Illness status

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Wow, yesterday I wasn’t doing so good. So much so that I forgot to actually git push that last entry, whoops.

Anyway. I slept for about 12 hours, and woke up feeling somewhat better. My cough is mostly cleared up, and the headache and fatigue that’s been affecting me for the past week or so is mostly gone as well.

I still took it easy, and also out of an abundance of caution I took advantage of QFC’s grocery delivery service, which was a pretty decent experience. Not something I’d do normally and not a thing I intend to keep on doing, but, y'know. It was helpful in this circumstance.

My refrigerator is well-stocked, at least, although I still don’t have much of an appetite. I’ve mostly been subsisting on crackers, seltzer, and cranberry juice.

I continue to test negative on at-home rapid tests. Given the symptoms I was experiencing as well as the timeline I have a hard time believing it wasn’t COVID, though. I know the at-home rapid tests only register for a certain viral load (which is pretty high with the current variants), and I’ve heard rumblings that the primer used for PCR tests is also very outdated at this point as well.

I absolutely credit the vaccine with keeping me from getting worse, though, and if you haven’t been vaccinated at this point and are able to be, please reconsider. If I hadn’t been vaccinated this would have definitely gone much worse for me, and also, please try to stop the spread, y'know?

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Test result: negative

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Today I got a PCR test. It came back negative.

I’m still sick with something, though, and the symptoms are to the letter COVID symptoms. I wonder how trustworthy PCR tests are these days.

Sick again

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I seem to be sick again. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I was exposed to COVID quite a lot two weeks ago (confirmed exposure at the office, probable unreported exposure at the hotel, not to mention all the other places where people have gone totally lax with distancing and face covering because I guess everyone’s given up on everything now) and a two-week incubation time is still not unheard of. Tests come back negative but apparently the current variants have a huge false-negative rate on the at-home tests.

Basically I’ve had a persistent headache and extreme fatigue (like, way more than usual for me, which is saying a lot) for the last week or so, and now I have a painful cough and it hurts to breathe sometimes. Robitussin and albuterol are helping, and I have a stash of promethazine if it comes down to it.

(Gosh I wish the war on opioids didn’t make promethazine so hard to come by…)

Even if what I have isn’t COVID-19, so many people around me are still getting it. This pandemic is far from over and I wish people would keep taking it seriously, and I wish people had been taking it seriously to begin with. Maybe if everyone had done their part to stamp it out, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

It sure would also be nice if Pfizer et al had actually kept their mRNA up to date like they said they would, and if the rapid tests were updated to cover new variants as they emerge. And if fucking Bill Gates hadn’t convinced the US government and WHO to not require vaccine stockpiles to be shared globally, so that maybe the breeding grounds for new variants might have not been quite so effective.

This was not a time for half measures.

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.)

Vaccine cache

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Today I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Whew. I’m expecting the next few days to really suck with side-effects so I stocked up on a bunch of easy-to-make food. My dining room is still a bit of a disaster though, and right now it’s even worse because I took delivery of my new TV console today and the box is like… in the dining room. And a bunch of other boxes and stuff are on the table. Oops.

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Vaccination

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It’s been nearly 13 months since COVID-19 made its way to Seattle, but I’m finally getting vaccinated on Saturday! And so many people I know are vaccinated now!

I didn’t have a lot of choice on the vaccination day, but at least I was able to choose a time in the afternoon. My plan for Saturday is to spend a bunch of time at the new house to install the Ethernet, and then to get my first vaccination dose, and then hopefully any side effects I end up with wear off by Tuesday which is when I need to spend all day preparing for the movers.

It’s pretty interesting to go back to March 2020 and revisit how things felt back then. Also the beginnings of the BLM protests. Holy crap, it sure has been a year, huh?

Small probabilities add up

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Rebecca Watson made an excellent video about how the recently-released COVID-19 risk map is not particularly helpful, due to the lack of context provided and the public’s general lack of understanding about how statistics work. It’s well worth watching (and also talks about a few other things, like issues with services like 23andme’s genetic risk factor screening kits). People are apparently using this risk map as a means of justifying going to Thanksgiving gatherings based on “only a 5% infection chance” or the like, which is incredibly short-sighted.

Let’s say that 5% of the population is carrying the disease, and assume that this statistical model is completely accurate. (It almost certainly isn’t, but that’s beside the point.) This means that any time you encounter someone there’s a 5% chance that they’re infected. That seems pretty low, right? For a single encounter, sure. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

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Non-COVID-19 medical care wonkiness

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So, because I’ve changed insurance plans, I need to change my specialists as well. One of those is my sleep specialist, which I mostly want to get a DME provider set up with my insurance, which requires a screening in order to get DME approval.

Because of COVID-19, appointments are limited, and they can’t see me until June 1, which means if I need to refresh my mask et al I’ll have to go out-of-pocket until then. Not the worst thing in the world (and honestly I found out-of-pocket to be cheaper than the copay on my previous DME anyway), but annoying.

But there’s a bit more that this leads to which is a little wonky… because of COVID-19 they had to ask me the usual appointment pre-screening questions regarding SARS-NCoV-2 symptoms and exposure. But those questions are based on right now, and probably won’t be valid in three months. Like, one of them was “have you traveled in the last 14 days or been exposed to someone known to have the virus in that time?” and regardless of how I answer now that has no bearing on how it’ll be on June 1. Similarly, just because I have no symptoms or fever right now doesn’t mean anything about how I’ll be in June.

If the appointment were within two weeks I’d say this was reasonable, but… it’s two months away. How does that make any sense?

Surprise frustrations

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So, I am using way more soap than usual when washing my hands, which has been drying out the skin a lot. To try to counteract that I’ve been using lotion a lot more. But it turns out that this leads to more tactile stimulation on my fingers (basically I constantly feel like I’ve just been soaking in the bathtub for an hour) which in turn leads to a sensory overload/pain flare, and it doesn’t even help with the dry skin anyway, and the dry skin also leads to its own level of sensory issues too. And Fiona’s insistence on sitting on my lap while I work isn’t helping at all. Just before lunch I had a bit of a meltdown because of it.

I guess I need to figure out a better way to periodically clean my hands without leading to other issues.

I could also really use a haircut, because my wild scraggly hair getting in my face is making this worse. Of course all the hair stylists are (rightfully) closed right now. I suppose I could break out my Flowbee but that feels like it’s taking the “mental stress due to isolation” look a bit too far. (Plus I don’t want my hair to be that short right now. I need every femininity cue I can get these days.) Maybe it’s time to finally learn how to use hair clips, but I suspect feeling them bouncing against my face would make me flare too.

Why is my brain like this? Ugh.

Updates from Elsewhere

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So, my cold symptoms came back somewhat today, so I took another sick day and took it easy. And now I’m feeling better, so, yay.

The last few days I’ve been having trouble with my sleep apnea again so I’m giving my CPAP another shot. Since I’m on new insurance and getting healthcare at a different place now maybe I’ll get a new sleep doctor who actually listens to my concerns instead of just taking shortcuts based on simple apnea.

I also of course still want to get tested for COVID-19, if only for peace of mind. I’m not fond of this constant uncertainty. If I can get a clean diagnosis I can stop having an anxiety attack every time I cough or feel short of breath. And on the off chance I do have the virus I know what to prepare for. (Plus I switch to no-contact grocery and food delivery for a while.)

Inside I’m going to ruminate about the virus itself.

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