Ugh. Low oxygen, fast heart, all day. Not acute, not ambulance time… but ugh. The big fatigue.
Mom hauled wood up from the wood pile under the porch and stacked it on the front porch, all ready for winter. No rain yet but it got down to 48° last night so winter is definitely coming!
Woke up with ok oxygen but fast irregular heart rhythm. Ugh. Only 100-ish, but faster than I’d like. So I just lazed around, hoping my heart would settle down but it didn’t and I had stuff to do so I got up and crossed my fingers that my day wouldn’t end in an ambulance ride.
Made a batch of cookie dough and froze it in lumps for later, then picked up Mom from Henry’s house. She’s thrilled with the bike that Dave bought for her to ride! It’s a nice 7-speed cruiser type, so she can sit upright. She went out for a bike ride already, and then she came home and did the dishes,
I made an excellent stir-fry for dinner. Timing is EVERYTHING.
In our chapter of Artemis tonight, the plot thickened when Jazz went to visit Ngugi’s office…
We have veggies to use up so I did some cooking this morning — a batch of Rotkohl (German sweet-and-sour red cabbage), a batch of cauliflower cheese, and six hard boiled eggs for snacks.
And then I felt yucky and had to spend the rest of the day lying down. Low oxygen, fast ragged heart. Got my go-bag packed just in case it was ambulance time, but after a few hours I felt a bit better. O2 is ok now, and sometimes my heart is in sinus rhythm when I check. Sitting on the sofa with Australian Bake Off cued up for when Dave is done breaking down cardboard boxes and dragging the bins to the curb for Garbage Day tomorrow.
I worked on a little pair of jeans-style pants for the little doll today, with functional pockets and everything. I used some leftover brown flowered quilting cotton. They turned out so cute! Pic tomorrow maybe.
Bad night. My Remodulin pump woke me up at 2:30 am claiming “blockage”, which it does frequently. There’s never a blockage. The cure is to take the battery out and restart the whole thing. So then it happened again at 4am, but this time, when I restarted it, it alarmed and said “CALL FOR SERVICE”. So I had to dig my other pump out of my supplies bag (they supply Remodulin patients with two pumps, and you swap pumps every time you refill them so you know you always have at least one that works) and get THAT one set up. Ughhhhh. So, yeah, rough night.
Got up, went to airport to pick up my mom, took her to New Seasons for groceries, then dropped her off at Henry’s for the weekend. Came home and crashed on the couch. Didn’t even get the dishes done today.
But then at 4:30pm I remembered that Friday night is Pizza Bus night at the coffee shop around the corner! So I zipped over and picked up a couple of little pizzas — margharita for me and pepperoni for Dave. The Pizza Bus is so cool! https://hearthandsoulpizza.com/ Really good pizza. I ate 2/3 of mine, so maybe that’ll put some meat on my bones. I still only weighed 99.2 lbs this morning.
Dave went to the bakery for bread and quiche and he brought me a pain au chocolat, which will be my bedtime snack tonight.
We finished watching the first season of Best Woodworker in Britain (or whatever it’s called) and Misti won! Well-deserved. She was great.
I got the dreaded Thread Jam in my bobbin assembly while sewing this afternoon (making a little gathered skirt for Dolly). I fixed a bobbin thread jam once before but it was nerve-wracking, time-consuming, and difficult, so I called Pam the vintage sewing machine fixit lady who lives down the street. She let me bring it right over and she fixed it up. It took HER a while and a lot of effort too! It’s wild what a microscopic bit of thread in the wrong area of a Featherweight 221 can do. Alas, Pam is moving an hour away next week, argh! So my next Featherweight service will be a lot more trouble. Sigh.
I cleaned the sewing/guest room so it’s nice for Mom! And as a by product, it’s now nice for ME to be in there. I drafted a collared blouse pattern for Lulu’s Christmas doll, cut it out, and got about 3/4 of the construction done. Felt good to sew again.
Had a bout of nasty nausea right when we went to bed so Dave read to me for a change! He did the whole next chapter of Artemis. Jazz has sabotaged three of the harvesters but had to flee back to town before she did the fourth. That scene was so cool, with the harvester cameras watching her and trying to thwart her! It would be such a great action-filled movie scene.
Dave is out-of-practice at reading out loud and his eyes are pretty bad, so he stumbled a bit, but he reads with just the right amount of expression and great pacing. I enjoyed it so much. I hope he’ll take a turn reading again sometime soon. My phone reads to me all day, every day — the Libby app for library audiobooks and my Scribd subscription for stuff I can’t find at the library. And Librivox of course! But there’s no substitute for being read to by a real live person in the very same room.
Woke up a bit too early but felt ok anyway. Thank goodness.
I made a really excellent Roasted Veggie Pasta Sauce: this morning I oven-roasted (475°F) a handful of mini red and yellow bell peppers, a double-handful of garden cherry tomatoes, a few cloves of garlic, and a small thinly-sliced onion. Drizzled with olive oil, of course! When they started to blacken I took them out and let them cool. Tonight, while I boiled water for pasta, I heated all the roasted veggies in a small saucepan and whizzed them with the immersion blender till smooth-ish. Added a couple pinches of kosher salt and a couple pinches of mixed herbs. Omg it was so freaking delicious!!! This made about two servings. If feeding a crowd, roast a /lot/ more veggies.
Skipped my exercises today, figured I deserved a break after doing them for two days in a row!
Forgot to say — Dave’s back has healed enough that he can sleep in our bed again instead of on the recliner in the living room, YAY! And my ribs are a little better every day too.
Felt pretty good today! Good long sleep last night (but night sweats the whole time ugh). Entertaining dream about a pygmy hippo moving in with us. The hippo spoke perfect English, and when I made some comment about that seeming unusual, she asked how many other pygmy hippos I’d spoken too. Apparently they’re all fluent but we self-centered humans never bothered to have a chat and find out. Ok, brain.
I did my darn exercises tonight while we watched Australian Bake Off.
I did my darn exercises today. I HATE doing my darn exercises. But my doctor says they might help, so…
We just finished watching yesterday’s episode of Strictly Come Dancing. Ranger Hamza did ok, not as well as last week but not at the bottom of the pack either. Come on, Hamza! You can do it! I definitely have a weakness for cuddly men, and he has the sweetest smile :D
I got my sewing patterns sorted out and organized! I had them just sort of jammed into three binders — baby, kid, and adult — but now they’re in nice big envelopes by type. So, all the baby pants are in one envelope with sizes noted, and all the girls’ sundresses are together, etc. It’s going to be so much easier to find what I’m looking for and to avoid tracing off a size that I already have. This was the first step toward Wrangling My Sewing Room Into Shape. Next, when I have the stamina, I’ll pick up the fabric off the floor and tidy up the surfaces. Need to make the room habitable ’cause Mom is coming next week and it’s also the guest room.
Hot again but only 80s. No rain in predicted in the near future. Argh.
We got a red cabbage in our veg box last week so tonight I made German-style Rotkohl (red cabbage). Onion, red cabbage, diced green apple, pinch of cloves, dash of red wine vinegar, spoonful of homemade peach jam, all cooked together till soft. Yummy! Dave ate a big scoop with his chicken and potatoes dinner and said it was GREAT. I wish I enjoyed eating as much as I enjoy cooking.
Slept much better and till 9:30 am so that made the day much much better! I set up my Switch in the living room so I could play Dorfromantik on the big screen and show Dave. I’ve only played classic mode so far. Maybe I’ll try a different mode tomorrow.
This afternoon we watched the wonderful Bettany Hughes explore Egypt down the Nile on Channel5.com. Excellent.
My health is so frustrating right now. Besides being an absolute skeleton, I’ve had more severe PAH symptoms for the past couple weeks. Like, I can’t walk from room to room without stopping to catch my breath, even on supplemental oxygen, and when I read to Dave at night I need to stop for frequent breathers. Ugh. Tomorrow I plan to start up my pulmonary rehab exercises again — I had to put them on hold while we had a few months of brutal summer temperatures and then my bruised/cracked rib happened. Still hurts but I think I can do most of the exercises anyway. Maybe they’ll help my breathlessness.
