Better night. Rather wakeful, but my new audiobook is good so that passed the time. Heart still uneven and jumpy but not thumpy or racing, oxygen good enough at 85-87% on ten liters. Mild night sweats. Feeling quite fragile, but maybe I can get up today. We shall see.
Mom will be here in a few hours to visit for a week! Great timing, she can do my little chores for me, and fetch and carry for us, and we can sit quietly and draw on our iPads. Really looking forward to teaching her more about Procreate!
I’ll make her a Pencil tether if she wants one. I’d better crank out a few more feet of lucet cord. It’s so handy to have around. Everyone should have a lucet. If you didn’t hit my Wikipedia link and are wondering what a lucet is, imagine one of those knitting spools with four prongs that every kid has. Used to have. In my childhood. Anyway, a lucet operates on the same principle but with only two prongs, so the resulting cord is narrower and faster to create. It is strong, with a little give, and it won’t unravel when cut. I use it all the time when I need a bit of sturdy cord. Useful for replacing drawstrings and shoelaces too.
Had to stay in bed all day. Palpitations started up again, scary to walk around. Not as bad as overnight, but not fun. Drew, played a little Zelda, listened to audiobooks. Watched history of mac-n-cheese. Was hoping to make tzatziki but that plan has been postponed. Sigh.
Ugh ugh really bad night, kept waking up with a RACING heart like I’d just run up a flight of stairs and low oxygen. Each episode only lasted a few minutes but so scary. My heart rhythm is all over the map and my o2 is lower than expected. Feels like it’s about to happen again… so I just took my morphine for the first time. They said it should help when this happens. I’m super freaked out about taking it so i only took half a dose. What happens next? Will I wake up in an opium den? Will i go back to sleep for a while and wake up feeling sturdier? Will I panic and puke like that time they gave me hydrocodone for wisdom teeth extraction? WHO KNOWS? (Tasted horrible btw)
Answer: absolutely violent dry heaves, but stomach empty so nothing came up. Good times.
But a few minutes later, actually feeling more stable. Numbers are good and “normal” at 109bpm and 87% o2. I feel like drawing.
The power went out this morning, ugh, but it was only gone for an hour and a half and I survived without using my emergency oxygen tanks. Just stayed quiet and rested.
I sort of stayed mostly in bed for the rest of the day but somehow I did a bunch of stuff too. How did that happen? Finished my latest drawing. Froze a punnet of strawberries that were about to spoil, first hulling them, then spreading them on a tray to freeze, then popping them into a ziplock once they were frozen. And I babysat the Roomba while it did its work. The living room is a Roomba Puzzle. Poor stupid robot. If there is a bit of string anywhere, the Roomba will find it and choke on it. Also it does a fairly bad job on cat hair. Some gets sucked up but a lot gets rolled up into little cat-hair sausages. On the carpet, that is. It does a fine job on all the hard floors. Anyway I went around afterwards with the little handheld vacuum with a long snout and got rid of the sausages.
Made soup for dinner, not quite as good as the soup from a few days ago because I ran out of carrots and threw in some mushrooms instead, but I forgot that I don’t really like mushrooms in a chicken-based soup so I’m gonna pick them out.
Rough night. Up every hour or so to pee because yesterday was a metronidazole day. Ugh. Couldn’t get back to sleep after waking again at 7:30am but stayed in bed till nearly noon, resting and crafting a tether for my Apple Pencil. Tired of it disappearing. My solution works beautifully.
I took about two feet of lucet cord (braided on my lucet) and lashed one end to the butt-end of my Pencil using one carefully-wrapped layer of sewing thread. I tried a rubber band at first but it was much too thick and interrupted the magnetic contact so the Pencil couldn’t charge. A single layer of sewing thread is just fine. The other end of the cord is attached to a hole that I drilled in the edge of my iPad case, where there’s a little pocket of empty space at the end of the trough where the Pencil lives. See the photos in my Mastodon post:
I couldn’t be more pleased with myself. My Pencil disappeared so thoroughly yesterday — and I NEVER LEFT THE COUCH — that I gave up and ordered a replacement. I used Evil Amazon, saved 30%, and it was delivered the same day before bedtime. So sue me, I’m terminally ill and I need my Apple Pencil so I can draw and paint. And my Pencil will never disappear again! (And surely the original will turn up someday, creeping shamefacedly out from the depths of the couch, and I’ll have a spare to give to one of the kids or to Dave, who has also lost his Pencil.)
Then I got up around noon and had a bath and some lovely gruel (cream o’ wheat) and a nectarine. Pretty good appetite today. Finished off the simple and amazing chicken-veggie-rice soup I made yesterday, drank a ton of water and lemonade, ate several more nectarines. I’ll probably eat bread and cheese and tomatoes for dinner. No wait! Henry just reminded me that smoothies are nice on a hot day! I think I have everything I need.
Just occurred to me to post the three Procreate tutorials that I have watched over and over. I’ve got the techniques memorized now, but I might forget them next week and it will be nice if I can search my blog for Procreate and find them again.
Lisa Glanz’s how to remove textured background tutorial :
Calvin’s sticker tutorial:
And Lisa Bardot’s repeating patterns tutorial:
There are many different ways to achieve all three effects, but after watching dozens of different videos I’ve landed on these three as the ones that work best for me.
Here’s another new audiobook treat for you! This was my other project yesterday — tagging, uploading, and podcasting Chloe’s recording of Little Town on the Prairie. She recorded it as a treat for me but she’s happy to share with you, too :) http://kayray.org/laura-ingalls-wilder/ (scroll down past The Long Winter, another Chloe Treat from the beginning of the Pandemic when I was recovering from brain surgery)
Listening to a Shedunnit episode about removing offensive old language from Golden Age mystery novels, and realized I never got around to making a clean version of Kipling’s wonderful “How the Leopard Got His Spots”, the only story in the whole Just So Stories book with a very unfortunate word in it. I recorded the book years ago for librivox, where we have a hard-and-fast policy of reading the text as written. So today I snipped out the offensive word, saved the whole book in a zip and uploaded it all to my own archive.
In the story, in order to improve their camouflage, the Leopard gets his sandy-brown skin painted with spots and the Ethiopian gets his sandy-brown skin painted a beautiful black. The Ethiopian compliments the Leopard’s new spots, and the Leopard asks, well, if spots are so great why didn’t you choose them too? And the Ethiopian says, “Oh, plain black’s best for a n*****. ”
Well, now it reads like my childhood edition: “Oh, plain black’s best!”
You’ll see that chapter 4 is marked CLEAN, so you’ll know you’ve got the right version. You can also visit my archive page to stream the stories one at a time. https://archive.org/details/kayrayreadstoyou9 Again, you’ll see that chapter 4 includes the word CLEAN in the title.
On this page you can find links to all the chapters plus a podcast feed:
Yesterday I watched Max Miller make early 19th century doughnuts, so this morning I wanted doughnuts.
Voodoo Doughnut is a three minute drive away and they have online ordering and curbside pickup, so it was super easy to acquire a few. And then I felt slightly ill from eating a doughnut in the morning (my morning tummy is dodgey as heck) but OH WELL it was very good.
Also took a bath and washed my hair. Adam the palliative care nurse came for a visit so that was nice. It’s always good to see him and feel cared-for. Nice sunny summer day so I sunbathed for a bit and then mulched a few of my garden pots.
Back to my regularly-scheduled night sweats. Ugh. It was a two-towel night, too. Bah! I bet you’re tired of hearing about this. Imagine how tired I am of experiencing it.
I used the other half of a big steamed cauliflower and the other half of a frozen steak (made soup with half a while back) to make Curried Beef and Cauliflower which is soooo good! My sense of taste is still odd and I’m never sure what’s going to taste nice, so I was very pleased that the effort was not wasted.
The cleaners came and scrubbed the kitchen, hooray!!
A pretty good day, as days go. Got right up and made that pea-and-onion cottage pie and washed a few of Dave’s greasy pans. Gotta get all the dishes done and the counters clear because the cleaner is coming tomorrow to do just the kitchen (more affordable than the whole house and we’re just not that messy).
Then I finished the “Stained Glass Effects in Procreate” class that I splurged on. It’s a great class. I figured out a way to make my stained glass even more realistic by rounding off the inner corners of the leading.
And then I got tired and ate a bunch of ice cream (vanilla with homemade raspberry sauce omg) and played Zelda. Solved two shrines and found another stable and a Great Fairy who wants me to bring her a flautist.
Man. Towards the end of the day my body feels so heavy it’s an effort just to lift an arm. All I can do is go to bed. Bedtime is getting earlier and earlier — 6pm this evening ha.
Last night was a really good night. No pump alarms, only woke up twice to pee, and NO NIGHT SWEATS. None at all, not even a sweaty forehead. God the relief is unbelievable.
Gonna get up and make my little cottage pie NOW at 8am before I get too tired. Ha.
It’s frustrating that I haven’t had another Really Good Day since improving my oxygen intake.
Today was ok, though. Not bad. I did manage to skin and seed a few pounds of elderly tomatoes and cooked them down in the crockpot all day. A few more hours tomorrow and they should be tomato paste. Played some TotK, did some drawing and reading… and steamed an enormous cauliflower. Ate some hot with butter and some cold, and there’s plenty more for tomorrow. Appetite better lately, actually. We have some leftover mashed potatoes that I should use for a simple little cottage pie tomorrow if I possibly can. Just onions, peas, gravy, and cheesey taters would be easy and tasty.
Yesterday I lost my mind and ate coffee ice cream in the afternoon. Coffee ice cream later than mid-morning keeps me awake. I was up way too late last night, felt like crap today. Bah.
Yes. More oxygen has made a HUGE difference in my quality of life today. The numbers aren’t even that different — I was hovering in the 80-82% area on 5 liters, and on 7 I hover in the 86-88% zone. But wow. I felt awake today. I felt bright and alert. My mood was better. My appetite was better (also because I took my mega-diuretic this morning so my belly doesn’t feel so full). Dave cooked a nice dinner and I ate a whole small pork chop and a little helping of mashed potatoes with the applesauce I made a couple days ago to use my mushy green apples.
It’s almost 9 pm and I’m not about to pass out from exhaustion.
I painted a beautiful purple tulip today, and worked on one of my blackwork projects while watching Chicago.
Now if I could just have another non-sweaty night I’d be so thrilled. Please, Goddess of Night Sweats, have mercy on me.
Plan for tomorrow, if I have another good night, is to turn our spare tomatoes (Dave bought more than we could eat and they’re starting to go bad) into tomato paste in the crockpot. (Autocorrect suggested “tomcat paste”. Go home, autocorrect, you’re drunk.)
I figured out how to get more oxygen into me and had a better night. Still sweaty, still up to pee multiple times, but no waking up gasping for air!
I turned on both of my oxygen concentrators, set one to 5 liters per minute (the max, which is my usual amount) and the other to 2 lpm, then put BOTH cannulas in my nose. (Luckily I have huge nostrils.) They fit easily and never fell out in the night. A combined 7 lpm, and my sats were great every time I checked, like high 80s! This morning, 88% and heart was only 81 bpm as opposed to the usual 100+. Whew. Might be comfortable a little while longer.
Last night I was not sweaty. First time since May 24th. Such a relief.
I followed a big elaborate Procreate tutorial and learned a lot. Not gonna post the result because I’m not super proud of it — I mean, I did a great job, it’s just not a thing I would ordinarily choose to draw. I can’t link the tute here because it’s only up for a week, as an enticement to get people to join the artist’s patreon. Anyway I’m super clear now on why one would choose a clipping mask, alpha lock, or just select.
Henry came over to help Dave finish installing our new enormous mailbox. The crappy old brick pillar is gone, a fine new steel post is set in concrete, and in the morning Dave can affix the mailbox to the top of the post and it’ll be finished!
I think I’ll go get a big dish of frozen peas to snack on while I read for a while. I tried to eat a little more today. Cream o’ wheat and juice for breakfast. Tiny half-size BLT for lunch. A slug of kefir, a little dish of cottage cheese, and another helping of cream o’ wheat spaced out through the afternoon. Oh I’ll grab some cheese to go with my peas, that will help. So damn thirsty.
I am having a terrible time eating. Two bites and I’m full. I’m so thirsty all the time that I’m filling up on water, I think. I crave juice every minute of the day, and am alternating between grapefruit, cran-apple, and lemonade. So I’m getting vitamin C anyway. I have a dish of strawberries and cream to work on slowly now, and my wonderful green apple and goat cheese for bedtime. Other than that I managed cream o’ wheat and kefir for breakfast, half a bagel with cream cheese and a tomato for lunch, and an Ensure in the afternoon.
Update: strawberries: no flavor, mushy texture. Green apples: no flavor, mushy texture. Time to give up on buying both until they come back into season. Just eating the goat cheese.
Tomorrow I’ll try to remember to set my hourly EAT A BITE OF SOMETHING DAMMIT alarm.
