busybee fluffy rambles

For the past few days I’ve had some low-grade pain building up in my shoulder, just like it did in November 2017. Today it got excruciating. So I went to the hospital to get it checked out to make sure I wasn’t going to die of an embolism. I shared my medical history with this stuff (repeatedly) and the nurse and doctor focused on getting an embolism diagnosed.

That turned up negative. Which is great! But I’m still in excruciating pain. Which isn’t.

The doctor was dismissive of my pain. The nurse was too. She said that maybe knowing it’s not an embolism means I’ll feel better, and suggested the pain was just anxiety. But no, it is absolutely not just anxiety. Or just chronic pain. I’ve been dealing with chronic pain for over 20 years now. I know what chronic pain feels like. This ain’t it.

I wasn’t in excruciating agony while lying down, but as soon as they discharged me they were nowhere to be found. As soon as I sat up I was in agony but I couldn’t find anyone to talk to. I already had my discharge paperwork, and it was late at night, and I wasn’t dying, so, just toss me out onto the street, don’t even try to find a sling or something that’ll help me.

I did at least manage to get a prescription for some painkillers. Maybe that’ll help, but I got home well after the pharmacy closed.

I mean I’m glad I’m not dying and that this probably wasn’t because of the clot, but holy heck am I in agony right now.

Maybe I should have put on more of a show about how much pain I was in. After the past two decades I’ve gotten pretty good at powering through pain and not, like, screaming and crying. That doesn’t mean I’m not hurting, it just means I’ve gotten good at not showing it. I’ve always learned to minimize my pain. So people see my pain as not being “real.”

So, some updates of the things that have been going on in my life since the last update, because I’m waiting for my car to get some overdue scheduled maintenance and I forgot to bring my Switch, so why not.

Yesterday the fifth and final season of She-Ra was released on Netflix, and it was absolutely fantastic. The whole show is worth watching, and I feel it’s the best cartoon since Steven Universe.

Anyway, one thing that Netflix does is makes it really easy to skip the intro, which is a shame because on this show, the intro changes based on plot-relevant details throughout the season. Let’s take a look!

(Obviously huge spoilers below, you have been warned.)

Back in 2010 or so I was trying a bunch of different approaches to putting my keyboard and mouse close to my lap for better ergonomics. I looked at all the height-adjustable keyboard trays and was really annoyed by all of the ones on the market. Either they were flimsy or they were way overpriced and hard to adjust well, and usually not able to actually accommodate my various input devices due to having built-in molded wrist rests and so on, and of course the ones always provided by workplaces were the worst. So I bought an Ikea DAVE laptop table (since discontinued, but here’s an Amazon affiliate link) and that became my usual go-to for a bit of office furniture, and I bought a few of them, all red. I still have two of them (one being from the office when I worked at Sony), and have continued to use them (one as a generic putting-stuff-on table).

A few years ago I got annoyed at the unwieldiness of the actual desktop on it and replaced it with a chunk of wood, and later melamine, shelving¹, which made it a bit more manageable, and also had the benefit of being able to put it into a standing configuration pretty easily (tilting my monitor back so I can look down at it). But I was getting progressively more annoyed with the stand itself, getting in the way of my legs and not having a way to put my feet flat on the ground and so on. Plus, it made it very easy for me to keep putting off vacuuming under my desk.

So, a few days ago I finally ordered a new keyboard tray from Mount-It (I bought it direct from the manufacturer but here’s the obligatory Amazon affiliate link). Today it arrived and I installed it and I have thoughts about it. It’s mostly positive, but there’s definitely some places it could be improved as well.

So, the update from yesterday is that I am now on anticoagulants again, and I am not terribly happy about it. On the plus side I’m on Xarelto which takes way less management than Warfarin, but on the minus side I am told that I likely need to be on them for a long time (at least a year, possibly forever) due to my prior clot history, and so far it’s been giving me a headache and I’m also constantly worried about, you know, bleeding out and dying.

I’m also still in considerable pain, both in my leg but also in my everything else, because this fibro flare just will not end. And I’m under a lot of stress right now, and I’m frustrated at a lot of things.

Back in November 2017 I had a clot in my leg that turned into a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Fortunately it was a pretty mild one, so I’d have only died a little bit. Anyway, after that I was on warfarin for 6 months and then have been hyper-vigilant about leg pain ever since.

About a year ago I had leg pain for a while that felt like it could be another clot, so I went to urgent care and got a sonogram; they found nothing and said it was probably just fibromyalgia playing tricks on me.

Anyway, about a week ago I started having familiar leg pain again, but what with COVID-19 shutdowns it wasn’t particularly easy to find options for getting it diagnosed. It wasn’t getting any worse but it also wasn’t getting any better, so yesterday I asked my doctor, who had me come in for an in-person diagnosis, and the doctor who saw me was concerned enough to schedule a sonogram for me.

I just had that sonogram, and there is indeed another clot. But! It’s pretty benign.

Photoshop has gotten unwieldy, slow, and unstable. It has a lot of features I’ve grown to rely on but sometimes I feel like they just get in the way.

After playing with Strike I’ve come to realize that my relationship with art programs has gotten pretty dysfunctional.

So here’s a list of things that I’d love to see in a drawing program.