busybee fluffy rambles

Today I finally had an appointment with an ENT and an audiologist, as part of trying to figure out what’s going on with my vertigo.

The audiologist didn’t find anything wrong with my hearing and said it’s normal for someone of my age. (She also told me the correct pronunciation of “tinnitus.” It’s like TIN-nit-iss.) She didn’t have any idea what might be underlying my tinnitus but I’ve had it my whole life and it doesn’t seem to be relevant to anything going on now.

The ENT didn’t see anything particularly out of the ordinary with my sinuses from what he could see in this basic exam, but he wanted to bring me in for a more focused CT scan, especially since my previous cranial CT scan found sinus polyps as being a thing, and I have such a long history of chronic sinus issues. So that’ll happen in a month. In the meantime he also referred me to a physical therapist that can do vestibular rehabitation, and he thinks the prognosis for that is really good.

Hopefully I’ll be able to feel comfortable driving again soon, because gosh do I not like being stuck in my little bubble.

The vet just got back to me with the results of yesterday’s tests.

Her white blood count is elevated (indicating inflammation or an infection), and the radiologist says that the concerning bits on her lungs are just her asthma being especially bad right now.

So, we’re giving her a short course of Prednisone and hopefully that clears things up.

It’s unclear what caused the weight loss but given how enthusiastic she’s been about wet food and how meh she’s been about dry food, I think she’s just going to get a lot more wet food going forward. That’ll make it easier to give her the meds anyway.

The most important takeaway is that she is almost certainly not dying any time soon. Yay!

After having eaten a bunch of wet food last night and having had three doses of antibiotics, Fiona’s getting back to her usual cuddly/climby self. She isn’t sneezing anymore, and while she’s still a bit congested she snuggled up with me in bed this morning, and right now she’s being super snuggly and affectionate. She’s also purring super loudly, which she hasn’t done in a while.

I still haven’t heard from the vet about her bloodwork or x-rays but I feel like there’s a lot less to worry about now.

I haven’t posted here in a while so I figured I should do that, just to keep folks informed of my continued existence.

I’m still experiencing substantial post-COVID symptoms. This cough is persisting, and it’s made my vertigo way worse, to the point that I am having trouble driving anywhere. I also have a new fun symptom where every time I cough I get a flash headache on the right side of my head and sometimes that includes dizziness! Fun times. I hope this doesn’t presage an aneurysm or something.

Anyway in a couple days I’ll be flying to Denver for Song Fight! Live, the first time we’ve done it in person since 2019. I’ve missed doing this so much. Unfortunately my vertigo situation means I will not be renting a car and will relying heavily on Lyft and mass transit.

For folks in the area, my performances (Sockpuppet and Octothorpe) will be Friday the 19th at Buntport Theater, with the show starting at 5 PM. I will also be accompanying some folks on Saturday the 20th on drums, and of course that day is also the “live fight” when we all debut a song written in a hurry for a title that’s given sometime this week.

I mean, assuming I’m not about to die of some major brain hemmorhage or something.

Meanwhile I’m also trying to get more VRChat performance opportunities. Stuff is slowly fermenting in that space and hopefully it leads somewhere good. Unfortunately most scheduled VRChat performance stuff all happens in clumps where I already have other stuff going on too. Maybe I should just start making my own concerts and see what happens.

I’m over COVID, and just have a little lingering bronchitis. Also some of the worst brain fog I’ve ever had. I feel like my brain’s been through a blender. Spatial relationships make very little sense, my reaction times are super slow, I am definitely not safe driving right now, and so on.

My standard state of affairs is best described as “dazed and confused” right now. I feel like my mental acuity has pretty much gone away. I’m also making a lot of ridiculous spelling mistakes when I write, and I’m having trouble stringing together basic procedures for things.

Basically I feel like I’ve taken massive brain damage and this has me all sorts of fucked up.

At least I’m not alone in this but that’s cold comfort. If I can’t recover from this, what future do I have? My brain is pretty much the only thing I had going for me and now I don’t even have that.

Last night I started feeling significant pain whenever I inhaled too deeply, telling me there was either pleurisy or another embolism happening. I gave it several hours to try to resolve on its own, and it just got worse and worse, so this morning, I headed to the ER.

And there I waited, and waited, and waited, and then after around four hours of nothing happening while just sitting in the waiting room in agony, the pain had resolved itself, and I could breathe normally again.

So I asked about being discharged early, and was told to wait, and wait, and wait, and it was another hour or so before I was able to leave.

Anyway I’m back home now, and hopefully this is the last of the COVID drama in my life for a little while.

I seem to have made it through the worst of the COVID. My fever’s mostly gone, and my cough is way less severe (which is good because oh my god does it hurt to cough anymore). I’ve lost five pounds since Friday but also I’m finally getting my appetite back so hopefully I can cushion some of that.

Because of the current surge, the antivirals are all super out of stock, including Molnupiravir which I’d gotten a prescription for (unfortunately Paxlovid isn’t safe for me to take due to my blood thinners). I had a followup with my GP yesterday and we decided that based on my progress I don’t really need it anyway. (She also doesn’t think the nodules they found on Sunday need a followup.)

As usual I seem to have a secondary bacterial infection in my lungs, judging by the phlegm I’ve been coughing up, but hopefully that’ll clear up in a few days and I won’t need antibiotics for it. For now I’m just taking pseudoephedrine and guaifenisin which is my usual “sit it out” protocol, since I’m allergic to most antibiotics and am super worried about antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains (and anyway Washington State guidance is to wait a week if possible before prescribing antibiotics for lung and sinus infections).

Usually when I get COVID I use QFC’s overpriced grocery delivery service (which is really just Kroger-branded Instacart), but lately I’ve been shopping at Safeway more so I figured I’d try theirs out instead, and wow, it was way cheaper, just $4 + tip for my whole order. We’ll see if the ice cream survives.

I am super fatigued right now and that’s making it even less feasible for me to work right now. It hasn’t even been a week since I was exposed, much less the onset of symptoms, so I have to remind myself that it’s totally normal to feel this way after an illness, especially COVID which usually wipes me out for months afterwards. I’m just hoping that given how quickly the disease progressed this time, so will the post-infection fatigue.

I feel super guilty about this but I’ve started up a gofundme to help defray some of my ongoing financial issues. I’m hoping I can ramp up on freelance stuff soon (not that I’d been having much luck with it before this, anyway) but at this point I’m mostly just hoping to carry things forward until I can finally get on disability. I do want to genuinely thank everyone who’s contributed so far, even though I feel really weird about accepting the money. I’d rather be getting it from random rich people and not, like, people I know, who I feel could probably use the money more than me? If that makes any sense? Gah.

This outbreak has been pretty devastating to the choir; at least 15% of us are sick, probably more. A lot of us are disabled or immunocompromised. I hope we’re going to see a return to our old masking+testing policies; they’d been relaxed this season in keeping with King County infection statistics, and we were caught totally off-guard by this surge. It’s a very hard lesson learned for the future.

In some positive news, my parents (who were visiting for the choir show) are not testing positive, and I’m glad they were here when I needed them most.