geowench

Well, after 2.5 years and FOUR jabs, I got Covid.  For my birthday.

The Mad Scientist has resumed quite a bit of travel this summer and a few days after coming back from Belgium in September, he started feeling sick and tested positive.  I thought I might actually avoid it because it took nearly a week before I came down with it.  But eventually I did.  Damn it.  We both had flu-like symptoms and were down and out for about 4 days and then he needed maybe 10 days to get back to normal and is totally fine now.  I'm exactly 3 weeks out from getting it and am mostly recovered.  Back to working full time, but still coughing and still pretty fatigued.  In Covid terms we got off fairly lightly.  In pre-Covid terms, we were actually fairly sick and quite miserable for a good week, though never in any danger of needing hospitalization. I was feeling fairly smug about being in the minority of people to have not gotten it, but you know what they say about pride.

So.  It's been 5 months since my last confession, I mean post, and I think I'm going to try and post monthly again.  Let's see if I can even remember what's happened since I last posted in my April that I had rage quite my job.

May: 2 week solo road trip to CA was FANTASTIC.  I wish I had stayed longer, but I came back before memorial day.

June: I got over my "oh it's so hard not to work" nonsense pretty damn quickly and spent June relaxing and enjoying myself.  I went swimming a few times.  I slept a lot.  I spent a LOT of time in the hammock, reading.  I did not get much of anything productive done.  I just felt like I NEEDED that month to rest and recover, and so I did, and it was splendid.

July: More of what happened in June plus I had friends visiting for two weeks, which was fun but TIRING.

August:  I started a new job on the 10th and spent the rest of the month completely bewildered.  I'm working as a tech writer for an alternative energy company.  I'm in the Information Systems (software) department and am supposed to be documenting their software systems.  It's completely remote, and they're paying me literally twice what I was making at my previous position.  Plus they've sent me a Dell lap top, docking station, and 24" screen and then were like ooops, we were supposed to send you a MacBook Pro and a different docking station, so they sent those, but didn't ask for the original back, so now I've got 2 brand new laptops.  I suppose I should ask if they want the Dell back ... but I actually use both of them, so I'm kind of waiting to see if anybody notices/remembers.

New job: They have a very incomplete onboarding process, plus my boss is totally hands off (and a tech/computer guy, not a writer), so I spent the first two month having no idea WTF I was supposed actually be doing.  It was pretty frustrating and anxiety inducing, and then I got COVID and had to take some time off when I was still brand new.  But I feel like I'm finally starting to get a tiny bit of a grip on what I'm supposed to be doing.  At least I hope I am.

October plan:  Get over Covid and ease back into my physical fitness routines.  Get my office/craft room to be functional again and not look like a hoarder's paradise.  Find time to actually do some sewing.

On Friday I got my COVID booster and so have spent the entire weekend pretty much wrecked.  Although not as wrecked as the second shot.  This time is mostly just fatigue; haven't had any chills or body aches like I did with #2.  However it's Sunday eve now, and my arm is still hot, hard, and swollen (LOL, not nearly as sexy as it sounds), plus I have a swollen and painful lymph node in my arm pit.  While these symptoms are annoying, they are of course not nearly as bad as actually getting COVID.  However, I can also see how someone without sick leave or anyone to take care of their kids might decide they can't afford to lose 2 days to get a vaccine.  

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and it was very pleasant, though low key.  The Mad Scientist got me a hammock with a stand (as requested, I even sent him the link) which he assembled for me and now it's on the porch, and it's pretty splendid.  He wants one now.  

I'm pretty pessimistic about this winter and the COVID toll.  It seems to me that everyone who wants a vaccine has probably gotten one, and I expect winter to be pretty brutal with the combo of COVID and flu.  My strategy remains the same - hide at home when I'm not at work, and when I'm at work, hide in my office as much as I can.

Teeth seem to be the theme just now ... the last two posts in my reading feed are from two different friends posting about dental woes.  And I broke a tooth last night.  Got in to see my dentist for a quick look today and she says it's broken beneath the gum, but she *thinks* she can save it with a crown, though I will likely need a root canal sometime down the line ... unless I want to just do the root canal now?  No thank you, I'll take my chances with the crown for now.  But she can't get me in until the 25th.  So three weeks of being super careful and only chewing on my R side, I guess.  

I've been rather sick the last week or so, even missed two days of work.  I basically had a sinus infection.  I didn't go the the dr. and I didn't get tested for COVID, though perhaps I should have, since I'm now reading that delta infections are common in the fully vaccinated and present more like cold symptoms.  But I'm basically over it now, so I'm going with "summer cold/sinus infection."  

Holy moly, I used to be much more interesting person.  At least I think/hope that I was.

Well we are definitely in a plague summer lull, and I'm cautiously hopeful that it's less of a lull and more of a beginning of the end.  Here in OK, people are definitely treating it as if it's over.  Everything is back open, there are no mask or social distance requirements and very few people are masked.

Work is kicking my butt and I had a stressful week.  Next week I need to do better at managing myself because my workload is going to remain heavy for several months.  At least I got out of going on a week long photo shoot, telling my boss that I just couldn't afford the time.

Nothing much to say, just popping in to say I'm fine.  I'm managing my BP pretty well, my vision is almost back to normal, and I'm trying very heard to improve my eating habits.  Life goes on.

My BP is FINALLY coming under control after half a dozen med adjustments.  But on Sunday we got takeout, which we rarely do, and it was very salty and the next day my BP spiked like 20 points.  It took about two days for it come back down to where it had been.

Now when I was in nursing school (~1990) we were told that contrary to popular and intuitive beliefs, salt didn't actually affect BP unless you had underlying kidney issues.  Well I just had an ultrasound that showed my kidneys are doing just fine, so I figured salt wasn't really an issue for me.  But after that little episode I did some googlescholaring and found peer reviewed papers demonstrating that salt indeed has a major effect on BP, though some people are more salt tolerant than others. 

So then I started looking at a low salt diet.  Now I knew there was a lot of salt in most packaged foods, but I am still shocked to learn just HOW much salt is in things like bread.  And tomato sauce.  Canned beans.  Everything, dangit.  So now I'm contemplating going fullon granola woman and doing things like making big pots of beans and canning making my own tomato sauce because the brand of sauce I have in my cubard is like 17% of daily salt intake for half a cup, which is outrageous.  Store bought chicken broth is shocking.  My favorite condiment is Vietnamese fish sauce and a single tablespoon of that is like 8 million mgs.  Sigh.

So now I'm contemplating what I am and am not willing to do.  It seems pretty clear I need to do a diet overhaul, and I think I'll start with cooking up a big pot of garbanzo beans and roasting some veggies this weekend for my lunches throughout the week.  I've also been contemplating only eating meat in the evenings - I'm married to a devout carnivore, and he wants a hunk of meat every night, but I can decrease the amount I'm eating.  I've already drastically reduced my portions of evening meat, and I can cut it out totally during the day, especially stop with the lunch meats which are big source of salt. No more frozen lunch meals (which I only rarely resorted to anyway).  

In other exciting news, I've been back working every other day in the office since the beginning of the month and then starting in May, we all have to be back in the office full time, which I'm fairly bummed about.  It will definitely take me awhile to readjust and I anticipate being tired all the time for at least a month.  I'm thinking seriously of leaving my job.  Nothing terrible has happened, I'm just bored, and would like to find something more flexible that lets me travel (assuming travel ever becomes a thing again).  We just lost ANOTHER manager, and really the logical person to take that position is me.  But I absolutely do not want to.  I won't do anything for awhile yet, but if the economy starts to open back up, I may take a gander and see what other options I might have.  Like working remotely for one of our competitors.

It is currently 70F, and last month's endless deep freeze seems like a distant nightmare.  We spent time outside over the weekend starting to prep the garden, and are talking about buying a tiller.  We are both scheduled for our second COVID jab on Friday.  I think I will celebrate by going to Trader Joe's on the following weekend (need to give it a week or to get those antibodies going).

The world is still a disaster, but at least I don't wake up every morning dreading to find out what insane thing the president said/did.  There are still thousands of new COVID cases a day, and thousands of deaths a day as well.  The planet is still so fucked.  People are still so evil.  But we have nearly 12 hours of sunlight a day and I feel the tiniest bit of hope in the dark recesses of my cold black soul.

Y'all, so far this year is sucking pretty hard.  I'm not even going to go into the whole rioting at the Capitol stuff, because the newspapers are all over that shit, but can I just say holy crap.

On a personal level, I finally got to my GP about 10 days ago and she prescribed me a med for hypertension.  At first it seemed to be helping a teeny bit, but then it did not and last night my BP was so high that in nonCOVID times I would have gone to the ER.  I did call the ER and spoke a very nice nurse who was like yeah, you could come, but OTOH, if you're not having any symptoms like blurred, vision disorientation, or pounding headache, you could just try and relax and hope your BP comes down a bit, b/c we are admitting COVID patients right and left and are pretty much full.  So, I broke dry January and had a small amount of rum to try and get my anxious self to relax, and E and I watched an underwater animal documentary, and I guess it worked because I did calm down some, I didn't have a stroke, and I got a good nights sleep and this morning my BP was still far too high, but the far too high it's been for weeks now and not quite in OMG she gonna stroke out territory.

So this morning I called my GP and spoke with her nurse.  Nurse got back to me with a new plan.  Stop the medication and start a new one (a beta blocker).  And tomorrow I have a renal artery ultrasound scheduled to try and find out WTF is going on.  I've taken one dose of the beta blocker, and maybe it's just the placebo effect, but I do feel calmer and the pressure in my head seems to be a little less.  (Beta blockers are used for both hypertension and anxiety, basically they block the effect of epinepherine and sloooow everything down, which I desperately need right now.)  I haven't taken my BP again because what's the point?  We'll see how long that lasts.  As long as I'm calm, and not having stroke symptoms, I feel like taking my BP will just make me more anxious.

This weekend normally we would be in Tulsa for our big 5 day work conference.  Instead I had to attend an all day online meeting on Saturday which was certainly stressful, but I don't really see how it could have precipitated this whole BP crisis.  

As for my vision - my R eye remains fine.  The left eye has cleared up a little bit - maybe 20%?  In bright light I can see well enough to drive, and I can read.  In dim light I definitely cannot see well enough to drive and I can only read if I've got a high contrast setting, or I just close my L eye and use the R eye.  Basically it is like looking through a veil.  In the light it's a light colored veil that I can more or less see through but in dim light it's a dark veil that really obscures most of my vision.  

SHEESH, I totally forgot to tell about going to the retinal specialist and the super fun part about getting a shot in my eyeball.  It was there I learned that my BP was so high.  When they told me what it was, I was like No, it's not, very dismissive, becuase I've always had quite low BP.  But I took it when I got home and then took it again the next day and yep, high, so I was able to get into my GP the very next day, which brings up back to where I started this entry.

The good news is that E has been really supportive.  I delayed telling him what was going yesterday because I didn't want him to freak out.  But he has remained calm and supportive and willing to do whatever is necessary including driving me to the ER and waiting in the car.  He drove me into town today to pick up my new medicine.  I underestimate his ability to deal with a crisis that isn't his own.  The other good news is that my various injuries seems to have really improved and I'm able to manage them with only Tylenol now.  Turns out NSAIDS like ibuprofin increase BP and I had been popping those babies like candy for months (years?) now.

So.  Writing this out has helped me to calm down a little bit.  I really hope to get some answers and some decreases in my BP soon.

October and November have been mostly about watching the fall of the American Empire.  Even though Biden won the election, I'm not 100% certain he will actually be sworn in ... 45 is now trying to get states that went to Biden to cast their electoral votes for him.  And even if Biden is peacefully sworn in ... 71 million people voted for 45, which just makes me sick, and the repubs will still control the senate, not to mention the Supreme Court.  so yeah ... it's all terrible.  And that's not even getting into COVID, which is completely out of control.

So let's see, back in October, I was doing really well with my walking and rehab, up to 3 miles ... and then we had an early ice storm that closed the state down for two days.  On Oct 27 I walked out on my porch, didn't see the ice, and down I went, royally wrenching my already effed up R knee.  It was breath-takingly painful.  I immediately iced it down and did all the right things, and it is slowly improving, but I've had a painful November because of it.  It's worst at night, usually around 2-4 AM I wake up and it is really painful and I can't get back to sleep.  I thought about going back to PT, but with corona so out of control, I don't actually feel safe going back to the rehab place that I stopped going to back in early summer because I was uncomfortable with their level of CDC recommendation compliance.  So I'm doing my best to rehab it myself, and it has really improved tremendously.  Last weekend I managed about a 1.5 miles.  I'm sure I can do that again tomorrow, though I probably won't try to push it to 2 miles.  Maybe 1.75 miles.

This week work started us working split schedules again until the beginning of January - and probably longer, given the way everyone expects COVID to go this winter.  So every other day I go into the office and every other day I work from home.  I actually like this - there are fewer people in the office when I have to go in and while working from home full time gets lonely and boring, I like doing it every other day.  

Socially I am more isolated than ever, of course.  I've seen no one since February, I think.  Thanksgiving is this coming week, and it will be just me and E.  Usually we get together with this couple who lives in Tulsa, but when I texted her to say what a bummer we can't do Thanksgiving this year, she was all, oh we've moved to Nevada.  So now we really are friendless.  Sigh.

I am especially blue right now because yesterday coming home from work I found a beautiful barn owl dead in the middle of the road.  Of course I brought it home and will prepare the skull and bury the rest of it, but it really made we sad.  Some nights we hear owls hooting and I find it so beautiful and peaceful and calming and to find one of them dead (again!) just really bums me out.  

But 'tis the season to be grateful and I am genuinely grateful for so many things.  We are healthy(ish) and have not contracted COVID, we are both employed and have a comfy home and all we need.  This is a crazy ass time to be alive, and I am know that I am a fortunate woman.

The main thing I remember about August is being exhausted.  All. the. time.  And also being worried that I might actually have COVID.  I think both these things are due to ragweed, to which I am crazy allergic.  I spent the month with a nagging sore throat, a barky cough, fairly intense headaches, and deep fatigue.  Perhaps I should have gotten myself tested, but FB memories kept telling me that I feel this way every August, and given that I hardly ever see anyone and even at work am barricaded in my office and everyone wears masks - well parsimony told me it was allergies and not COVID.  Oh and hubs was fine - he's not sensitive to ragweed and grasses like I am.  I asked him several times if he thought I should get tested and he kept saying that I didn't have any symptoms that I don't have very August, so I never did.  Also if anyone at work had asked me to or been concerned, I would have gotten tested.  But I guess they're used to my grandpa hacking.  I'm justifying myself a lot here; probably I should have gone and gotten tested ...

This weekend is the first time I've had any energy all month.  Today I made a nice pancake breakfast for the hubs then we went for a walk (1.76 miles - my knee has been bothering me, so I didn't push it).  Did laundrey, made a yummy bundt cake, prepped my clothes for the week.  Even did two (short) exercise videos (abs and stretch).  Yesterday I even cleaned the kitchen and mopped the floor, which desperately needed it.  Oh I also baked a loaf of sandwich bread for the mad scientist's lunches.  So a productive weekend, although I didn't get the upstairs bathroom cleaned, which is verging on bachelor territory.  Ah well.  Next weekend, hopefully.

Normally this time of year we are off to Europe for a conference.  Last year it was Greece, which was fantabulous.  It was supposed to be some small town in Brussels this year.  I guess the Europeans could still do it, but they called it off in the spring.  Maybe next year.  Hopefully.

This coming month I need to get back on the wagon with my PT exercises.  Probably I should set some other goals too, but I'm drawing a blank.  

I wonder if 2020 will go down as the annus horribilus or if will be just the beginning of a longer suckfest.  Opinions?

Remember back in March when we thought maybe we'd be able to travel again come summer?  Hahahahasob.  We're spending the week in a cabin in the Arbuckle Mountains since vacationing in Europe is out of the question this summer.  We got here around 2:30, unloaded and took a nap.  When we woke up, I made dinner (sausages, bread, slaw) and then we read for awhile and now E is in the bedroom and I'm out in the living room sitting right up at the AC unit with a bottle of ice shoved down my britches, trying to keep cool.  And it's not even that hot today, but the cabin is pretty warm.  

So to back up to last week - we interviewed 6 people and it was even more exhausting than anticipated.  On the plus side there was one candidate that was by far the cream of the crop and the whole committee agreed she was the one, so hopefully she'll accept.  On Wed, I got an email from SEARCH (the arch firm) and said they wanted to progress with another interview.  I was shocked, figuring they'd written me off, given it was like 6 weeks prior that I'd had the first interview.  So I interviewed on Thursday afternoon.  There were 3 women, two of them editors and they asked me a bunch of pretty silly questions like could I do headers and footers and use track changes and did I like to import images or use links.  It became pretty clear to both them and me that I am way overqualified for this job and I realized that I don't want to spend 8 hours a day at home alone formatting documents (not even writing them or even really doing much editing, just formatting), even it is for an archeology firm.  So I told them I couldn't quit my job (using our year in Prague as a reason why I was obligated to stay throughout 2020 at least) but I'd be willing to try part time or on a contract basis.  But really, I don't even want to do that, it just sounds too bloody boring.  

And so between interviewing people to add to the team to do my current job and interviewing for a possible archeology (but not really arch) position for myself, I came to the rather astonishing realization that I quite like my job.  I'm good at it, I'm appreciated, it pays reasonably well, I have an enormous amount of freedom, and well ... most of the time I actually enjoy doing it.

On another note entirely, my anxiety has been really high, since returning to work full time.  This is because of COVID, not the job itself.  Every evening my chest gets tight and I think I'm coming down with COVID.  Then I go to bed and manage to get to sleep (alcohol and Benadryl are my good buddies) and wake up feeling much better and then I do it all over again the following day.  It's high summer and grass pollens (to which I am crazy allergic) are quite high, and so I'm sure that's what's screwing with my lungs every day, but even though I know it rationally, it still terrifies me every evening.  Feeling particularly anxious tonight because I haven't had any booze to take the edge off.  I'll probably take a Benadryl in a bit - I tend to alternate, so I don't get too dependent on either.  

I am aware and very grateful that we have it easier than so many, but the constant anxiety is really getting to me.  Knowing that the anxiety is actually appropriate and that there isn't much I can do to change things used to make it easier to bear, but lately it seems to make it worse.  I feel for my friends to who live alone or who in unhappy relationships and for those who are struggling financially.  It's a hard time for everyone.  And I'll continue to hang in there because there's not really any other choice.