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 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.

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.

Okay, so, I’ve been having a lot more frustrating issues as of late:

• Whatever my connective tissue issue is, it’s getting way worse
• My kneecaps love to dislocate while I walk, and after 1.5 miles or so my knees start to give out under me
• My toes also love to either dislocate or weirdly cramp at random, which is quite painful, and getting them back in place is challenging
• My other joints (wrists, shoulders, TMJ, and sometimes elbows and ankles) are also in pain a lot of the time, and are possibly getting inflamed
• I’ve been having frequent bouts of vertigo (which are especially troubling when I’m driving)
• My tinnitus has gotten a lot worse recently
• Also my GERD is back, and my usual dietary measures to keep it at bay aren’t working
• I’m also getting occasional unexplained itchy rashes that flare up and subside after a few days
• And I am fatigued all. the damn. time.

Yesterday I had a doctor appointment to try to figure stuff out, and while the appointment itself was pretty unproductive due to the usual crap with modern healthcare practices, the doctor did at least run a lot of labwork for me, including checking autoimmune and inflammation factors and the most common connective tissue disorder markers. It all came back negative.

She did at least refer me to a rheumatologist, but I suspect the rheumatologist is just going to look at the labwork and say there’s nothing they can do for me. Most likely the answer is going to be the usual “diet and exercise,” when my diet is already pretty decent and I have difficulty doing exercise because of the very problems I’m complaning about.

The only thing that was even slightly out of the ordinary on the bloodwork was a borderline c-reactive protein, which indicates either systemic inflammation or coronary artery disease, and given that I’m a bit overweight I can guess which of the two the doctors are going to assume it is (especially without any other markers indicating underlying causes for inflammatory disease).

There’s got to be something causing all this but the state of the medical industry means that it’s unlikely that anyone I talk to in the medical field is going to come up with ideas on their own, they’re just going to tell me “diet and exercise” and to do BPPV exercises. During the Epley maneuver the vertigo does get way worse, but completing the maneuver doesn’t resolve it.

And of course none of this even comes close to addressing my joints not moving the way they’re supposed to. I love walking but I sure don’t like the feeling of my knee bending backwards when I do so. Nowadays I need knee braces and a cane whenever I go out, if I want to have any chance of making it home without being in agony. And never mind playing DDR.

It’s just, gosh. I wish someone out there also has these problems but also knows what the cause is so that I can find some hope of understanding what I can do to make things better. There is so much more I’d rather be doing than what I’m currently capable of.