busybee fluffy rambles

Grab-bag of stuff going on for me, apologies for my usual unstructured rambling

I got back from Denver very late last night, and boy were my arms tired. And legs. And body.

Lesson learned: if you have the option to take a much earlier flight and it only costs $50, take it. That is much better than wandering around the Denver airport for 8 hours. Or, failing that, the $79 to get an admiral lounge day pass isn’t really all that bad either.

Anyway. Today was mostly a day of recuperation, and I was in extreme pain in my back and right shoulder. I was supposed to go to the STANCE annual meeting but I was way too tired and in too much pain to attend. I did at least virtually attend a yoga session to work on my shoulder a bit and it helped somewhat, and the instructor also gave me some good stretches specific to the pain I was feeling, so, that was super helpful.

Since a couple folks have asked, I’m still the same as the other day, which is to say, tired, with a mild cough and pretty bad fatigue. I’m actually able to get some work done, though.

Also, yesterday I finally got a positive COVID test, although the T line was extremely faint. But at least now I know these tests aren’t completely worthless, even if it only told me what I already knew and well in retrospect.

So, I was worried about having “long COVID” and/or protracted amounts of fatigue after this, and, unfortunately, that’s come to pass. I had pretty bad fatigue leading up to the respiratory symptoms, but in this week since the worst of the cough subsided, it’s been even worse. I’m constantly tired and fatigued and I have a bad headache that just won’t go away, and I’m barely able to do things that I need to do, much less the things I want to do.

This past weekend I did end up assembling the drum kit like I said I would, and that took a lot out of me. I played the kit for a few minutes and it was more than I could really handle. Then I decided to work on some other music, and I could barely press down on the strings on my bass, and had to stop after just a couple minutes. I tried playing guitar instead, and that was just as bad.

And the next day my body felt like I’d run a marathon or something.

Stuff I want to work on:

• Refactor
• Lewi and Unity
• Music in general
• Publ:
  • A post editor/submission system (particularly so that I can move my drawing group’s site off of Tumblr, and also so that I can enable public comic transcriptions again)
  • A native comment system
  • Also the rather large list of things I want to do to Publ itself
• Subl
• A game for Strawberry Jam

Stuff I need to work on:

• The day job
• Finding a better housing situation than my current condo

Stuff I have the energy to work on:

So today I finally had a phone appointment with the sleep doctor, following up on the sleep study I had done about 6 weeks ago.

The results are… inconclusive. And frustrating.

Hm, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything of substance. I guess I could check in for those of you who still read this for whatever reason.

So I’ve been on nortriptylene for nearly two weeks now, and so far it’s feeling pretty promising. I’m still at the 10mg dose (I’m supposed to increase to 20 in a few days) and while it hasn’t completely solved my fibromyalgia so far (not that I’d expect it to), it’s definitely helped me out a lot.

In particular, while I still feel pain after a full day of work, it just feels like something that’s present and that tells me that it’s time to take a break from things, rather than putting me into extreme severe agony.

Basically I suspect this is what pain normally feels like to people who don’t have this disability!

I still have some level of fatigue in the morning (and much more later in the day) and I’m still needing to manage my spoons – that’s not something that is likely to ever go away – but even this early and at this low of a dose I feel like I’m heading in the right direction.