to compensate for that pain has thrown my back into some kind of spasms, and my right hip is maybe made out of broken glass now, I can’t really tell. And still, I am so pissed off at life that I refuse to accept that there’s anything wrong with me. I haven’t stopped going out, and I absolutely refuse to stay huddled up here in the house. I knew I was good at partitioning, but rarely have I been able to achieve this level of knowing something and refusing to know it at the same time. When and if he tells me that I have to be back in a cast or boot for another 10 weeks, I get a feeling like I might disagree with him, though I don’t know what good that would do me exactly. I don’t know that it’s possible to reason oneself out of an injury, though I would sure like to give it a good try.

Also, I have a strong urge to yell at the doctor when I do see him, no matter the outcome of the x-rays, because he told me this shit was fine. He told me I could return to normal, strenuous activity six months ago, ffs. But he didn’t think to say that strenuous activity didn’t include stepping on uneven surfaces or, by the way, careful there because your particular brand of fracture has a 63% re-fracture rate. Might want to watch for that. Nor (in the case this thing isn’t broken) did he prepare me for the fact that it could possibly be this painful to step on something, this far down the road. At no point in my exit interview with him did he mention “Oh, and you’re going to be insanely tender for the next foreseeable stretch of time, so don’t fret when you’re in agony, that’s all normal.”  It’s just another things that I hate about doctors, the fact that they never mention anything  unless you specifically ask, and how often do patients know what to ask? But in either case (likely-re fracture or exceptional sensitivity) he should have mentioned that shit. Doctors are so cavalier because they see this kind of thing all day every day, and they don’t take into account that for each of their patients it’s always an entirely novel and frightening experience.

Doctors – the same assholish, blase, know-it-all attitude as IT people, but with the ability to fuck up your life much worse by not conveying the proper information.

Oh, and by the way, my Mom’s doing fine, she’s sleeping better now and has calmed down. Because that’s top on my worry list, making sure she’s fine w/my injury.

What, me, angry?

What do you mean, I’m not in charge of that?

So far I have employed a few different  techniques to deal with this foot thing. They differ significantly from last year’s most-used methods (weeping, cursing, throwing various objects at other objects until something breaks.)

The primary coping mechanism so far has been that trusty family standby “pretending it’s not happening.” I can really make this one work only by sitting down and not moving, since the pain of utilizing said appendage is a pretty steady reminder that there’s an issue of some sort.

The next method = painkillers. They seriously aid in the first (dissociation from reality) method but they have a tendency to wear off and also to make me sleepy and confused.

The last method has been denial of facts in ready existence, a.k.a. “If you refuse to wear a corrective device, there can’t be anything wrong with you at all.” Which is why I am not wearing that foot brace.

And a subsidiary to all of these theories is the “not fair” hypothesis – which holds that I wasn’t doing anything wrong, —was doing housework in fact—and was on vacation. It would be karmically implausible to injure myself in this way under those circumstances.

Honestly, I just can’t imagine that the world is this perverse. This can’t be happening, I refuse for it to be happening, therefore it is not happening. See how that one works?

I’ve had varying levels of pain since Tuesday, at times being able to walk with almost no pain at all (see: painkillers) and at other times having pain worse than when I first had my cast off in April. My toes have been alternatingly numb/pain free/painful, and I don’t know what that means. I wish I had a better understanding of foot/bone mechanics so that I could form a more educated guess as to whether this pain signals another break or not. One part of me says “no way – this doesn’t hurt as much as the original break, so it can’t be another break. Right?” The other part of me sasses back with “Well why hasn’t the pain subsided yet, smarty pants? What do you think you have, a toe sprain?” And I don’t really know enough about how feet work to say that toe sprain is/is not a workable theory.

All I know is that this is a gigantic pile of bullshit, and that I should never have told my mother about it at all, since she’s been steady crying and unable to sleep since I did tell her. For the record: she hates to think of me all alone in this big house with no one to help me, so very alone and by myself, isolated, in this state I am in of being without anyone else here, lonely, by myself and so very alone. Which is very thoughful of her to point out.

Although on the bright side she also posits that my state of solitary, hyper-alone, isolated, single, helpless, gaping void of pointless, useless life is nonetheless better than her some people’s state of being aggravated 24/7 by my father some people who will remain nameless. But is is very hard for her to deal with the concept of me all alone and injured in my bleak, empty household. For the record. But she’s really glad I told her about it because trouble shared is trouble halved. And now she has to go lie down and cry for awhile, while she thinks of my bravery here all alone by myself.

Ahem.

Feh

Talked to the orthopedic doctor’s office. Of course doctor is out until Monday. Asst. talked to him, he said I could go get an x-ray at the ER and then come in on Monday for him to look at it, but what would the point of that be? He can just as easily x-ray it in his office on Monday, if I have to go in.

All I wanted him to say is “Pshaw – there’s no way you broke your foot right there again! You’re fine!” but what he did say was “There’s a definite possibility you’ve re-fractured that same bone, as it’s weaker now than it used to be. The intense pain you’re having isn’t a good sign.”

This year just had to kick my ass one more time before it was over, huh? And this fits in line with the Halloween and Thanksgiving Eve crises in my world. Apparently the calm and sane xmas eve I had, with no household and/or health care emergencies, was the anomaly.

For now I am trying to stay off it, keep ice on it, and hope that it’s just aggravated and not broken. It can’t be broken. I refuse to allow that possibility into my world.

I cannot fucking believe this bullshit

So I came home from errands, decided to take stupid tree downstairs. Couldn’t find new storage bag for tree while I was out, but sick of looking at tree so it was going downstairs with or without bag. Awkward to carry w/o bag, as you might imagine. Knew I couldn’t carry everything, so I threw the tree skirt down ahead of me. It didn’t make it all the way down, but lay across the bottom two stairs, plus it knocked down some shit that was at the bottom of the staircase. Shit.

Carefully I went down the stairs, one foot at a time, as I couldn’t see where I was going and was soon to be stepping onto a pile of fabric. Not ideal. As I came down off the last step onto the basement floor, I accidentally stepped on a 1″ square aluminum pole that had fallen over when I threw the tree skirt down. It was laying across the bottom stair, so it was angled about 6″ up in the air, and I basically tried to balance on it, exactly on the spot on the bone where I broke that stupid fucking foot last year. An exquisite blossoming of pain across my entire body was the immediate result. I am telling myself that I can’t have re-broken that thing , that I have only bruised it, or angered it or something. There’s no way I re-broke it by stepping on a fucking pole, for fuck’s sake. But it’s all swollen and I can barely walk on it now, and am in some pretty agonizing pain when I try. I have taken a painkiller and I am going to bed.

Also I just realized I left a frozen bag of corn laying on the couch. Fuck it, I am not going back down there.

Protected: Well fuck this whole day already, and my doctor too.

Back to the Coal Mine

So tomorrow I have to go back to work, and that means I have to leave Jake here. He’s been fine all weekend, acting like he feels well, no bleeding, vomiting, petechia, nothing to give me any cause for immediate concern. But I can’t get over the feeling that as soon as he’s out of my sight something’s going to to wrong. I am nauseated at the thought of leaving him for 8 hours.

I wish that the vet(s) could have given me a prognosis that was more reassuring, or at least gave me something more concrete for my mind to chew on. Like: If “x” he will be fine, if “y” there is a problem. Right now it’s more like: if “x, y or q” there’s a problem. If none of those, there may still be a problem.

So tomorrow I am going to have to go sit at a stupid place and deal with fuckwitted morons, addressing problems of no consequence to people who will never understand WTF is going on around them, all in service to a useless cause, when all I want to do is stay home with my little guy. Life sucks like that. We have to spend all our time doing shit we hate, in order to afford the one or two things in the world we care about. Because that stupid ass job is what gave me the cash I needed to treat Jake. It pays for our house and his food. But it also sucks away part of my soul every single time I have to go to it.

Someday I have a dream of being able to afford truly employer-independent health care, and being able to survive on the income I could get from freelance work. Maybe.

So tomorrow I am going in early in case I need to leave early to run Jake to the vet for blood work. If I do, that means I will be expecting results on Tuesday. I am also seeing my new endocrinologist on Tuesday. Tuesday’s also when a little national election is happening too. You may have heard a little about that.

All in all, I think I am going to be looking forward to Wednesday when – even if it’s not the news I want – I will have some news, and get out of horrible anxiety filled waiting/limbo land.

/Sunday Rantings. Have a good week everyone.

Protected: Health ramble

Here’s more of that “ER Insurance”

Five mistakes that will land you in medical debt – CNN.com
It took the Trim family of Arlington, Texas, three hours to go $15,000 into debt. One evening last spring, Alex Trim was knocked unconscious when a car hit his bike and he slammed into the windshield. Three hours, many stitches and seven CT scans later, Alex was discharged in pretty good shape.

About a month later, the bill arrived in the mail. “I didn’t have a clue you could go into $15,000 debt in one night,” said Alex’s father, Callvin Trim. “When I saw that bill, I was just kind of numb.”

…

A report out last month from the Commonwealth Fund found that 28 percent of the population said they were paying off medical debt in 2007, up from 21 percent in 2005.

“Two-thirds of the people who go into medical debt have insurance,” said Mark Rukavina, executive director of the Access Project. “When medical debt hits, it hits very quickly. It’s a jolt, and it’s generally not very predictable.”

“These are all honest, hardworking people,” added Jessie Maurer, a medical billing advocate in West Des Moines, Iowa, who helped the Trims. “This could happen to just about anybody.”

I think I have a negative Lifescore today

Talk about a wasted, do-nothing day. I got up this morning and was headed out the door to work when a violent wave of not-feeling-well hit me. I thought it might be just a Monday thing, but I gave it a few minutes and it was definitely not in my head. So I e-mailed in sick. I didn’t want to just go to bed though, sometimes that makes me feel worse. So I sat down on the couch and put in the Two Towers Special Extended Platinum Director’s Cut Deleted Scenes Extra Stuff Box of White Rice and the Kitchen Sink version. And I watched it all. And then I had some lunch, and let the dogs out, and re-potted a plant. And then I came in and put in Return of the King Special Extended Platinum Director’s Cut Deleted Scenes Extra Stuff Box of White Rice and the Kitchen Sink version. And I watched all that too. And now I have that horrible, logey feeling you get when you do nothing but watch movies for 6 hours straight.

In the meantime I called my doctor, my internist. My gyno wants me to have a procedure done that I think is unnecessary. In fact, I think she’s a procedure-happy hot mess, actually. I think part of the reason she wants to do this procedure on me is so that she doesn’t have to prescribe me pain meds, if you can believe that. She actually said “Well, I’ve never operated on you, so I wouldn’t feel comfortable prescribing any pain medications.” What the fuck? So I should let her operate on me, causing fresh pain, to get medicine in order to releive the pain I already have? When she doesn’t even know what’s causing that?

So I called my internist to see if any of my other conditions might be affecting me in the way I am experiencing, and she basically said exactly the same thing as my gyno, except she also said a couple other stupid things that led me to understand that she has absolutely no concept of what’s going on with my health, and has a fundamental misunderstanding about a few things that are important to me, medically. So she just wants me to go have an invasive medical procedure too, just to “rule some things out.” Well, excuse me if I am not jumping aboard the medical procedures to rule things out train, since I remember very clearly what happened to me last time she wanted to rule things out.If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that I know damn good and well when something’s not right with me. And I am not going to go through an expensive, exploratory, invasive medical procedure just because my doctors won’t listen and won’t prescribe me pain meds.

This is combined with the fact that I just found out that my endocrinologist has left his practice, and now I have a new one. Who knows what she will be like. I am so out of faith with doctors, I am sick of all their bullshit pandering and acting like I am retarded when, if I hadn’t kept pushing them this year, they would have just kept telling me that my issues were all in my head. Since my subsequent diagnoses, I really want to say “Hey fuckwits, I told you so!” to someone, but I don’t think that would improve my general standard of care at all.

Anyway, I feel logey, achy and gross, even though it’s lovely out. I think I am going to go lay down and read a book. I would try outside, but the mosquitoes are sure to be terrible, and that giant spider really freaked me out. I just keep thinking that if there was one like that, there have to be more. Ick. (It’s apparently a St. Andrew’s Cross Spider and has “low venom toxicity.” Whatever.)