busybee fluffy rambles

Several months ago I realized I was feeling like I did back when I was off estrogen entirely because of the embolism and got my levels checked for the first time in a while. And they were dangerously low.

My doctor put me on a higher dose of transdermal estradiol and wanted to wait 3 months to follow up. I finally got that followup last week, and my levels are still dangerously low.

So, tomorrow we’re going to discuss the possibility of injections, which is honestly what I should have probably been on to begin with. But, y'know, doctors love to be super cautious with clotting risks on estradiol, especially with a family history. (I also never really had a reasonable dose when I was doing oral estradiol, either, even before the embolism, because I am bad at advocating for myself.)

Hopefully I’ll get on injections and that will help me start to feel normal again, and maybe I’ll actually get a decent amount of breast growth out of it this time (unlikely).

I feel like I’ve been operating well below my baseline for the last… I dunno. 9 months or so? I remember still doing pretty well as far back as, like, last June, and I don’t really know when my activity levels started to really decline because I haven’t been good at keeping track of that stuff. I do use a daily mood tracker thing and it looks like the last time I marked a day as feeling “good” was last July. So, possibly that’s when this hormone stuff started happening. Looking at my blog I definitely noticed a turn for the worse back in August and also looking at July I was starting to feel a bit off. So July is probably when things started to go haywire.

I’m definitely motivated to do a bunch of stuff right now; I want to build my Nerdy Gurdy kit which I was finally able to obtain after a few years of interest and a few weeks of deliberate intent, and I really want to work on my various albums that I’ve had on the back burner. I did start to work on Misfits a bit but I haven’t managed to sustain the energy so I’ve made very little progress on it. I also have three other albums on the back burner which I’d love to be working on as well. Plus finishing up the music for the game! And a couple of other low-priority commissions I’ve gotten!

And there’s so many projects I need to do around the house, especially a few things in the basement which will make the studio more accessible. And getting my kitchen organized. And getting a bunch of stuff I no longer need/want to Goodwill or whatever. A bunch of it has been sitting in my car’s trunk for months, now, but I also don’t feel comfortable driving down to Burien, both with my fatigue and with my car still needing a brake job.

Most of what little energy I can muster has gone to either going back to choir practice (which I’d missed so much!) or doing my various VR performances. Several of my recent VR gigs have been hour-long sets and that’s just been completely too much, man¹, even though previously I was able to do 90 minutes no problem. Even 30 minutes feels like a stretch nowadays. So there’s definitely room for improvement.

It’s also been supremely frustrating that all of the dispensaries in my town have closed aside from Uncle Ike’s, which only stocks high-THC stuff and what I need is high-CBD (and what few high-CBD products they have still have much higher doses of THC than I’d like). They seem to only care about getting wasted, and not getting pain relief. There are a couple of smoke shops around which claim to carry CBD products so maybe I’ll check some of them out, but smoke shops always feel so shady, compared to the nicely regulated cannabis industry around here.

I also can’t help but wonder if the other dispensaries closed due to pressure from Ike’s, as he has a long history of anticompetitive behavior.

Now that it’s getting warmer I want to be gardening, and I want to be working on music and my coding projects (especially the music-related ones), and I want to be doing so many other things, but even walking to the grocery store ends up wiping out my energy reserves for the rest of the day.

Anyway. Hopefully getting my hormone levels back in check will help.