Requisite Cliff-Hanger Update

June 6th, 2013

Turned out husband had appendicitis.

Terrible dehydration because he didn’t drink anything the night he spent in pain and confusion, then wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything the full day while they were diagnosing him, and the full night after his surgery he couldn’t have anything either, which means more than 36 hours with nothing at all.

Had some mild complications after coming home after surgery, including a post-operative fever of 104 degrees that led to a trip back to the hospital by ambulance and another hospital stay for some IV antibiotics.

Finally made it home for good, and two of his ribs popped out a bit from his spine, sending his whole back into spasm.  Was super painful, and is still lingering.  Probably something to do with either drug-induced heavy sleeping, or contorting in a waiting room chair, or something his muscles did while he was convulsing from the fever or curled up in pain from the appendix.  Not fun.

Many, many, many nights without sleep for both of us, but he is now kind of sort of getting better.

I am hanging in there as well as I can with no sleep and tons of stress (neither of which are good for keeping this illness at bay).  But I’ve been the full-time caregiver in this house for the past week.  Am doing WAY better than I might have guessed (thank you, Equilibrant!), but I won’t say there wasn’t a point this past weekend where I was literally crying because my husband needed pillows under his legs to take the strain off his surgery site, and I realized they were all the way at the other end of the hall.  And I was lying on the floor, because my legs just would not carry me anymore no matter how hard I pushed.

It’s been a long time since I’ve reached that point.  But this time, thankfully, I recovered some eventually, and it didn’t become my new normal.  I’m resting every second I can, and not doing much else besides sleeping and fetching meals, but I’m getting through it, and I’m reasonably certain that I won’t have any major lasting damage as a result if all keeps going as it has been.  Of course, there’s no guarantee and very little predictability with this illness, but I’m hopeful that I should bounce back.

I have to bounce back.

Please, please let me bounce back.

But he is okay, and home, and safe, and that’s the most important thing by far.

Painful Truths

May 29th, 2013

So my husband was awake all night from severe abdominal pain.

This morning he called the health line we have here, and they advised him to go to the E.R.

I feel awful for him and the rough night he’s had.  I’m concerned for him, of course, but I’m not overly worried at this point. Hopefully it’s nothing serious, and hopefully he’s in good hands regardless.

But it’s been a painful reminder of the impact my own illness can have. My husband is in severe pain, in the ER right now, and I couldn’t drive him there. I am not with him. I am not holding his hand. I am not talking him through it or being his rock. I can’t fulfill my role as the calm-in-a-crisis one. If something serious happened, I wouldn’t even know until somebody got around to calling me, and if they did, I don’t know how I would come see him anyway (though, somehow, I would FIND A WAY). I can’t push my own wheelchair around. I can’t even really sit up for long enough in a regular wheelchair for somebody else to push it around for me. I would need a caregiver.  And my caregiver is my husband.  And wanting desperately to help him isn’t enough to make me able to.

I can’t even entirely help myself.  I don’t even know what I’m going to eat today. Thank goodness there are leftovers in the fridge, and new groceries so there should be things I can grab haphazardly to gnaw on. I’m not well enough to fix myself even a simple meal without payback. I’m getting closer, but I’m not there yet. And if I was ever on my own long enough that the groceries ran out, I would be completely reliant on finding someone else to get some for me. It’s literally not possible for me to get them myself anymore.

I will be fine today, but they’re difficult realizations to have pushed to the forefront.  Wanting something really badly isn’t enough to make my body capable of it.

I cannot care for myself independently. And that’s a damned scary thought.

I cannot care for him either. And that’s so very much worse.

Are you my mom or step-father? You should probably close your eyes, then. This post is broken. It causes blindness. And hives. And it’s full of pictures of regurgitated food. On spiders. Singing Ke$ha songs.

May 22nd, 2013

…Though I suppose that defense only works if they know who Ke$ha is.

Confession:  I don’t even really know who Ke$ha is.  I am seriously out of date on overplayed pop stars.   Defenses failed.

This is going to be a shorter update than I’d like to give, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.  Physically, am hanging in there.  Have been a bit extra burnt lately.  Of course, there are all kinds of things I’d like to say about this, but the fact that I’m burnt already means I probably shouldn’t.  ;) The overall trend is still going in the right direction, though, and I seem to have a more solid grasp every day of how to keep it that way.

Have been under huge strain for the past few weeks, though.  My husband and I are trying to get my mother and her husband out of their current (very poor) situation, and into somewhere safe and secure and where they’ll be okay from here forward.  And that involves moving them.  And we need to do the house purchasing, because they’re not yet in the country.  And we need to find a way to reliably get one of them into the country, which might be difficult (but immigration will not give a straight answer about it or tell us anything about their chances, only “fill out the forms and we’ll let you know in 6 months”).   And we didn’t know that person didn’t already have citizenship until this morning.  And all of the researching and organizing and phonecalls and planning falls on us.  And the whole thing is dependent on a third party, who is impatient, and self-interested, and sometimes volatile.  And we can’t talk to that third party directly.  And the person who can is also sometimes volatile, and prone to despondency and occasional rash ideas.  It’s been a lot of work, and a lot of stress, and sometimes it feels like herding cats, except instead of herding I have to give the cats thousands of dollars and get them to fill out paperwork.

I am leery of saying any more than that here, because I don’t want what I say to be misconstrued.  And I dearly love my mother (she is not at all volatile.  She is made of innocence and rainbows).

Plus, there’s a slim chance that someday they might accidentally find out this blog exists.  And no good can come of cats reading my venting here.

At any rate, I’m just trying to cope at this point.  And hoping very much that this will all be resolved somehow soon.  The rest of my life has sort of been on pause until then.

Maybe you don’t understand as much as you think you do.

May 9th, 2013

Starving, cancer, heart failure, depression.   And people thinking they understand when they have no idea and coming off like douchebags.

Happy Mental Health Awareness Week, everybody.

No Spontaneous Combustion Here (I like to plan too much for that).

April 19th, 2013

(Sorry for any temporary technical issues in accessing the site.  We’ve gone rogue, cut free from the hosting company I’d been using, and hopefully giving us the freedom to fix whatever was making things so ultra slow sometimes (that’s what I get for choosing partly based on who had the most amusing company name, I guess).  As much as it was potentially fitting for my site to have the same kinds of energy issues I do, I’m pretty sure nobody wants to deal with that any more than they absolutely have to.  Anyway, everything should be a-okay now.  Thanks for your patience.  Let me know if there are any lingering issues we’ve missed that need resolving.)

(Besides the emotional kind.  I’m aware of those.  Mostly.)

Cat Scratch No Fever Whatsoever

April 9th, 2013

As I type this, my cat is lying pressed up against the side of my head like a giant Princess Leia bun gone wrong.  I have no idea how I might ever have contracted a bacterial infection that lives in felines.  Really.

I’m due to fill you in on what happened with the Cat Scratch Fever, etc. Have finished the antibiotics now, but have been feeling too crappy to update here.

Or maybe that’s an update in itself.

I did, however, have one heck of a Herx reaction, so clearly the antibiotics did something (they also gave me a bad case of diarrhea, some intestinal burning, and a yeast infection, but I won’t write that.  Because who puts “yeast infection” on the internet?  Not me).  So we’re now in the “hope that alleviated some of the burden on my overtaxed immune system” camp, and crossing our fingers that my overall improvement speeds up just a little from what it was before.

I came out of the antibiotics and pretty much right into a mild crash (phone call that went unexpectedly long), so I can report with some confidence that I’m still stuck with the swollen glands and ill feelings and burning head and stuff that we were hoping might have been more of a Cat Scratch Fever thing.   So all in all, I haven’t yet noticed any antibiotic-related change outside of a couple days of feeling like death and a couple weeks of feeling extra crappy.  But it does feel good to know those little buggers are out of my circulatory system.  I certainly didn’t need that on top of everything else. So I’m celebrating, even if the effects are impressively subtle thus far.

Who needs the lottery anyway.  I’d probably just become the obnoxious nouveau riche of the health world, spending my energy on showy things and crass displays of fitness.

In somewhat other news, we’ve been told that cats are generally only contagious for about 30 days before their immune systems give the bacteria the boot, and my only exposure to fleas or newly-acquired kittens is either 3 or 6 years ago.  Definitely not in the last two years at least.  Having a fleet of soft, purring kittens deposited on my chest while bed ridden has always sounded like a fantastic road to rehabilitation, but so far nobody’s taken me up on that.  So my exposure has been somewhat limited.  …Which means I really have had this infection for the last 2 – 6 years at least.  Ack. We may need to confirm in a while that it’s actually gone.  Apparently for some lucky folks, it can come back for another pass or twelve.

And I am impressively lucky with those kinds of things.

I once read a whole TV remote instruction manual in a sexy voice. That time was intentional, though. …Probably best not to ask.

March 21st, 2013

So we’ve determined that I have an Inappropriate Sexy Voice that manifests completely unintentionally on rare occasions, when I’m trying to say totally mundane things. Breathless, sultry, loaded with promise, and COMPLETELY OUT OF PLACE FOR THE SITUATION. My inner vixendom apparently cannot be contained. Also, it may be a good thing that no one’s ever asked me to give a eulogy.

This afternoon, my husband briefly emerged from the home office, where he slaves away during the days. I got up from the couch for a drive by hug on my way down the hall (because I’m all about efficiency).

Husband: Mmmm… Don’t squeeze too hard, though. I really just came out here to use the bathroom.

Me: Damn. I was about to use the bathroom.

Husband: It’s okay. You can use it first. Just turn on the fan if you’re going to poop.

Me: *completely unintentional over-the-top sexy voice* …I will.

The confused horror was probably to be expected, really. He seemed to feel that bathroom activities and sexy time should never fraternize that closely in this house. I told him that I cannot control Inappropriate Sexy Voice. It has a mind of its own. Sometimes there’s lingerie involved, sometimes we’re talking about infrastructure reform. It’s the burden we have to bear.

Some things just cannot be explained.

Dubious claims to fame

March 19th, 2013

Now and then I still collect amusing search terms used to get here, because I find them hilarious, and someday when I’m feeling well enough to put together that type of post I’ll be tickled to be pleasantly drowning in absurd search phrases to choose from.

A term on today’s list caught my eye, and when I went to add it to my stash, I realized it was already there. In fact, this seems to have shown up multiple times.

Now, there have been a few times in the past when I have ended up as one of the top search results for some really weird things. So this is the part where I begin to wonder, and head to Google with a good-natured cringe ready in reserve, but still thinking that I’m probably being silly to even check. Because in the whole of the internet, surely there are other pages out there for people looking for this type of thing. Surely that term popped up on my search hits from one or two very persistent searchers, trolling through the tenth or eleventh page of their Google results. But I pop the phrase into the search bar anyway, just to confirm (and to make any FBI investigations into my search history that much more interesting).

And of course, my first intuition was correct, and I had to shake my head and laugh at myself.

Yup. In all of the internet, in all of the world, the very first page result you’ll get if you’re looking for “fuzzy bondage”? Yep. That’s me. :)

(Even better, the post in question is a really lame, washed out, sort of depressing one from when I was still deep in the throws of medication-induced depression. Somehow I’m thinking that’s not what those searchers were looking for…)

I’m pretty sure only one of those would notice it’s pi day today

March 14th, 2013

We got a bar fridge for beside the couch! Which, I believe, means that I am now either officially disabled or an alcoholic. Probably the former, since mine is mostly filled with coconut water and probiotics, and I’m pretty sure that makes one heck of a nasty-ass cocktail.

No offense intended to perfectly normal people with perfectly normal bar fridges next to their perfectly normal sofas. I’m sure there was a very good reason for that.

At any rate, it’s a nice sleek black and chrome model rather than the old school plasticy white that I was expecting. Nice. I know details may not be particularly thrilling for you, but hey, this is the most excitement I’ve had in ages. Plus, I haven’t had a significant piece of machinery just for me since the day we sold my car. I may occasionally slip in there and make soft vrooming noises.

(It’s got great A/C. Probably should have sprung for the leather interior, though.)

…Do they make fridges with leather interiors? Now I’m thinking they probably do, somewhere. For just that special kind of individual.

Anyway, this should make it a little easier on us when my husband has to be away for the day and the walk to the fridge isn’t treating me so well. And it’ll let me have access to my own juice, water, etc. so I don’t have to ask him all the time or leave it out at room temperature for more hours than I probably want to admit. You’d be amazed how important those little scraps of independence can be.

Plus, I got to watch my husband moving heavy objects. Which is worth it in its own way. Though I made sure to reassure him that I like him for his brains.

…Which makes me either a nerd or a zombie, I think.