kayray.org

Too tired to write

Slept for twelve hours last night, yay! Feeling a little less fragile though still kind of out-of-it. Managed a bath and hairwash today, and a small load of laundry. Ate like a horse.

Seamed the sleeves of Henry’s cardigan! All that’s left is underarms, buttons, and blocking.

My order of vermicompost worms finally arrived! I was worried they wouldn’t survive the delivery delay caused by the Snowpocalypse but they seemed fine. Wiggly. They’re in their new home now, surrounded by delicious veggie scraps and covered with a nice layer of shredded cardboard. Ok worms, do your thing! I keep my container for collecting veggie scraps in the fridge now so it doesn’t get funky.

I cast on for my next knitting project this afternoon. I’m making a boxy cropped sleeveless v-neck pullover to wear over my favorite boxy high-waisted dress. I wore it just about every day last spring but didn’t have anything to layer over it on chilly days. My plan is to use the “Splash” cardigan pattern but converted to a pullover and increased to a much larger size, no waist-shaping, and stop after two 8-inch cable repeats. And I guess I’ll just stop knitting the sleeves when I get to the underarms. Not sure yet. It’s an experiment, and in bulky yarn so not a big deal if I need to rip it all out.

I literally napped all day. Got up twice to bring food back to bed, ate, commenced napping. I had a big-ass history audiobook playing and just drifted in and out to the accompaniment of medieval battles. No exercises, no crafting, no tidying, just dozing.

Ugh last night I had a big scary tachycardia event, probably an SVT. Had a good day, ran errands, cooked, knit. Then we were watching tv together in the evening when all of a sudden I felt my heart jump up to 160bpm. It’s such a horrible horrible feeling. I get all hot too. It’s terrifying.

So, yknow, I sat there for an hour waiting for it to clear up while Dave gathered my hospital go-bag and monitored my vitals. I tried all the vagal maneuvers, tried to puke, nothing helped. Hovered at 150-160bpm. So he called the EMTs and they arrived in about 2 minutes (it’s good living down the street from the fire station)

They hooked me up to the 12-lead ECG, I explained that it wouldn’t look like a heart attack but wasn’t, etc etc etc. Same old. I walked out to the gurney under my own steam, got into the ambulance, and while they were checking me over all of a sudden I started to feel better. Asked them to check my BPM and presto I was down to 120. So they did a new vagal maneuver that involved me blowing into a syringe for 15 seconds and then they tipped me back flat on my back and raised my feet in the air. After that my heart dropped down to 112-ish which is normal for me under stress. So then we went around and around for a while, trying to decide if I should go to hospital or not. All of their machines said I was having either a heart attack or 5 other deadly conditions, but I know my body.

They unhooked me from everything and let me walk back and forth in the ambulance to see what happened. It didn’t affect my heart rate much and my o2 was back to normal so I decided I was ok to stay home. The EMTs, Jordan and Kyle, were really understanding and reasonable. I had to sign the “against medical advice” form, of course, but they very kindly said to call again if I felt worse and they’d come back, no problem.

Then Dave tucked me in and I went right to sleep and slept for, what, 10 hours? 87 bpm now. Feeling tired but ok. Bullet dodged, again.

Bright and sunny so the snow has started to melt but boy is it beautiful out there.

Finished my Deco Cornflowers blackwork project. Pic soon. Knitting the button bands in Henry’s cardigan! Might seam the sleeves tomorrow. I like to knit sleeves flat and both at once so they match.

Sleepy.

Dave is home, home, home!!! He managed to summon a Lyft this morning, and a sherpa brought him home to me. You think I’m kidding about the sherpa? I am not! His Lyft driver was from Nepal and had been an actual sherpa. Lol.

Here are a few photos of our snow, including the snowman I built on top of a bin. We got about 4”, maybe 5. Henry got 11” at his house!

Great excitement. It drizzled all day until about 4pm, when it started to snow, real snow, fluffy white flakes. So beautiful! And it stuck, a few inches deep!

And then Dave’s plane landed. And his luggage was delayed because the equipment was iced up. And then he couldn’t book a Lyft or an Uber home because the roads were a snowy nightmare.

So he took the light rail (the Max, there’s a stop near our house) and got as far as his transfer downtown. And then the train got stuck. Meanwhile I’m looking at the traffic map… all routes in and out of downtown BLACK, with accidents every few hundred feet. I thought I’d better see if I could even drive up our hill in the snow so I got the snow cleared off the windshield and crept a few blocks down the street to await further instructions. Then he called and said he’d booked a hotel room! So I crept home again while he hauled his stuff through the snow to the hotel. But then it turned out that though they BOOKED him a room, they did not actually HAVE a room. So I prepared again to drive downtown (it’s 9pm by now and all I want is bed) but then he managed to book a Lyft!

I’m going to bed and trusting that his Lyft will show up, or that he can sleep in the hotel lobby.

Ugh! Of all the nights to get a thick beautiful blanket of snow! I hope it’s still there in the morning so I can enjoy it!

Update: his Lyft canceled. I’m off to Downtown. Wish me luck!

Update again: 10pm, sitting in car about to drive. He calls and says they found him a room! But I’m sitting in the car until he calls FROM A ROOM.

Update again: 10:15pm. He called from a room! (a suite, actually). I’m off to BED, thank goodness!

Just one more night till Dave is home! YAY!

Took a bath and washed my hair this morning, and did my whole page of leg exercises first thing. Then I made veggie-barley soup with dumplings and put a tray of frozen cookie-lumps in the oven, so there would be nice food for Henry and family, who all came over during his lunch break in the afternoon (Lulu didn’t have school today). Henry finished his workday from here and the girls ran back and forth and shouted and played and were bright wonderful sparks.

I am WORN OUT. Time for bed, leftover pizza and choc chip cookies, and some Taskmaster.

Oof. Last night was rough. Restless, very sweaty, insomnia, gurgling stomach, headache, and weird dreams when I did sleep.

Very very tired today.

Finished neck shaping on Henry’s cardigan and have picked up stitches for the collar.

Just two days till Dave comes home!

Oops it’s late and I’m tired! I listened to an absolutely bonkers suspense thriller ALL DAY. “Local Woman Missing” by Mary Kubica. So entertaining! I started it this morning, it’s 11 hours and 40 minutes long, and I only have 27 minutes left. So I’m not kidding when I say I listened all day!

I decluttered a bit for the cleaners but it didn’t need much more. There are just a few dishes to wash in the morning. And I shredded up a big cardboard box to use as worm bedding in a vermicompost project I have planned. And then I KNITTED like an electric Nan. I just finished the yoke of Henry’s cardigan and am ready for neck shaping tomorrow!

My new walker arrived and it folds as small as I hoped. Too tired and hungry to retype the mastodon post I posted this morning so here, read it for yourself. Goodnight!

https://zirk.us/@Kayray/109892758374175873

Oops left it too late, it’s nearly ten! Fine day, got a bit of tidying done because the cleaners are coming Monday. Also moved my Sleeping Zone back into the bedroom.

Weird night. No alarms but I woke up to pee three times and woke up with nausea a further four times. Bleah. But I felt ok today anyway. I did my page of leg exercises first thing. They’re getting a little bit easier and my legs feel stronger and I’m much less wobbly! I no longer need my walker to steady me as I walk about the house. I think my stamina and oxygen saturation might be slightly better also.

Went to Safeway this morning for more ice cream bars. They’re STUPID expensive but so delicious, and it’s a good way to meter my coffee ice cream consumption. If I buy a thing of coffee ice cream I will eat enough to keep me awake at night, but one ice cream bar in the morning seems to be an acceptable amount of caffeine.

Dave will be home Wednesday evening! Just five more days. Gonna try to stay alive and out of the hospital till then.

Listened to audiobooks and worked on Henry’s cardigan for hours. Finished “The Plague and I” which is Betty MacDonald’s memoir about being a patient in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1930s. Sharply witty, as you’d expect, and also a really interesting snapshot of a forgotten time. There is surprisingly little info about TB sanatoriums online, but here’s a wee morsel. https://tbfacts.org/sanatorium/ Betty’s sanatorium was the complete bed rest, no talking, no reading, nothing but sleeping and breathing fresh air kind, at least for newly-admitted patients. As Betty’s condition improved, she was gradually allowed more activity, starting with reading for fifteen minutes a day and progressing through one trip to the bathroom, meals in the cafeteria, occupational therapy, delivering flowers and supplies to the bed rest patients, etc., until she was cleared to go home after nine months.

Weird dreams and sweats last night. Definitely working a little more THC out of my system.

Got right UP in the morning and got my stack of dishes washed and took out the kitchen garbage, which wasn’t very full but was starting to smell a bit. Then my physical therapist came at 9:30, a different Christina this time because they are shuffling employees around but she was just as nice as Kristina last week. She tested my strength, stamina, and endurance in various ways and it seems that I’ve improved a lot in only one week! My legs do feel much stronger and I’m less wobbly. So I’m to keep doing what I’m doing. My pulse oximeter isn’t very accurate compared to hers; mine shows lower o2 saturation and a higher pulse. Frustrating because this is the third one I’ve bought recently. I keep testing them against the good ones at doctors, returning, trying a different one, etc. Now I know that Medline is a good brand, so I’ll try one more time.

Then I sat around and listened to podcasts and did needlework and then I treated myself to a chonkin’ big veggie pizza from the good place down the road. There’s enough pizza now to last me for DAYS, and when I want a change the kitchen is tidy enough for me to make soup.

Five pm now and sleepy.

Oh I finished the audiobook of Richard Osman’s “The Bullet that Missed”, which is the third in his Thursday Murder Club series and just as enjoyable as the first two. He writes such wonderful, believable characters! There was a little interview with him at the end and he said he’s working on a fourth Thursday book, and has plans to start writing an unrelated novel soon, too! I really enjoy his style so that’s excellent news. He name-checks Marian Keyes in every novel too, which tickles me. Everyone loves Marian. <3

This morning I was taking my Morning Handful o’ Pills when I remembered that my endocrinologist and I decided last week that I should go back on the liothyronine because my T3 is still ridiculously low. And then the thought struck me — “oh right, I am seriously hyperthyroid and have been for months and months, more than a year probably.” This could totally account for a lot of my weakness and fatigue. Good grief, there are so many things wrong with me, with so many overlapping symptoms, that I’m losing track. No wonder I need to go to bed at like 3pm.

I went off the liothyronine because it seemed like it was causing a lot of afib episodes but I’ve had just as many while I was off it so might as well go back on and hope that SOMEDAY my thyroid function will get closer to normal. They still don’t understand why my T4 and TSH are fine while my T3 is very much not. And when I was on liothyronine (T3) before it didn’t seem to help… but it’s very slow-acting so maybe I wasn’t on it for long enough. Sigh.

Feels like juggling. Throw my beeping medication pump into the air, try to catch the thyroid problem, toss in the constant pain, spin around, deal with night sweats, look out, someone just threw chronic diarrhea into the mix, oh no, call the ambulance for SVT, etc etc etc. It. Never. Ends.

Dave needs to stay in the Bay Area for a few more days for hardware testing so he won’t be home on Saturday and I had to fedex him some extra meds. Poor guy. It’s so awful to live in a hotel room for weeks. I miss him, argh!

I did my whole page of leg exercises this morning BEFORE I got too tired, yay me! And then a lovely social worker came over to help me fill in an Advance Directive and a Power of Attorney. Big-time adulting. I still need to fill in a page of extra instructions (e.g no TV if I’m in a hospital room, no intubation, etc.) and get things notarized but at least she got me started which is the hard part.

Physical therapist will be here tomorrow morning and I’m so proud to be able to report that I only missed one day of my exercises! I think that is pretty great.

I wanted to make soup for lunch but didn’t have the energy. Quesadilla instead.

Tired and breathless. No exercise today. That’s ok, maybe tomorrow.

Good sleep but big fatigue. Managed to get the dishes washed but just did needlework for the rest of the day. No energy, no stamina. Still, I did the left half of my page of leg-strengthening exercises plus the heel raises so I’m proud of myself. Something is better than nothing.

Every so often the roomba decides that the guest/sewing room is the bathroom. I’ll send him out to do the bathroom and a little while later he sends me panicky messages from the sewing room about his brushes being clogged. Well yeah, little guy, that’s why I don’t want you in the room with all the thread and elastic and ribbons and yarn on the floor… *eyeroll*

No alarms! That’s one full week during which I only had one nighttime alarm and that was a night that I’m 99% sure I didn’t put in a fully-charged battery when I swapped batteries at bedtime because of the system of lights on the chargers. Long story but I nearly did the same thing on Friday night but caught it in time.

I feel pretty secure in filing The Case of the Mysterious Nighttime False Alarms under SOLVED. If you, too, are having obnoxious false alarms on your Remunity Remodulin pump, try putting a 100% fully-charged battery in EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. And also make sure you don’t have any medical equipment phoning home in the middle of the night. That is still a possible contributing factor, since it seemed like the problem improved **slightly** when we unplugged Dave’s CPAP machine.

Now can I finally stop talking about it? Let’s hope so!

Great night of almost solid sleep. Got right up in the morning and had a bath and washed my hair, then did some light tidying and got the roomba to take care of the bathroom, kitchen, and hall. And I dragged the garbage bin to the curb all by myself! It was nearly empty so not too bad a job.

I’ve been listening to two new-to-me podcasts: The History of England Podcast, hosted by David Crowther and History of the Germans, hosted by Dirk Hoffmann-Becking. The England one was recommended by Kevin of my absolute favorite podcast of all time, The History of English Podcast, and I found the German one (which is presented in charmingly-accented English) this morning when it occurred to me maybe I should branch out a bit.

Let’s see… I did needlework for absolutely HOURS today. Working on the Deco Cornflowers kit I got for free. Love it. So delicate.

I did my page of leg exercises once. My god, they’re exhausting. I hope next week I might be able to do the page twice a day, as I’m supposed to.

Grocery store pizza for lunch. Not terrible. It’s hard to ruin pizza. It’s usually edible no matter what. So I’m going to eat some more now while I watch a little Taskmaster and the new BBC bank robbery drama, The Gold.

No alarms! And I realized, when I was putting in my freshly-charged battery last night, that the other day when I did get an alarm I had probably put in a battery that wasn’t at 100%. So I still have hope that my current solution might actually be working. And I only woke up once, due to icky night sweats, so I felt pretty darn ok today! Went to Safeway first thing (closer and easier than Trader Joe’s, though twice as expensive) and restocked my veggie supply, got more juice, got lots of lemon Noosa yogurt on sale, and got some haagen-dazs ice cream bars for a nice calorific treat. And some corn dogs for when I want something filling and junky.

Um, what else did I do today? Listened to audiobooks and podcasts, ate an excellent lunch (a Big Salad and pita bread), did lots of embroidery and knitting. Oh, I got all caught up on Would I Lie To You. Lol. Such a fun show.

On my way to bed just now (yay bed! My favorite place!) I stopped at the kitchen counter to do my new sheet of leg exercises. A gold star for me, please. The “90° stretch for back in corner” note is to remind me of a great upper back and calf stretch that Kristina taught me. You need to stand facing into a corner, then extend your arms out from the shoulders and bend your elbows so your hands are pointing up. Then brace your forearms against the wall and lean into the corner. It’s such a good stretch but BOY is it tiring. I can just barely count to twenty and it leaves me out of breath. Feels great though.

No alarms last night, but I had one (the totally bogus, absolutely a lie kind) at about 8:30 this morning, which is exactly what I expected to happen when I began doing the battery change and pump self-test at bedtime; I hypothesized that whatever is wrong with the pump’s brain tends to happen at ~X hours after SOMETHING, and there are not many options as to what the something can be. Moving the something forward by several hours should move the errors forward by several hours. Is a battery change and self-test the something? More data is required.

Woke up three times in the night to pee. Argh. I’ve been taking half of my diuretics in the afternoon because I hate needing to pee every twenty minutes all morning, but I guess waking up all night is worse, so I’ve switched them back to the morning. Good times.

Physical therapist Kristina came over for my intake appointment this afternoon, and it was great! I mean, mostly we just went over my medical history, but also my goals (more endurance, more strength) and she tested my various big muscles to see where I’m starting. And she gave me a few more leg-strengthening exercises to add to my other stupid boring little exercises. She was super nice. She or someone on her team will come over once a week for a couple months to check on my progress, give guidance, etc. That will keep me motivated because they will know if I slack off.

Even with my very minimal efforts at exercise over the last week or so I’m noticing a positive change. I no longer need my walker to go from room to room. I’ve got a little bit of strength back in my legs and I’m not so shaky.

I watched the first two episodes of the new Australian version of Taskmaster but it was bad, very bad. It felt like everyone was trying really hard to be funny, which made it not funny at all. It felt scripted. The hosts have no charisma or banter. I don’t know what the heck the audience was laughing at, which makes me think it was canned laughter. Anyway. Two episodes were enough. Jen recommended the Norwegian version and I found two full seasons on YouTube so that is a treat for Knitting Time tomorrow, since I can knit and read subtitles at the same time.

Now I need to go find Second Dinner. First Dinner was just cottage cheese and Rotkohl, so Second Dinner needs to be somewhat more substantial. And I just got terribly thirsty, oh no, I’ll be up all night again! Must hydrate EARLIER tomorrow.

Two alarms in the night. Oh well. So be it.

Made excellent chocolate chip cookies this morning and ran a load of laundry, then went up to OHSU for pulmonology appointment (Dr. Jeff Robinson) at noon. Nothing new. He can still hear gunk in my lungs from the great coughing virus but it’ll clear up eventually. No edema. He’s thrilled that I got my appetite back and have gained weight! I’m 107 today, which is NINE POUNDS more than when I was thinnest! My o2 sats are still low but he says to keep doing my little walks and exercises.

When I got home and parked I decided to wear myself out completely by taking a tiny walk, as long as I was already outside with my walker. Walked slowly for five minutes. Better than nothing, and I’d already stood for a long time while baking and also walked a bit from car to doctor and back.

Now I’m plum worn out. It’s 6pm and I’m trying to stay awake till at least 9pm, so I’m watching stuff, listening to stuff, and knitting etc. Have started the raglan yoke decreases on Henry’s cardigan. Started season 4 of Taskmaster. Watching American Hustle now, for a change.

Dave has been in California for five days but it feels like forever, argh. The quiet is nice, but I miss the way he potters around the house like Pooh Bear.