Improvement

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So last night I kind of hit rock bottom, in that I was incredibly depressed and ruminating about every single mistake I’d made in life and so on. I had a good cry and went to bed at 10 PM (and didn’t use my CPAP because my nose was all stuffy), and then the next morning woke up at 6 AM, still feeling kinda like crap, and I stayed in bed until 7:30. But when I got up I felt better, and I ended up going to the grocery store at like 8 or so and bought stuff for making a decent breakfast for once.

Today was basically a self-care day, and I think between having reduced my nortriptyline dose, having gotten a full 8 hours' sleep, not having used CPAP, and having been taking magnesium supplements, well, at least one of those things helped out. And today I was… well, not pain-free, but lower pain than I’d felt in a while. This afternoon I ended up taking a brief walk and managed to go a lot further than usual, too, although it was still only like a mile total. But I didn’t feel completely worn out by it.

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Current sleep/pain/etc. checkin

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Let’s see, where am I at right now…

  • Sleep: I got a weighted blanket on Meh. I’ve slept with it two nights. First night my sleep was aborted because of a… thing, second night I slept pretty well under it and woke up sore in the morning as if I’d been lifting weights for the last several hours. Interesting.

  • My new CPAP mask has been working pretty well for me. Although somehow I managed to not only take it off but take it apart in my sleep last night. Wat.

  • The… thing: I was feeling a mysterious pain in my left leg and hip starting on… Tuesday, I think? and it was getting worse and worse, and felt a lot like the DVT I had back in November 2017 which threw a clot and turned into a pulmonary embolism which wasn’t exactly a fun experience that I have any interest in repeating anytime soon. So I went to the ER to get it checked out, and it turned up… nothing. So, good news, no DVT. The doctor suggested I just take it easy for the next few days, which I am trying to do, and oddly enough I’m feeling a lot better, go figure. Also I’m glad I’m with Kaiser because the whole thing only cost me $15.

  • But it’s hard for me to take things easy because I want to get my home clean, because my birthday is coming up soon and I am intending to host a completely unrelated pizza party at my home. (Incidentally, if you are in the Seattle area and are interested in pizza and you think I know you well enough to let you into my home, let me know and I’ll maybe extend you an invitation to the party!) Fortunately a friend is coming over tomorrow to help me out with the cleaning stuff (for which I am incredibly grateful!) but I am oh so very tired. So I mean I’m taking things easy at the moment, but I’d rather not.

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The current state of the fluffy

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I guess it’s been a little while since my last post about the unending tire fire that is my mental state. I’ve been yo-yoing a lot, but here’s a summary of where I’m at right now:

CPAP: I’m back on it, trying some different things to make it more useful. The main problem seems to be bad mask fit, so tomorrow I’m going in for a proper mask fitting (rather than the half-assed thing the DME vendor did during the training session). Hopefully that will help.

Nortriptyline: I’m steady at 30mg/day, and have started taking it earlier in the evening, which has helped me with actually being tired when I need to be.

That weird failed drug test: Still no idea what happened with it. As one followup to it I had another diabetes screening (since that’s one possible cause of a false opium positive) but that came back fine (normal A1C and nothing out of the ordinary with my blood sugar), so that’s one less thing to worry about at least.

Day job: Still feeling like this is a bad match for me. Coworker is trying to assure me that I’m doing fine and trying to be helpful at getting me up to speed on the stuff I need to understand, but my brain refuses to play along.

AR startup: Going pretty well, I guess? I’m not doing a lot of active work for it but I’m glad to help out where I can.

Social life: I’m feeling much more withdrawn from my usual activities and am still on hiatus from most of my meetup groups. Ed is no longer hosting karaoke so I’m back to doing my drawing group every week. It’s going just Okay but I mostly use it for hanging out with a handful of folks I like. With a couple of those folks I saw Detective Pikachu the other day, which I enjoyed but I still have thoughts about. The monthly “smol games” group I’m in is still great though, even though I’m not actively working on any games (but I love seeing what other people are doing).

Music: Still plinking away at stuff. Also I really want to be able to attend Song Fight! Live, which is in Madison this year, but planning travel for it is a bit onerous. With music production I keep on waffling between “this stuff I’m making is pretty good, actually” and “ugh this is garbage.” So, same old, same old.

Progress resumed?

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So, just an update from my last bit on discontinuing my CPAP. I feel like I’m back to where I was before the CPAP started causing problems, and I’m also up to 30mg of nortriptyline and that’s feeling fine. I also heard back from the sleep clinic today and while the doctor still hasn’t had a chance to go over my sleep study (I guess she’s been out of the office for some reason) the clinician agreed that I should stay off CPAP for now if I’m feeling better without it.

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Feeling pretty darn great

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So yeah the last um… two months have seen my fibromyalgia getting worse and worse, and my sleep getting worse and worse, and my pain getting worse and worse, and me just plain feeling like garbage and falling apart and constantly falling asleep throughout the day.

I still haven’t heard back from last week’s in-lab sleep study, but finally I decided enough was enough and two days ago stopped using my CPAP.

Two days ago I thought I might have to cancel all my weekend plans. Today, however, I felt absolutely fantastic, and did those plans and then some. And I still feel fine.

I am pretty sure the CPAP has been doing more harm than good, and I need to make the sleep doctor understand that while one metric (AHI) was going down, it’s only because the more important metric (amount of actual sleep managed) went down moreso.

Like, yeah, I wasn’t suffocating in my sleep, because I wasn’t sleeping.

Anyway. Tomorrow I will probably stream the iPhone battery replacement at, say, 2 PM PDT; if you want to see me possibly destroy the only phone I have which works properly, follow my twitch channel and “ring that bell,” as all the YouTubers say.

And I hope that with this newfound state of feeling pretty okay I’ll be able to start making music and comics (and therefore streaming!) more regularly again.

Progress

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It’s April 1, and nobody seems to have noticed the little joke I put on my site, or at least didn’t react to it. Which is fine, it was mostly a last-minute commentary on web UX patterns and so on.

(If you’re seeing this in the future, I added a GDPR compliance popover that prompts you with, “This website uses cookies to remember if you’ve clicked this button,” and a button which reads “I clicked it.”)

Anyway! It’s been a few days since my last post and I’m feeling somewhat better right now, so I’d might as well share what’s changed.

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Backslide

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So, whatever positive effect I’ve gotten from the nortriptyline isn’t enough to make up for my current baseline pain levels. At least I’m able to get out of bed again (unlike a week ago) but holy moly do I fall into agonizing pain after not doing a whole lot. This weekend I wasn’t even capable of doing my usual 3-to-5 miles of walking a day, and I’m thinking tomorrow I might end up having to take a bus or even a Lyft to work. Very frustrating.

Also, lately I’ve noticed that the extra weight of my iPad in my purse is taking its toll on me. I should probably switch back to using my backpack as my main conveyance; it’s heavier but at least it’s symmetrical and puts the stress on my back rather than my shoulder and neck.

On the plus side, I’ve finally gotten my CPAP working well enough for me. I ended up finding a decent video on how to adjust the nasal pillows and those have turned out to be much more comfortable, given a second chance. The face mask ends up being too disruptive for a bunch of reasons (the slightest movement makes it leak around the sides and I have no way of scratching my nose without hecking the fit up) and I somehow managed to lose the nasal mask (which was nearly as bad as the full mask anyway) so the fact that I’ve gotten the one I’m “supposed” to be using to work reliably and comfortably is nice.

I still feel like it disrupts my sleep somewhat, though. I hope that’s just a matter of something I Need to get used to. Hopefully I’ll eventually start getting reliable deep sleep on it once I’ve fully acclimated.

Anyway. Being up this late and typing a blog post isn’t exactly helping. But I figured an update was in order.

Ongoing stuff

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So, Friday I took a day off from my day job to go out to Quincy, WA to visit the Quincy Valley Historical Society and Museum, a farming museum which the AR startup is doing an app for. It was an interesting trip and I learned some stuff, although mostly we were there to guide the filming of greenscreen footage that’s going to be part of the app.

Quincy reminds me a lot of Las Cruces, where I spent a total of 8 years as a college and graduate student, only it’s even smaller and there’s no university.

Anyway, Friday night I didn’t sleep particularly well, then Saturday we drove back and after a brief nap I went to a local Twitch streamer meetup and met a bunch of people. Which was a good time and I made a bunch of contacts, but unfortunately the combination of that with the previous day meant I was already pretty much at my spoons limit.

Then Sunday, because of the dumpster fire that is Daylight Saving Time, all those dirty spoons got thrown into my garbage disposal.

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