kayray.org

Ten (10) solid hours of restful sleep! No sweating, normal dreams. Dreamt I was wearing a beautiful fur-trimmed surcoat like this:

No sleep. Like, literally maybe three hours cumulatively. I think I figured it out, though. On several doctors’ recommendation I’ve been taking a cannabis gummy, very low dose, just about every night for several years, to help ease medication side effects such as pain and nausea, and to give me a little appetite. Realized recently that it was linked to some of my tachycardia events so I quit taking them at the end of October, I think, or early November. Easy, not addicted, don’t crave it at all. I only miss being hungry. It was so nice when food seemed appetizing once a day.

Last night it occurred to me to check with Dr. Google.

My symptoms align EXACTLY with marijuana withdrawal. And I mean exactly. Gahhhhh.

In theory, this is probably the worst of it now, and within a few days it might start to ease, and then get better and better over 20 days or so. I hope. Lol.

So I’ve decided to be as kind to myself as if I were an addict in treatment. No scolding myself for being sweaty, greasy, and unambitious. All the self-care I can manage. If I can’t sleep, I’ll figure out some way to amuse myself instead of being anxious about not sleeping. And I’m not going to spiral out about how bad I feel. This WILL get better.

Henry’s little family has travelled by Amtrak to California for Jayla’s Grandma’s funeral, and my Englishman is still out of town, so today Henry came over and he did some chores for me and now we are having lovely quiet Henry-and-Kara time. So rare, so treasured. Watched a couple episodes of Taskmaster and now The Sting. Pausing frequently to chat about things.

Last night while trying to fall asleep I fell into the Pit of Dark Despair. Couldn’t stop crying, felt panicky and awful. It got really bad so I called the crisis hotline that I’ve had stored in my phone for YEARS. They wouldn’t talk to me cause I don’t live in California anymore, and the Oregon number they gave me was disconnected, but I managed to Google and found a crisis hotline specific to my county! A lovely woman picked up right away and let me sob and vent. We did slow breathing together, and she listened, and sympathized, and offered gentle support. It was so incredibly helpful, and after about fifteen minutes I stopped crying, felt much better, thanked her, said goodnight, and hung up. Managed to sleep for two hours too.

The moral is: if you have mental health issues, please google your local crisis hotline NOW, call to make sure the number works, and store it in your phone for the future. You’re allowed to call in ANY kind of mental health crisis. You don’t need to be suicidal. Call before you get to that point. They want to help! Xxx

Slept last night! Woke up several times, once with violent dry heaves, but went back to sleep each time and woke up feeling relatively well rested and human-like. Did the dishes, cleared old stuff from fridge, made eggplant and red bell pepper pasta sauce. Kept Lulu company over FaceTime (home from school for Veteran’s Day) and we ate oatmeal for breakfast together.

Mostly played on Mastodon all afternoon. Henry and Lulu came over to borrow suitcases for Jayla’s Amtrak trip to CA for her grandmother’s funeral. It was so nice to see them and he took away two boxes of donation stuff so it’s not cluttering the entry anymore, yay!

Super tired now, going to sleep. Fingers crossed that I STAY asleep, but I got some Benadryl delivered so I’ll take half a tab if I get wakeful in the night.

Last night was… odd. Fell asleep early, like 9:30. Slept till 1:30-ish. Then was awake for several hours. Then fell back asleep for half an hour only to be awoken by my **$&##* pump again. At 5:30-ish. And that was the end of sleeping. So, i feel like crap again.

But am safe and warm and have great internet and it’s 4pm and i can go to bed soon i guess.

But hey here’s a thing that Jayla sent me that makes me honk with laughter every time I watch it. Be sure to unmute.

O hallelujah I got nearly 9 hours of sleep last night! Only woke up twice in the middle. Medium night sweats, normal dreams. Woke up feeling cheerful and human!

It got down to 32°f last night and the world was still only 36° and frosty when I got up. I went out right away to FedEx some stuff to Dave’s hotel, and my windshield was so icy it took quite a lot of windshield spraying and wiping to get it clear enough to drive. I think I’d better buy an ice scraper.

Got Dave’s stuff shipped, picked up a few things at New Seasons. When I got home I broke down all the cardboard boxes that had piled up in the entryway and stuffed them into the big recycling bin. Also took out trash and tidied up a tiny bit. And then I was worn out so I rewarded myself with some Mastodon time and rested for the remainder of the day.

Tomorrow I need to ship Dave yet another thing that he forgot, but then I hope to do some sewing — if I sleep again tonight, that is. Omg I hope I sleep. I felt like a new Kara today. Good cheery mood, too, which was a relief because last night I fell into a Deep Black Pit of Despair. Totally caused by exhaustion and sleep-deprivation, I knew it wasn’t real, but god it was just awful anyway. Nearly called a crisis line just to talk to someone but decided to try to sleep instead of clogging up the line and making it harder for someone else to get through. All’s well that ends well.

Up since 5:30am gahhhhhhh. Sleep, why doest thou forsake me?

Had a nice day anyway. Check out my sidebar —->

No more twitter link, replaced with Mastodon handle. Oh god I love Mastodon. The experience is completely different from twitter, even my own, carefully-cultivated, happy and gentle corner of twitter. I’m on a Mastodon server where it seems everyone is a history nerd of some kind, and 3/4 of them are knitters/crafters. But it’s not insular — everyone follows and reposts people with different interests from other servers. It’s so damn LITERATE, and considerate, and friendly. I hate to keep going on about it, but man oh man — this is what social media should be. NO ALGORITHM trying to enrage and engage me. No advertising. People who are excited about stuff. No doomers. Humanity at its best.

It’s election day and I wasn’t bombarded with angst all day — no, I was chatting with new friends about 17th century needlework and kids’ books. The election doesn’t need me to monitor it and feel all upset all day.

I’ve found that I’ve lost my taste for instagram as well. It’s so… pushy and flashy and commercial.

I did a load of laundry and finally finished cleaning up Dave’s Sunday Roast Dinner Kitchen Extravaganza. Did I mention that already? Sunday he spent all flippin’ day cooking himself an elaborate Roast Dinner (I only ate the peas) and then he was too exhausted to clean it up that night, and then Monday morning he flew out of town for work so… yeah. I think he used every pot, pan, utensil, and dish that we own, and every kitchen surface was covered with lamb grease. So it was Quite a Job, I’ll tell ya! But he’s sweet and warm and kind and cuddly, so I didn’t mind much. I just worked on it slowly over the last two days :D

How is it not bedtime yet? Feels like midnight, but is 4:30pm. I think I’ll watch some more White Lotus — I started season one over again from the beginning last night because I realized that my only memory of it was enjoyment. Lol. Memory loss has its advantages! More shows to watch!

It was cold and sunny today, just beautiful. Look at our maple — it turned bright yellow overnight.

Endocrinologist this morning. I’m a medical mystery.

Lovely cold gray rainy day.

Time change. Bah. Tired. Had tons of fun on Mastodon today. I need to remember to remove my twitter link from my sidebar here and add my mastodon link so you can find me there if you wish. Maybe tomorrow.

Watching White Lotus for a bit, then sleeeeeeep, I hope!

Really weird night last night. The good part was that my dreams were back to normal, and I had no night sweats at all! Maybe my body is getting used to the liothyronine already. The weird part was that I was wide awake from 1:00-ish to 3:30-ish, then slept till 5:30, and that was the end of sleeping. My eyes had that lack-of-sleep gritty feeling all day and I had zero energy, but oh well, I sat on the couch and played with Mastodon all day. I

love Mastodon so much!! The communiry is wholesome and friendly, kind and intelligent. I wouldn’t go back to twitter now even if Musk died. There is zero drama on my Mastodon server! I magine there are servers full of right-wing trolls and jerkfaces, but they can’t breach the Fortress of Goodness that is the zirk.us server, nor, I imagine, the many other servers where my friends and family have landed. It’s just astonishing.

Now it’s time for the obligatory bitching about the time change. Why, oh why, oh why must they torture me. With my lack of sleep plus the time change, I was completely disoriented all day. Is it 11am? Is it 6pm? I have NO IDEA. At one point I asked Dave if it was almost bedtime and he said it was 3pm. Ughhhhhhhhhhhh.

Omg Hamza’s cha cha cha!!! I adore this man. He is an actual sunbeam of joy. And he got a great score — 38/40!

Ah looks like good ol’ twitter is going down in flames.

Lol. Yeah. So any spammer can spend $8 to shove my actual friends out of the way. Any spammer can pay $8 to impersonate my favorite scientists. NOPE. (I don’t see ads because I use a third-party twitter client, anyway) Suck it, Elon.

I’ve joined Mastodon, a decentralized social thingy. You can find me here:

https://zirk.us/invite/qj5FoAxw or if you already use Mastodon, I’m kayray@zirk.us, which is an arts and humanities-focused server. Just put my handle into your search bar and you can find me from any server. It’s not hard.

I took a shower and washed my hair, and then I dropped our ballots into the drop box today, yay! I’ve been listening to the Taskmaster Podcast (Dara O’Briain’s episode lolololol) and knitting Jayla’s legwarmers, and now I’m gonna eat some yummy cold pizza!

Oh man. The dreams last night. They’re so LOUD, so vivid, so bizarre. Take the strangest dream you ever had, multiply it by 100, and stream it through your brain at top volume all. night. long.

Donno if I mentioned it, but I think I traced some (but not all) of my recent frequent tachycardia episodes to the THC/CBD gummies I take to increase my appetite, so I’ve stopped taking them, and have therefore barely been eating. Again. Tonight I got hungry all of a sudden and it’s Pizza Bus night at the local coffee shop, so Dave zipped up there to pick up a couple of wonderful hot fresh pizzas and I ate two slices! And there are leftovers to last the whole weekend. Calories! Nutrition!

Super crazy fatigue all day. But the yarn arrived for Jayla and Henry’s Christmas presents so I sat on the sofa, listened to podcasts, and started working on Jayla’s legwarmers. Legwarmers, lol. She, born in 1998, thinks the 80s were cool *heart eyes* Got several inches of ribbing done already.

It stormed all day! Rain and howling wind! The power went out a couple of times but came back within minutes so I didn’t need to switch over to my emergency tanked oxygen. Our little house is so cozy and warm and lovely.

When I got my blood drawn yesterday I forgot to take the bandage off asap so now the skin in the crook of my elbow there is swollen, burning, and painful from the adhesive ARGH. I discovered that ice helps a lot. Good to know. I am FALLING to PIECES. Gahhhh.

Time for bed and P&P.

Liothyronine causes weird dreams, man.

Dream one was a nightmare. I had to clean out a basement which was open to the air and at street-level for some reason. My brother was helping. We had to scoop and scrape out several inches of muck that was like if you mix crude oil with garden soil and picture frames and newspapers and chunks of wood and a horse corpse and god knows what else, and we were scooping with kitchen ladles and the muck smelled awful and I was crying and screaming and terrified and the muck got in between my teeth, and then I woke up to pee, thank goodness.

Dream two, which I just woke up from, was a BBC drama starring Lily Tomlin as a woman who figured out how to make a fortune on the stock market by dubbing cassette tapes, which were labeled with various classical music pieces. She was also a secret alcoholic. There was a lot more to the plot but it has faded already.

And those, my friends, are liothyronine dreams. Not recommended.

The night sweats are killing me. Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Palliative Care Nurse Adam came over today. Always a pleasure to check in with him. Then over to OHSU for pulmonology appointment with Dr Robinson. He wants to wait and see if the liothyronine and slightly increased Amiodarone help at all before changing anything else. Got labs done too.

It’s 4pm and I’m so goddamned tired. Trying to stay up until Dave’s done with work so we can watch Taskmaster. I should eat but I’m not hungry, just ferociously thirsty. Stupid diuretics. I drink water, I pee, I drink water, I pee. All day long. Depending on lab results they might let me lower the dose a little. Fingers crossed.

COLD today! Only mid-40s! We’re expecting freezing temperatures soon, and maybe even snow? Tomorrow we should get two inches of rain and we are gonna be COZY with our wood stove. I hope I have the energy to make soup tomorrow because that would be the epitome of coziness.

Dreamt about driving an electric flying car, in between waking up nauseated and DRENCHED IN SWEAT. Soaking wet. Honestly, if you’ve never had severe night sweats you can’t imagine how awful it is. I need two quilts and a Heavy Blanket, because otherwise the evaporating sweat chills me to the bone. So I’m wrapped in wet pajamas and wet blankets all night. Lovely. And I need the window open a crack so I can get cold air on my face. Just shoot me.

I realized that Tuesday’s post didn’t publish properly but it’s fixed now.

Woke up 5am and that was the end of sleeping so today my brain felt like a dish of lukewarm oatmeal. I just realized it was probably the liothyronine that kept me awake. Yay.

Yeah. So. I did nothing today. Well I worked on my embroidery project and enjoyed the Elon-Twitter Schadenfreude.

Slept well again except for sweating through my tshirt! Had a nice long chat with Elli this morning, then took a parcel to FedEx, a return: my Christmas Boots that are a size too small. Replacement should be here next week, in plenty of time for me to “forget” about them till Christmas.

Then I washed every dish we own, or that’s what it seemed like, and made a lasagna, and chatted with Henry, and worked on my embroidery picture.

Tonight, unless I’m mistaken, Lizzie Bennet will go traveling to visit Charlotte Collins, nee Lucas, and will become acquainted with Lady Catherine!