The frustration of continued existence

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My week off from work felt great. But I’m still having difficulty actually focusing at work. I have a bunch of paths of exploration to examine but none of them feel, y'know, right right now.

Meanwhile, my house continues to be a bit more work than I expected. On the plus side, I’ve successfully murdered my lawn and vastly improved my garden and started up my nice meadow. On the minus side, my heating bill is through the roof (literally) and I’ve been getting bids for finally improving the house insulation. So far I’ve had three bids which went thusly:

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Current goings-on

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Still on disability leave, and still in considerable pain. I’m trying not to work too hard on things, but it’s hard not to do things.

For example, I worked on a song with my friends Ken and Huan-Hua for this week’s Song Fight!; we entered the “We Did Everything We Could” fight under the band name Richard Donner Party. It was a fun song to make. Fortunately I didn’t have to even so much as look at a guitar. Most of my work was vocals, light keyboard work, and editing.

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So far so good

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Aside from a few hours of severe soreness last night and this morning, I haven’t had any major issues with the vaccination. Yay!

Also with my hecked-up shoulder/neck, the set of stretches I’ve been trying has been doing a good job of clearing up that pain too. If only I’d found those stretches last year instead of going through a month and a half of agony and condescention from healthcare professionals!

Also today I finally found my Wacom tablet and started poking at comics again. I also made a bunch of progress on my living room situation, and got Stepmania moved to my gaming PC (and also have my z-i-v mirroring thing running directly there, although wow Python is kind of a pain to deal with on Windows these days). I still haven’t actually hooked up my dance pad, though, but hopefully soon I’ll have the clutter mitigated to the point that I can do that.

Incidentally, I’m pretty underwhelmed by the TV stand I got. I’m not too surprised by the fairly low quality of the materials (especially given the price) but what I cannot get behind is its complete lack of internal cable management. Each of the 6 bays has a too-small hole out the back, and there’s no way to run cables internally, nor is there anywhere to reasonably stash a power strip. Ugh. I think I need to take up a furniture-making hobby so that I can eventually get to the point of making a TV cabinet that works the way I want it to. Because that’s what I need, more hobbies!

So I mean I ordered a circular saw, some saw horses, and a bunch of clamps, and most of it’s arrived already. And I’ve been watching at lot of 3x3Custom Tamar and Frank Howarth for inspiration. What I want to build actually seems pretty doable! (For that matter, Tamar did something very similar to what I want to make.)

Shoulder, unpacking, gardening, etc.

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Wellp, I managed to screw up my shoulder again. Last time was probably from me using my cane on a fairly long walk, and this time was probably due to me overdoing it with my weed puller (which requires a snapping motion that does similar things to my cane). Bleah. At least this time I know stretches and things that might help, and I found a bunch more which feel like they’re helping. Hopefully I’ll still feel well enough to get my second shot of vaccine tomorrow. (Which will probably have me feeling pretty much immobile for a few days anyway.)

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Current state of affairs

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I’ve been on Wellbutrin for a couple of weeks now and the effect has been interesting. I’m definitely finding it easier to focus on things like chores (and heck, my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since the remodel got finished, and my dining room is well on its way to not being a disaster), but on the other hand it’s disrupting my sleep a lot and I end up feeling tired throughout the day. My dreams have also been way more intense.

Right now I’m feeling sick with my usual winter sinus crap, so I’m a bit wobbly and a lot nauseous.

Between the Wellbutrin and playing DDR my pain levels are a bit lower but still not amazing, and I’m still finding it easy to hit a fibro wall™. Tomorrow I have a followup with my pain doctor to try to finally get on low-dose naltrexone. I also have the next two weeks off from work and hopefully I won’t end up just working too hard on personal projects instead. (That said, I have a couple of creative output gift swaps with deadlines coming up that I really should start on at some point.)

Anwyay I guess I don’t have a lot else to say. Oh well.

Pain, music, and DDR

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I’m fully off the nortriptyline and I haven’t had withdrawal side effects for several days now. On the other hand, my persistent fibro dizziness is back, and when I hit a wall with a pain flare I really feel it. I’d forgotten just how much more intense that was before nortriptyline. (Of course, while on nortriptyline it’s not like the end result was any different so I don’t feel like I’ve made a big mistake getting off of it.)

My pain doc recommended trying low-dose naltrexone, which is something my previous pain doc had scoffed at1, but anyway I’ve sent a message to my GP asking about getting on it, and if she can’t take care of that then maybe my psychiatrist can, or maybe the pain doc can (but unfortunately he’s really busy and appointments with him are booked to well over a month out at this point).

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pain management update

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Today i had a followup appointment with the pain clinic. Unfortunately, as soon as I started working again my pain flareups came right back. But the doctor was able to pinpoint a few things which are probably the underlying causes, and gave me some more exercises to try. We also decided to try increasing my nortriptyline dose again; I’m on 30mg for the next week then going up to 35 after that (update: and mentioned an eventual target of 40-50, forgot to mention that).

It’s also pretty clear that stress is a huge factor, and boy howdy have I been under a lot of it. Fortunately my new workplace is hugely into giving generous vacation benefits and making sure people actually use them, so in a couple weeks I’m taking a trip out to Port Angeles and staying in a tiny house for a week. I’ll probably bring a guitar and my iPad and try to just, like, decompress, and Be, and spend a bunch if time in the olympic peninsula and enjoy the small town vibe.

Everything I’ve seen about Port Angeles indicates it is a pretty good place with a lot of comfort potential. Maybe even the sort of town I’d want to retire to. And apparently it’s even pretty trans-friendly! I look forward to seeing this year’s Clellam county election results.

Current status

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My neighborhood is a war zone, but all signs point to SPD abandoning the East precinct and deescalating. I am suspicious that after they do, they’re going to purposefully cause crimes to make everyone fear for their safety to try to get us to beg for them to come back. If this happens, I hope we see past it.

The next few months are going to be interesting, and not in a great way.

Meanwhile, I’m sick with yet another sinus infection, and this combined with my mental health and my chronic pain issues are making this a very bad time. I mostly slept and cried today, although now it’s 10 PM and I’m at least feeling good enough to exist.

Job-wise, the news is quite public now that my company was hosting the Blue Lives Matter site, and enough was enough and pretty much everyone at the company revolted over it. They’re shutting the site down now. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but we are going to hold them to it.

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Pain management

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Current state of affairs: the opioid painkillers have stopped being effective, so I’m gonna stop taking them for now. My doctor prescribed me a rather aggressive regimen of Tylenol (4000mg/day! holy crap) and some muscle relaxants, the latter of which help a little but not very much. She also increased my daily dose of gabapentin from 200mg to 400mg, and that isn’t helping much either.

I did finally get one of those old-school hot water bottles (the rubber kind which fill like a balloon and have a screw-in cork) and it turns out that this is a really good use for my sous vide machine, so that’s cool. The hot compress seems to do more for my pain than any of the meds do. Not enough to be, like, productive, but enough that I’m not screaming in pain. But maybe I can get back to work.

Anyway, on the plus side I finally got set up with a new rheumatologist, and I’m also starting physical therapy, so maybe those things will help with my ongoing fibro issues (which this could very well be yet another expression of, for that matter).

Things and stuff

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Got an appointment with my GP today. She understands my frustration at how the ER went, and she did a brief physical exam, in which she saw that my muscles are… very, very tense.

She prescribed me muscle relaxants and increased my dose of gabapentin. Hopefully that’ll help. I took my first dose of relaxants about three and a half hours ago and I’m not in as much agony but things still hurt. But it’s an improvement. Hopefully this continues.