busybee fluffy rambles

Last night I started feeling significant pain whenever I inhaled too deeply, telling me there was either pleurisy or another embolism happening. I gave it several hours to try to resolve on its own, and it just got worse and worse, so this morning, I headed to the ER.

And there I waited, and waited, and waited, and then after around four hours of nothing happening while just sitting in the waiting room in agony, the pain had resolved itself, and I could breathe normally again.

So I asked about being discharged early, and was told to wait, and wait, and wait, and it was another hour or so before I was able to leave.

Anyway I’m back home now, and hopefully this is the last of the COVID drama in my life for a little while.

I hate how every time I get sick, be it with COVID or anything else, I spend so much time feeling worthless and like I’m in limbo and like everything is passing me by.

I’ve got stuff to do but I’m feeling way too tired to do any of it and I’m full of depression right now. Post-COVID everything just feels so pointless, and I also feel so alone.

I’m supposed to be getting my set together for Song Fight! Live, but I’m just full of negative self-talk and a feeling that nobody gives a shit about me or my music. I hustle so much trying to find anyone who wants to work with me on anything and the best I can find is endless unpaid work for exposure which never amounts to anything.

I forced myself to take a walk today and it was nice to get out of the house but I still just felt so alone with my thoughts, and those thoughts weren’t great to listen to.

Sometimes it sucks to live alone.

I seem to have made it through the worst of the COVID. My fever’s mostly gone, and my cough is way less severe (which is good because oh my god does it hurt to cough anymore). I’ve lost five pounds since Friday but also I’m finally getting my appetite back so hopefully I can cushion some of that.

Because of the current surge, the antivirals are all super out of stock, including Molnupiravir which I’d gotten a prescription for (unfortunately Paxlovid isn’t safe for me to take due to my blood thinners). I had a followup with my GP yesterday and we decided that based on my progress I don’t really need it anyway. (She also doesn’t think the nodules they found on Sunday need a followup.)

As usual I seem to have a secondary bacterial infection in my lungs, judging by the phlegm I’ve been coughing up, but hopefully that’ll clear up in a few days and I won’t need antibiotics for it. For now I’m just taking pseudoephedrine and guaifenisin which is my usual “sit it out” protocol, since I’m allergic to most antibiotics and am super worried about antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains (and anyway Washington State guidance is to wait a week if possible before prescribing antibiotics for lung and sinus infections).

Usually when I get COVID I use QFC’s overpriced grocery delivery service (which is really just Kroger-branded Instacart), but lately I’ve been shopping at Safeway more so I figured I’d try theirs out instead, and wow, it was way cheaper, just $4 + tip for my whole order. We’ll see if the ice cream survives.

I am super fatigued right now and that’s making it even less feasible for me to work right now. It hasn’t even been a week since I was exposed, much less the onset of symptoms, so I have to remind myself that it’s totally normal to feel this way after an illness, especially COVID which usually wipes me out for months afterwards. I’m just hoping that given how quickly the disease progressed this time, so will the post-infection fatigue.

I feel super guilty about this but I’ve started up a gofundme to help defray some of my ongoing financial issues. I’m hoping I can ramp up on freelance stuff soon (not that I’d been having much luck with it before this, anyway) but at this point I’m mostly just hoping to carry things forward until I can finally get on disability. I do want to genuinely thank everyone who’s contributed so far, even though I feel really weird about accepting the money. I’d rather be getting it from random rich people and not, like, people I know, who I feel could probably use the money more than me? If that makes any sense? Gah.

This outbreak has been pretty devastating to the choir; at least 15% of us are sick, probably more. A lot of us are disabled or immunocompromised. I hope we’re going to see a return to our old masking+testing policies; they’d been relaxed this season in keeping with King County infection statistics, and we were caught totally off-guard by this surge. It’s a very hard lesson learned for the future.

In some positive news, my parents (who were visiting for the choir show) are not testing positive, and I’m glad they were here when I needed them most.

I’m back at home. They did a CT scan but there wasn’t anything too concerning, it just seems that I was coughing hard enough that I had a minor bleed in my lungs, exacerbated by the blood thinners I take due to my clotting disorder. The prognosis is to just not take my blood thinners for a few days and to do the usual hydration/plenty of rest/etc.

The CT scan did find a couple of probably-unrelated nodules on my lungs which are probably nothing but will need a followup.

Anwyay tomorrow my prescription for molnupiravir should finally come through. It’d have been nice if I could have started on it yesterday when it was prescribed but supplies are limited right now. But it should at least help me to recover much more quickly.

i’m in the ER because I started coughing up blood this morning. so much for releasing my new avatar today…

Last night I took some cough suppressant before I went to bed and remembered to run my humidifier, and when I woke up this morning I was feeling fine. So maybe this was a false alarm as far as COVID re-infection goes. OR maybe my immune system finally knows how to take care of it quickly. Either way, I’m glad to not be in the throes of respiratory distress.

I’m still feeling like crap in other ways though. I bought a promising piece of exercise equipment based on reading how this sort of thing can help a lot with fibromyalgia, and I did three sessions with it today and oh wow am I feeling it.

A couple weeks ago I traveled to Albuquerque to visit my family, and now I’m sick with some fun respiratory gunk. It may or may not be COVID (again). Hard to tell at this point. So far it’s at least not as bad as when I got it a year ago. But I’d still rather not be having it at all, y'know?

Anyway I think air travel is Bad, Actually.

Annoyingly this got in the way of all of my pride plans; I was meant to perform with the choir at Trans Pride Seattle last night, and today I was going to go to brunch with friends, and even if I didn’t feel like complete ass I also wouldn’t want to spread this crud to anyone else.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall any time in recent history that I traveled by airplane and didn’t end up getting sick shortly after. Like, even pre-COVID, it was pretty much a given that any time I traveled for work or whatever I’d end up with some awful crud.

I guess in more positive health news, there’s some promising research into new fibromyalgia meds, and also some pretty interesting advances in understanding what fibromyalgia even is and what treatments might help with the underlying issues. So that’s hopeful, at least. Solving fibro pain wouldn’t fix all of my problems but it’d at least make it easier for me to do the things I want to be doing.