busybee fluffy rambles

So, the update from yesterday is that I am now on anticoagulants again, and I am not terribly happy about it. On the plus side I’m on Xarelto which takes way less management than Warfarin, but on the minus side I am told that I likely need to be on them for a long time (at least a year, possibly forever) due to my prior clot history, and so far it’s been giving me a headache and I’m also constantly worried about, you know, bleeding out and dying.

I’m also still in considerable pain, both in my leg but also in my everything else, because this fibro flare just will not end. And I’m under a lot of stress right now, and I’m frustrated at a lot of things.

So, in anticipation of my new job starting next week I’m trying to figure out what the right balance of medications should be for my various neurological issues, and I’m not sure where the balance point should be. I’m mostly thinking out loud here, but I am going to try to walk through it and maybe folks with more experience can comment, or something.

Back in 2015, I was a complete mess, and I did everything I could to hide it. I was still having panic attacks regularly, and they would be brought on by the slightest provocation. But I felt, working in tech, that I had to be quiet about it, and just let things pass and things would get better if I ignored them.

One day a coworker did a thing that triggered a pretty big panic attack. It wasn’t anything malicious on his part, just a cavalier, morbid joke in gestural form that happened to tread upon one of my biggest triggers.

I felt awful, and I wanted to keep from feeling that way again.

So I messaged him on our work chat, and told him that the gesture he made happens to be a huge trigger for me and I was having a pretty major panic attack as a result. And his response was incredibly helpful: he didn’t realize, he understood, and he wouldn’t do it again. And he stuck to that.

I’ve been on Adderall XR for a bit over a week now. It’s going pretty okay, except for the stuff that isn’t.

So, a new decade has started¹. Hopefully this next one will go a lot better than the last one.

I feel like it’s been a little while since my last checkin post so let’s do one now, I guess.

So, GeekGirlCon was yesterday and today, and for once I vended at it, having been put on the waitlist every time I’d applied for the last few years.

I already have quite a few thoughts about how things went and how they could have gone better for me, and my thoughts about my future as a potential convention vendor. Which is to say, I probably won’t be doing this again – but not because of anything wrong with GeekGirlCon. (Just to get that out of the way.)

Note that this isn’t my first time tabling at GGC, as I had previously done so with the Seattle Indies in 2017. But that was a completely different setup for a completely different intention – promoting games and the Indies organization.

So, this post about signs of undiagnosed ADHD showed up on one of my fibro communities and so much of it seemed PRETTY FAMILIAR, and I also found out that fibromyalgia and ADHD are highly comorbid, and then I was realizing that I stopped being able to focus on work and Getting Stuff Done when I had to go cold turkey on caffeine when my panic disorder started in 2011, and, wellp.