My Cat Is A Republican

Today was my favorite holiday of the year. Since I no longer work nights, I have to say Fall Back Sunday, or the end of Daylight Saving Time, is custom-made for me. I can sleep a whole hour late and no one could possibly care. Except the cat. Her reaction to my sluggishness led to a groggy epiphany.
My cat is a Republican.
I've got one living here in the house.
Proofs:
She does not believe in time change or climate change or hope and change or any change. She frowns on all matters of change.
She looks out for her own interests with fierce intensity; her food wants are paramount and must be attended to. However, when she has been nicely fed with my resources, she then turns her eye to my own meal. She obstructs my ability to feed myself by throwing herself into my legs, then once I have overcome her opposition and prepared a meal, she demands to see if mine is nicer than hers, and wants a portion.
Her behavior is generally environmentally unfriendly, as she declines to poop and pee outside where it is biodegradable. If I take the catbox away so she will go outside, she merrily proceeds to spoil my belongings to suit her preference.
She is automatically afraid of and hostile to anyone who wears anything on his or her head.
Although she brings foreign lizards into the house for her pleasure, she outsources most of the spider killing to the wild rangy outside cat.
She is, as Teddy Roosevelt put it so succinctly, a fat cat.
I don't think my TV gets Fox News but I am going to have to watch where I leave the remote.

Cheering

I just completed my first week at the job I've been on for a year that entailed just doing the basic job description; no covering for other people, no teaching new people, no endless meetings for projects that never start.
It was a pretty sweet gig, actually. My fledglings call me for database type questions but I don't mind that. The other person they are designated to call, the "Educator", is completely clueless and calling her would just be frustrating to both of them.
The lady at the Credit Union said my refi went through but the assessor didn't call me this week and the CU lady didn't return my call of inquiry. I am going to keep on her, though, this house might fall in if I don't get some shit fixed. I am dreading cleaning up for window installation but it will be nice to not have actual wind blow through the house in the winter.
I have lost 14 pounds. The "saggy fat suit over muscle" look is what I am going for and I am ignoring the folds of skin sliding down my midsection. Excelsior!
I wonder if I should get one of those compression garments they have you wear after lipo and wear it. You can get anything on Amazon.

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 3

I stopped in the manager's office today at the gym. She was sitting at her computer looking sadly at the screen. I asked her if she had heard about the hot tub follies over the weekend. Indeed she had, and was about to handle that situation as soon as she solved the problem in front of her. Oddly, it also had to do with the ladies' locker room. She seemed mournful and without hope.
"What else could be going on in the ladies' locker room? My word!" was my inquiry.
"Nudity," she said hopelessly. "Someone was offended because the ladies in there have nudity when they are changing and it makes this person feel uncomfortable."
Wait, what?
"Hold on a minute. A woman is complaining that the women who are changing clothes in the clothes-changing area make her feel uncomfortable?"
"Yes," she sighed sadly. "And I can't think of a thing to tell her."
I pondered briefly and a helpful thought came to me.
"Tell her if she thinks those naked women are bad, just take a look in the hot tub of a Saturday and she will really get an eyeful. Those naked old ladies will look positively tame."
We both hooted like old Southern ladies love to do.  Then she grew sad again.
"I can't tell her that."

The Douchenozzle Chronicles Vol 2

Squick also ewwwww also WTF.
My Catholic friends used to say, "Shit Marie" when something was too bad for mere profanity and needed true blasphemy to convey their emotions.
Shit Marie.
I saw Towel Freak Woman leaving the gym today as I was coming in late. She was wearing workout gear and her hair was not wet so I thought I'd dodged a bullet and they had told her ack rite or don show up.
How wrong can one old lady be?
Very wrong.
I got out of the pool, padded into the shower room, and SHIT MARIE there she is, towel tied over boobs, kneeling over the STRONGEST nozzle in the Jacuzzi.  I turned around and padded, dripping, to the front desk and complained my ass off in no uncertain terms: "I told Angela last week there was a woman masturbating in the whirlpool over a nozzle, she said she'd get Cathy on it, and the woman is in there right now doing it again, and it's disgusting on so many levels!"
The clerk's response? "Oh my god. She needs to buy a shower massage." She had seen Towel Freak woman come to the desk as if leaving, then turn around and go back in. She apologized profusely that it hadn't been stopped last week, and promised it would not happen again. Then she said, crossly, "There is a toy store right down the street, she needs to go there instead."
I know, right?
Shit Marie, what has happened to the world. I expect this kind of craziness at work; we actually seem to have a drug ring that operates out of our driveway, where the security guards are never visible. We also have somewhere that prostitutes who are patients seem to be plying their trade, and if you walk in on most of our male patients and they are not masturbating it's because they just finished.
 I go to this high-end fitness club to get away from people like that!

Squick of the year

I've had a wicked muscle spasm in my neck for, hmmm, forever so I haven't felt like typing once I get home. But I'm still plugging along at the horrible job, like the hamster on its eternal wheel. One good thing for the month: I now weigh eight pounds less than I did at the start of last month. I am taking the adrenal and thyroid supplements and not eating fruit, sugar, or starch. Boring but effective.
The squicky icky omg grossssss gross gross thing that happened today? Well, that is the story. At the gym there is a woman who tends to come on Saturday and hog the whirlpool. It's a big one, but she gets in it and talks so loudly on her cell or plays such loud music on her phone that I generally avoid her. She also decorates the floor in the hot tub room with, no kidding, eight or ten towels in various stages of dampness. So it's like being around someone else's badly raised teen on a good day. Anyway, last week when I got out of the pool there were two other ladies in the whirlpool and the messy teen grown damn towel freak woman was perched nearby on a shower bench. I could not help but notice that she was not wearing a suit as per the four signs that read "Whirlpool Rules: Swimsuit must be worn, and don't shave your disgusting legs for Christ's sake either" but was wearing a towel tied in front over her boobs, another twisted over her hair, and nothing else but eyeliner. Yark. She stayed out while we hottubbed. As I was leaving, I could have sworn she got back in once the pool was cleared and was leaning on her elbows facing out of it. A little buzz alarm went off in my mind: was she cozying up to the jacuzzi nozzle with her towel open in front? Gross, I decided, and went off to shower and change.
Today my neck was just a little stiff, so I wanted to whirlpool it into submission after my swim and walk in the saltwater pool. I cruised into the whirlpool room and sans music was towel freak woman, leaning on her elbows  facing out of the whirlpool. She was holding a book whose pages she was not turning, and was kneeling with her legs straddled and the bubbles aimed right between them. Her superfreak towel was billowing out behind her. There was actually another woman sitting on the corner of the tub with her lower legs in the pool!
How nasty. There is not enough Clorox on the planet to clean that water. It's just a thousand gallons of douchewater, bubbling around the perverted freak who is hosing down her cooter with the jacuzzi nozzle. Ew, ew, ew. Also, fucking freak killed my chances of working on my neck.
I got dressed and skibbled out to the front desk. Sometimes the manager works on Saturdays, but she was not there today. The clerk knew exactly who I was talking about, towel freak woman comes at opening time on Saturdays and they have to ask her to leave at closing time and pick up all the towels she throws around. I used the words "unacceptable" and "disgusting" and she and I both agreed that towel freak woman needs to buy her own damn toys on the Internet and use them at home like all the other girls.  She said she'd be glad to tell the manager to ask towel freak woman to just stay home for jolly time.

Time for Voodoo, Woo, and anything else with oo that is not ow

So it took me about ten hours in phone calls, faxing, walking to his office to sign yet another medical records release, and driving to get my medical records to the high holy best diagnostician in town. He is a rheumatologist, and my doc wants me to go to Mayo for answers on whatever the fuck this syndrome is, but thought it would be good to see him first. He is supposed to be able to figure out any autoimmune thing in the universe.
A, he did not read any of that shit.
B, he had me come to clinic for a 1200 appointment; I saw him at 4 and got out of there at ten of five.
C, he has no fuckin idea what the hell this is. He says it's not lupus and not RA, RA eaten and removed joints notwithstanding.
He basically agrees with the endocrinologist, that I had too much iodine from all the CTs and MRIs and it made the Hashimoto's antibodies attack like crazy. Not just my thyroid but muscles, brain, and guts too. He says that's so unusual that no one knows just why it happens and how long it takes for the antibodies to get off your case. He did point out that the flares are shorter and less outrageous, so there's a decent chance I will start having them more seldom.  My goiter is already gone, and the endocrinologist doesn't believe in natural thyroid and is uninterested in changing my meds now that my TSH is below 1.
So I gave up on medicine and doctors and got on the Internet. Several seriously woo articles later and some typing on Amazon, I acquired dried thyroid and adrenal cortex pills. Oddly, they do not stink as you think they might. I have been taking them ten days.
I have lost five pounds.
The horrendous neck and back pain that showed up during the four hour wait for the rheumatologist is not receding as I would wish, but having my pants fit looser almost makes up for it. The one pain relief I have seen is that the fascia on my muscles is not exquisitely tender, which is nice.
Five down, forty-five to go.

Drugged Hamster Escapes Wheel

So the gold tooth on the molar way in back came off and the dentist took an xray and shook her head; the molar had broken from some extremely poorly executed prosthodontia twenty-odd years ago and was now shattered and inflamed, with severe bone loss in the underlying jaw. So an appointment with the oral surgeon it was.
Yesterday at the actual appointment does not bear a lot of reviewing; he was a very skilled guy but that tooth had disintegrated into more than seven pieces under the gum. So, yeah, I had taken 1/2 a Xanaflex before I went and could have used a bunch more pills of various types. But the surgeon was very quick and strong, it definitely could have been worse. He was very interested in my horrid immune system history, even when I assured him I'd been extensively tested and had nothing he could catch. He asked a lot of questions about the RSD and was sympathetic, which is unusual. Most docs hate anything they can't help with, and he seemed interested that all I took for it was Neurontin and Xanaflex, and that I would wean off them between flares. After the surgery, he asked what type of pain medicine I was used to and I couldn't think of any. So he said, "Lortab all right?" and I was all, "Yeah, sure."
I went to the front to get the scripts from the printer and he came and signed them, then cheerily said bye. I drove off all shellshocked to the drugstore and handed them in. When I picked them up, I almost fell out. He had given me 25 of the 7.5's. Day-um. That is a boatload of hydrocodone. Then I got a little worried; I was still numb but how bad was this going to hurt?
He must have thought I was lying about my drug history and would be calling needing more meds because I had a huge tolerance. Ha, not. I took them one at a time until bedtime and was maintaining, just a little sleepy. I took two at bedtime and regretted it in an hour; I was super groggy but the extra hydrocodone made me itch! I finally got up and took a Benadryl, which made talking to my boss when calling in super sloppy. Gained a lot of sympathy votes, though. So I have had a lovely groggy day hanging out with ginger kitty; rainbows on the floor in the kitchen from the prisms, and it's so nice to not be at that job. I haven't taken my noon dose of Lortab, and so far nothing has exploded. I'm going to take some Ibuprofen, hang on to the Lortab for other bad days, and think about going to walk in the pool all afternoon like a lady of leisure. It's better than thinking about how long it's going to take me to pay off this one disaster tooth.

Here is the real reason you do not want a motorcycle

My fella has this party in the summer that is like Groundhog Day. The same people from his festival group come every year, drink and eat the same food, play the same water volleyball in the same pool that's too small for anybody else to get in or get clobbered. One of the festival mavens is a sister of a guy I dated forever; she was bitchy to me when we dated and he blamed her and his other bitchy female relatives when I handed him his hat. So, no, she is not nice to me and I rarely have anyone to talk to at the party; they have all known each other for twenty years and it's one long inside joke. Last year I was just too sick to go, maybe the year before it too. So he has me come late in the evening and drive his drunk ass home so he doesn't get a DWI.
Tonight I went to get him and he was more lit up than usual; I can't remember if I've ever seen him stumbly drunk before, but he sure was tonight. I caught him with an odd expression and possibly leaning over the kitchen sink and quizzed him if he needed to throw up. No, no, no.
He just didn't look right to me so once in the car I rolled his window down and warned him that if he decided to blow, make sure to lean way out. Then I headed out of the subdivision and got on a bridge over the river, a dark two-lane bridge. He rolled the window back up and I put it back down and fussed. He insisted he was fine and rolled it nearly to the top.  As we came off the bridge, I heard a motorcylist on a rice rocket rev up super fast and swerve around me to pass on the right, all hunched over. The cycle sounded extra loud because the window was now all the way down, and my fella was throwing up into it. But he didn't have his head quite far enough out, and I started getting drops on my arm from him spewing. Shouting for him to put his head all the way out,  I pulled over to the side of the road, still in the pitch dark, and let him finish calling Ralph. I saw some vomit in the corner of the window and cleaned it off with a towel I had in the car. Then when I turned the light on, I saw it; he had leaned out far enough once and the windstream had made a huge vomit plume the shape of the Nike check all down the back window of the car....and undoubtedly to the rear where the motorcyclist following us across the bridge had gotten his share. His roar and swerve around us was a desperate move to stop being pelted with chunks of boiled shrimp soaked in beer and gastric juice.
My fella's failure to maintain or at least listen to my hard-gained knowledge regarding drunken vomiting in automotive vehicles is going to give him a long day detailing my car tomorrow in the heat. 

Emerson

The weight is still creeping up. About a pound or two a month, and I'm beyond frustrated. My feet hurt so much it's like the bones are screaming, and my back is a damn mess. To top it off, it's unbelievably hot here; we've had temps over 100 almost every day since the beginning of June, and that's hot even for this place. So my Biggest Bra in the Store from Victoria's Secret is failing; my boobs are getting skin problems from being squished in there. Off I went to Target, as I knew that VS sizes are smaller than other manufacturers. Damn if the D cup 38s I bought were not too small. Holy crap. So I took them back and got DD's. Now that is more like it. They are only a tiny bit too small and make my shirts look a lot better.
Back when a girl could make a decent living working for herself in the oil patch, I used to share an office with a charmingly foulmouthed handsome man from Mississippi who admired my then-modest bosom, back when it was a restrained 34 C. He would openly eye my chest, and say, " Sheee it, baby. Knock knock."
Me:"What now, Jim."
Jim: "C'mon baby, knock knock."
Me:"Sigh. Ok. Who is there."
Jim:"Emerson."
Me:"Emerson who?"
Jim:"Emerson fine big titties thar, babeh."
That actually cracked me up the first time he did it. We were friends and he didn't do that stuff in front of anyone else. After that, if he liked my blouse (read: the way my boobs looked that day), he would ask if the brand was Emerson.

Groundhog Month

My efforts at health-building activity backfired pretty spectacularly, and I've been just hamster-on-a-wheel for a whole month. The soul-killing job had a bright spot with the sudden and dramatic reassignment of the Worthless one, and I went two days pretty happy with my new upgraded assignment. Then a shitload of people quit from burnout, and I am now back to doing two jobs. The HBIC canceled all vacations right when I had been planning to have enough scraped together to go and see the daughter before the snow set in, and that is pretty depressing. And my foot, leg, and shoulder pain have been downright excessive. So no news there.
Last night was fun, though: a service company bent (BROKE) the rules about this sort of thing and took a bunch of us out to a paint-and-drink party store. So there was music, Purple Haze Abita Beer (raspberry beer, you should have some at all times), and lots and lots of cackling amidst the hack painting of a fleur-de-lis. If I could get my phone camera to work I would put the picture up, it turned out okay.
The tunes that the store blasted in-between brushing tips were oddly eclectic, and included that MTV classic, "Mickey" that the not-cute girl did the cheer routine to. The youngsters next to me started singing along with it and I put my brush down and did the cheer arms and head. They roared with approval and somehow that got to my age; they were all ten or fifteen years my junior and disputed that fact. "I thought you were our age!" Ummm, gray hair, girls. And a vicious middle-aged spread. Not to speak of the creaky motion when I get up to refresh my beer, steadying myself and moving like a tree sloth.
I was thinking about that today while doing the haying out back (tractor broke two weeks ago and fella finished fixing it while I was at Cackle and Dab). I used to hate the lines between Voldemom's eyes and when I caught myself doing that in my twenties, I just made myself stop frowning. I have one line over an eyebrow from keeping it lifted all the time, and some jowliness. My cheeks got so puffy with the steroids back when that they don't have lines now, and my eyes are too big to sag.  Now inside, I'm like the Picture of Dorian Gray, and the outside is still decent-ish to others.
Maybe I should scowl or wince when it hurts? Does putting it out there keep from storing it up?
The idea holds little charm, actually. I think I will put my energy into tracking down a source for a Japanese neuropathy drug called Neurotropin, it sounds excellent.

Staycation

I have been running out of month before money with this job; it pays monthly and my check is double what it used to be for two weeks. The catch is, there are five weeks in what seems like most months. I know it's just two weeks salary difference, but it sure bites my budget in the butt. But every time I get stressed out by the situation with Worthless at work, I put in for some leave. It's paid, they stopped putting it on the retirement, and something really aggravating must have happened about six weeks ago because I put in for a whole week! I have a complicated dress I am sewing for the OoA#1, and the garden and house were getting away from me again. I have sewed, worked out extra at the gym, worked in the yard every day, and enjoyed making dinner when my feet aren't actively screaming with pain from the job. Part of the idea with the yard work is to get my metabolism going again by staying out in the heat. The weather has certainly obliged; I can't work past nine a.m. without starting to faint!
Today I was fighting a new, useless sprinkler head trying to keep the parch down. I gave up and put a small, new "turret" style on that will only do 1/4 of the tiny front yard at a time. Then I went and grubbed under an artemisia bush and pulled out two plugs of dallisgrass and....a dollar. Whoa. Money in bushes, what the hell. I'll take it. I looked up and the new sprinkler makes mist instead of drops, and it is showing a huge full rainbow across that half of the yard.  Ha, my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a damp dollar bill from under a bush. But it still feels auspicious, and beats a sharp stick in the eye.

How do you feel when you get up in the morning?

My fella has started calling me in the morning because I'm having so much trouble not sleep-clicking my alarm to snooze. He doesn't get it; he wakes up and apparently gets up, pees, stretches, does crunches, cleans the fishpond filter, feeds the cats, and still gets to work on time.
What. The. Hell.
I have a fine CPAP machine that I thought was going to make me sleep better, hence magical rested mornings would ensue. Not fucking even. I thought the gasping, choking, and waking every six minutes was the cause of my fatigue. A year later, I'm guessing I was wrong. When I wake up, I'm stiff, my shoulder hurts from lying on it, my hip is showing off a big old charleyhorse apparently from bladder pressure, my feet still do the screamy don't-put-your-weight-on-us-no-No-NOOO thing that gives me my trademark lurch to grab the wall on the way to the bathroom. And my arms are cold. Under the blanket, cold arms. Also, I am often so groggy that I put the coffee back into some random place instead of the freezer. And if I left laundry in the wash overnight that does not contain essential uniform ingredients, the chances I will forget it wet until it begins to stink are 9 to 1.
The cats take varying measures to get me up now that alarm clock lady dog has gone to heaven. Fat girl tends to ball up by my feet and stare at me, assessing my food value if I delay past her to-be-determined deadline. Wild man pops into the house and leaps onto the bed, purring like a tiger with his mouth open, prrrrr-WAAA-prrrrr-WAAA. Then he gets on my stomach and makes purr biscuits with his unclipped claws, which gets my attention fairly well. The cats know to scatter when they do get me up, as I will be unable to miss them with my feet during the inital lurch down the hall.
I tried not taking my neurontin at bedtime (by running out of it like a damn genius) and the result was not pretty; I have work-related nightmares all night when I do not take it and fierce nerve pain and fatigue the next day from waking up every three minutes to go, Aieeeee. Oh. Nightmare. Stop sweating, go back to sleep. Go on, now. Sleep now. Ok, now.
Trying to recall back in the faroff haze of youth, I don't ever remember waking up clean and refreshed. I had a firm mattress and I would wake up hurting, convinced I had not turned once in the night. I used to put telltales on my covers to try to test the theory but would always forget them. Sleeping; I am doin it rong.

Weasels and fuckers and Groundhog Day

Weasels personally dealt with this week: 6.
Fuckers personally dealt with this week: 9.
Times I woke up clutching my alarm, having popped the snooze button for more than twenty minutes unawares:2.
Times I called that lady about that job and didn't get a return call: 1.
Scale of the eyeburning, chest-tightening funk odious cheap whore cologne the idiots I share an office with wore: Mississippian. Like the river. Rolling waves of eyeburning pain.
Times I slipped up and said Damn in front of the house supervisor at the front desk: 1.
FML.

Believing in Miracles

My fella got talked into a bodywork class at the gym. He hated it, except for the part at the end where they lay on Miracle Balls. I looked them up on Amazon and was intrigued, and hey, Amazon Prime free shipping plus two whole dollars off. I like the kit, it's like a Klutz press gift book with toy for the crippled.  Yes, I am crippled so I get to call myself that. I don't call anyone who is not family that, so relax. I do wish the tiny adorable book were a little larger or easier to keep open, it's an adorable four inches square with big print and you have to flip, like, ten pages, to do one move. But the balls under my back and hips do seem to relieve some pain at the moment right after use. Perhaps with more use the effect will last. Meanwhile it is very entertaining to the fluffy cat, she sits on the shelf under the coffee table and watches me closely to see if I am dying and need to be eaten.

He Who Plans Makes the Gods Laugh

How is this for WTF: a girl who I used to work with fb messaged me yesterday asking if I was interested in a job in the field I'd studied so hard and spent so much money certifying in, only to not find a job it was practical to take. Ummm.
Yes, I am interested in knowing more.
Boom, her boss called me an hour later.
She says she wants me to come talk to her about it in person when the HR gnomes post the opening.
We will see about this. I'm reluctant to give up the state retirement but it's hard to overstate how much my job sucks. 

I love my new endocrinologist

She is tiny and lovely, and asks very good questions. And has patience with my bad memory. She seems rawther smart as well, and is of the opinion that my big health disaster of 09 was caused by the iodine in all the CTs setting off my Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Something about all that iodine triggering my immune system to attack my already feeble thyroid with renewed ferocity. That's the first time a doctor has told me I had Hashimoto's instead of garden variety hypothyroidism. Supposedly the lab work I did the other day showed it. She is changing my thyroid medicine up and giving me more of it, and has scheduled me for more labs and a remote followup. There was some harrumphing on her part about my TSH being at the high end of normal, she doesn't think the lab normal is right and wants to bring it right down. So we will see. She does think the weight gain is post starvation syndrome and that the no-starch plan is a good one but wants me to supplement with mega doses of Vitamin D and B12. A girl after my sister's chiropractor's heart.

Today's Win and Fail

The win, I guess, was that I found this to be funny: Worthless supposed co-worker listens in on a phone conversation. I tell the person on the other line how his goal would be achieved, what I can do to help, where I am putting the paperwork, and the caveats on whether or not it is possible. I take his number and promise to let him know what I find out after he leaves me the paperwork.
I hang up, reach for my portfolio to take his paperwork out and start to fill it out.
Worthless supposed co-worker, whose job this actually is but whom I have stopped asking because she won't do ANYTHING, says, "Oh, I have three things to do upstairs so I will let you handle that."
Hahahahaha hilarious. Hilarious because her job description is basically to handle six to eight things a day, not three for fuck's sake, I have three besides my job description. Also hilarious because, how the fuck is she letting me handle anything when I was ALREADY DOING IT ALL.
Win because I let my face say it all and refrained from any speech, gesture, nod, or eye contact. She just finally walked off.
Today's fail was walking outside and seeing a lady in a pink housecoat smoking twenty feet from the front door. Yeah, that's against the rules, so what, the security guards come out like twice a day and run off the foul Newport addicts. The fail part is that she was sitting on a wall and had something sitting next to her. Actually, it was sitting by her, all green and shiny, with a tube going to her nose. Yep, she was smoking, outside the hospital doors, on oxygen. Our oxygen. We are a gazillion million dollars in the hole and some goofy nurse hooked this idiot up with a nasal cannula, a twenty-pound oxygen cylinder, and a rolling cart to go outside and play demolition grandma.  Good thing it was windy today.

Snake oil and woo

I'm pretty skeptical about all medicine and most herbals. I've tried just about everything in the literature for my arthritis; because of my sulfa allergy, I'm not allowed Celebrex. Vioxx worked for two weeks and stopped, about four times from different MDs. Plus it tends to make people's hearts stop and they don't quite know why, not a good quality to me. The docs have given me SSRIs, SNRIs, big huge Cox-2 inhibitors, Elavil, and about seven other things. The effects are, flat don't help, make my head fog worse, screw up my insides, and make me feel groggy and crippled simultaneously.
So a couple of weeks ago I decided once again to suspend disbelief because I was just hurting so freaking bad, with a wicked RSD flare that was starting to affect my guts again with the pain in my SI joint spreading to my belly. I plopped some money into Amazon for some 400mg Italian Sam-e and some cheapo Swanson Magnesium oil.
I got some relief, not like turning off a switch, but gradual. The mag oil is tricky though, if I don't rub it in very well, it starts burning like a motherfucker about five minutes after application. I was able to pilot my nused lawn tractor bought secondhand from a neighbor around the huge expanse of backyard, though, with minimal (five joints) pain consequences.
We will see if it keeps working. My legs still start the horrible pain screaming and purple coloration when I try to stand around or walk the whole distance of the Lowes.

Time for a vacation

A woman who works down the hall from me got run over in the street today by a car. Right in front of the entrance doors.
I thought, "I'm glad she wasn't killed," and "Mmmm, need to rethink my constant jaywalking."
Then I was mildly envious of her for getting out of work today.
I said the first two things out loud but I kept the last bit to myself.

Chemo hair? Radiation hair? Colitis malnutrition hair?

So, about a year and some months ago, I had a CT, then another, then another, and most of my hair fell out in the next six weeks. It had two more spells during colitis flares where it would start  raining down again. I'd have hair on my clothes, in the food, covering the sink, all over the floor, and big old wads in my butt crack that I never figured out how they got there. Seriously, how does a pile of hair the size of a toy mouse get past an untucked shirt and down your pants?   Twice a day?
I lost almost all my eyelashes, about half my brows, and a sizeable but unmeasurable portion of my nose hair. I can't really describe the process when your nose hair decides to let go and blow out of your nose. It doesn't look like eyelashes on your face, either. And the carpet still matched the drapes but boy did it get threadbare.
 I started with a shitload of dark mouse brown, slightly gray, very bone-straight fine hair. By the time a year had gone by, I was down to less than half the ponytail I'd had in width, it was very flat and straight indeed, and my hairline had reshaped while receding. There were a few weak looking grays coming back but not much else. I didn't need a haircut for months last winter, it actually stopped growing for a while, and my hair usually grows nearly eight inches a year; "My hair is eating my face" is how I describe my need for a bimonthly haircut as a rule. I only got it cut once last year in eight months, and only then because it was so raggedly and broken.
In September, I got hold of some meds which started holding the colitis back somewhat. About a month later, my head began to itch like crazy. When I got some privacy to scratch it, my scalp felt decidedly prickly. I started seeing this kind of crew-cut growing in around my remaining hair. So, now about four or five months later, I have two distinct heads of hair. If it's dry or static-y at all, I have a whole new set of hair about three inches long, most of it stripes of gray, a lot of it wavy, that sticks off my head like a momfro. Or the strangest mullet ever.  There are curly elflocks growing in front of my ears. Curls, on me, the flat and lifeless hair queen of the world. Frizz, even.  Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it. It's pretty cool to have hair texture, though. I've always heard that your hair grows back different after chemo; I wasn't on chemo that I knew of but I did get convinced that the first CT was an overdose. So, maybe radiation hair.
My abundant chin hair, which had stopped growing altogether last winter for six weeks and then was a little feeble and hesitant, is no longer pussyfooting around. I'm back to the daily hunt and pluck of three of the little bastards at the least. Good thing about that is most of them turned white as well, so they aren't as aggravating as when they were all black. It's weird what cheers me up sometimes.

Poltergeist

Two nights ago, I came home at ten, lugging groceries. As I staggered into the kitchen, the oddest noise got my attention, and I couldn't find it at first. Then I realized, the old fridge magnet that is a minature slot machine was making a tinny, creepy, running-down battery noise. Its bandit arm was pulled forward just a little, and it was sort of whining.
I touched the handle, and it clicked off. Then I went cold all over; that crappy thing doesn't have a decent magnet on the back, and falls off when tapped. So the cats couldn't have set it off. One of them was in the house, and not acting weird, so I looked around, and the back door was unlocked. I have gotten in the habit, since the dog died, of closing it by the deadbolt and locking it in one motion. The cat started acting strange, sniffing under all the furniture. Yikes yikes yikes.
I got the creeps, bad, and called my fella and whimpered, and he came over and shone his flashlight all around, including the attic, and flushed out no evildoers. I still had trouble going to sleep.
Last night I got home and there was a light on I didn't remember turning on that morning. Sure enough, I got too creepy to go in and had to go back and get him, and his flashlight, again.
This morning I was all, "I am TURNING THESE TWO LIGHTS ON AND REMEMBERING IT" out loud like a crazy lady.
Fella surmised one of them would burn out before I got home and he'd get summoned again. Ha, third time was the charm. No cats inside but nothing that creeped me out, either.

Adding to my legend

Looking like me, and walking like me, makes me automatically eccentric in a town dominated by small-nosed petite makeup obsessed women. I have lived on the same dead-end street for decades and my neighbors are either friends or frightened of me.
Two weeks ago I planted some new lovely flowers in my front flowerbed. I ripped up handfuls of wild onion at the time, and dug out every plant of it I could find. This week I was dismayed to see they had all come back and more. The internet was not much help; I've tried every remedy and product for them listed except: steam.
I have a steamer, kind of a big 'un.
I got my chair, my ice water, my phone playing Avalon channel on Pandora, and my extension cord. I fired up that steamer and steamed those weeds flat. They turned bright green and fell down, smelling like dinner with that special wild onion funk.
The postman and the neighbors all had to stop to see why I was vacuuming the flowerbed. The explanation did nothing but add to my legend on the block. If I'd done it in my bathrobe it would have been a little more fun but it's too warm today for that.

How to Slow Down Time

As you get older, time seems to speed up. Days and weeks seem shorter and shorter. Then, poof, there goes another month, another year. I have discovered how to stop this process cold in its tracks.
Give up eating starch.
No, seriously. I was gaining weight in a scientifically unlikely amount and writing down every bite I ate; the calorie count could not even begin to account for the four pounds a week the scale kept inexorably showing.
Then I decided: okay, if your guts think you are still starving, make them work to get the calories out of the food. So: eggs, fish, meat, veg, fruit. No sugar, wheat, potatoes, corn, or rice.
Holy shit.
A day lasts forever on this regimen. There is nothing to look forward to, and eating is not fun. The last week at work doing this was about a month long, and that's with going home one afternoon with a stomach bug.
I lost about four and a half pounds in ten days, also highly unlikely, and am not the least pleased. For this amount of suffering I should have acquired Adriana Lima's body.

What I did and didn't say

What I did say: "Oh, so you don't have time to do this assignment?"
What I didn't say: "Bitch, you don't have anything else to do, I know this for a fact, and you were supposed to come aboard and do these specific tasks. If you don't feel like helping, get out of my face and quit the fuck paging me when you know what phone I'm sitting next to, and we'll take it up with the boss."
Being a grownup is hard. Drawing the short straw on a co-worker is hard. Keeping my face neutral is impossible.

What I have given up lately

Besides my dignity what there was of it, telling this stuff. But this week I stopped eating the one spoonful of sugar I put in my coffee, wheat, and corn.
What I have not given up: swearing. The scale hasn't gone up in three days but I swear at it anyway, and I am quietly cursing most everything else. I say FUCK under my breath a lot.

The Biggest Bra in the Store

So, yeah. I had this one bra that is a neutral color and it's the one I generally wore to work. It was big.
But the doc I went to this week to complain to about my hellish 14 pound weight gain in the last three and a half weeks and the atrocious new bone and muscle pain had little to offer. She just thinks that my insides and my metabolism were convinced I was starving to death during the Bad Year of Famous Poop, and neither one has yet gotten the message, NOT STARVING QUIT HOARDING CALORIES. And oh, that pain is refeeding myalgia, so cut back on the exercise, and we'll get you in to the endocrinologist asap.
Meanwhile, the beleaguered bra in question just gave up in exhaustion. So off I go to the bra and underwear store. Because that's where you buy bras. Except the cheery petite salesgirl measured me, thought I'd go one size up from the 36D I was sporting, and those weren't even close to big enough. I got the 38DD next, thinking this will be HUGE. And it is. Only not as far as capacity cup-wise. I could easily have worn an E. But they don't go that high in that store. I wore E's back when I was nursing and I thought the weight of my boobs would crush me if I lay down. Now I'm back in them except they don't sell them there and it was bad enough to have to buy the Biggest Bra in the Store, I was not about to hobble down the mall and look for a bra with cups big enough for my oversized head.
I am eating this primal diet thing and Saturday is the first day in nearly a month that the scale did not go up. Primal diet and endocrinologist need to handle up, I can't waddle around at nearly two hundred pounds for long without breaking a bone in my foot.

How to fix life-altering colitis

I can't really even believe I did this, much less that it worked.
My doctor gave me the long Rx for those antibiotics that helped. We talked about what would happen if they stopped helping. He mentioned a few of his patients that have not gotten any medical relief and that he was reading up on stool transplants. I had the expected reaction.  He told me a story which was not off-topic about how his teachers in medschool all completely rejected the H.Pylori hypothesis for ulcer formation as voodoo talk. Then, fifteen years later, someone devised a way to really test it and boom, almost all ulcers are curable with antibiotics. All those esteemed professors were wrong. He mildly mentioned some current researchers who attribute Crohn's to low-level TB exposure from cow's milk and UC to enterotoxic bacterial overgrowth following a viral infection. How those guys are getting hooted at now but he thinks in ten years they will be heroes. He looked at me meaningfully with that small discussion.
The antibiotics stopped working in six weeks.
The headfog was brutal, my hair started falling out again in handfuls, the belly pain was coming back, the diarrhea went from three times a day to five then eight. The arthritis called Ankylosing Spondilitis which is even meaner than it sounds, revved up so I could barely get out of my car or hold my keys. My nails started breaking to the quick either from clumsiness or poor circulation, and the muscle spasms came back in my legs and feet. I went back to pain level seven all day, every day. My face swelled up and my ears were ringing. Then the fainting started again. When your gut becomes porous, your whole body goes wrong.
It was kind of a bad two weeks.
Understatement. My last chance had failed, and I got really, really sad. Then I got desperate.
I did a stool transplant.
I haven't had diarrhea in almost two weeks. It stopped when I got the stool enema. Yes, it was as gross as it sounds.
My headfog has cleared quite a bit. My belly has almost stopped hurting. My hair stopped falling out. The musculoskeletal mess is very slowly improving, and I don't get headspin or ringing ears.
It didn't make it all the way to the ileum, which is the source of the worst pain, so that's been gradual; I may have to repeat it.
But still; kind of like a miracle. I'm so ready to have a life. I hope this gives me one back.

What I did and didn't say

"Um, they won't give that away for free, you can talk to them about it but they make a lot of money charging for that, no I am not going to ask them to give it away."

(If I were a fucking fairy godmother, I would sure as shit not be ugly, old and fat; everyone knows them wish-granting wenches fix themselves first. Am I beautiful, slender, ageless, and winged? No? Then, motherfucker, I am not your fairy godmother.)

What I did and didn't say

So here is this client. She wants me to write, let's call it a work excuse. For her relative in the hospital this week, and she wants me to state he can't make it next week, the week after that, and into March. I told her, politely, ten times, I could write and fax the excuse from the time to admission until the day she wants it written but no one gives excuses out for the future. Hoo boy. She bitched and wailed and waved what was left of the tips on her nails and yelled about me getting him in trouble until the nurses at the station almost lost their heads from craning their necks while rolling their eyes at her stupidity.
What I was dying to say but waited until I got back to my office and verbalized it to my cubicle co-slave: "Bitch, if I could predict the future your sorry ass wouldn't know what I looked like, because I'd have my lottery winnings and be locked behind a big gate with a mean, bald Israeli security force."

The Well-trained Cat Owner

My half-wild ginger man purred at a lady three streets over and she read his collar and called me. My fella went over and fetched him home, screaming dismally in the truck. He promptly ate half a pound of kibble, purred around charmingly, and took the plumbing panel off the closet in the night and went back outside. Heated the subdivision on my dime. He opened the panel to come both in and out several times over the next few days; a cute trick but costly on the heating bill. I got my fella to put a catflap in the panel and nail the panel itself more securely. Ginger man and his pudgy calico sister wasted no time poking their heads through it. He's gone out through it twice in two days, but he's still coming in through the people door. I thought little dim chubby calico sister was too timid to go out through it, but I came home just now and she was waiting in the driveway after I had left her in the house. I was proud of her initiative initially, but then I opened the door and decided that the evident reason she felt compelled to leave was the stench of the heinous shit she had taken in the catpot before going OUTSIDE where other cats are smart enough to go to take a dump. So now I have cat egress which is not being used until after the home is befouled. Not hard to see who the dim one is here.

One month later

It's really pretty out today, finally some sunshine. I got a candy-striped crinum lily, some asian lilies in pink and white, a white amaryllis, and some white peruvian daffodils. I planted them on my Lily dog's grave while the cat hovered around watching anxiously. I'd like to have something bloom there all year, and wish I'd ever had success with lily-of-the valley for winter/spring. I've got some paperwhites out back and daylilies and spider lilies out front. That should have something like a lily blooming there most of the year. I still can't talk about her, and I honestly don't feel better even with this done, but maybe when something blooms I will.

Loving them state holidays

I had a better week at work even though the crazies were barking loudly. My new plan, to not call the seconds in command, just get advice from people who do this job and let the big boss know what the bad crazy potentials were, made things a lot smoother. We are supposed to get some help soon that should get the crazies out of my hair and onto another set of burdened backs. Can. Not. Wait. It will let me just sleepwalk through the soul-killing parts of the job and just focus on the fact that I have one and it has state benefits. Best of all are the nearly monthly three-day weekends. Just as my jaw and neck and leg pain get the worst, along comes some Monday off or another. December's were pretty great. Some other things work better, like the HSA; I filed my first, big hit from the year's deductibles for my stunningly expensive medicine and the HSA put the money back in my checking account in less than a week. My former HSA took two or three weeks to send me a check, so that was nice. It gives me the money to eat on until the end of the month.
Working with people who don't have jobs or health insurance really brings it home that in our country, you either have or have not. If you don't have a job with insurance and you get sick, there's no real safety net; one good illness and you can find yourself living under a bridge. I do not care for algae in general so under-bridge life appeals to me much less than a soul-killing job. There is a remote possibility that holding onto the soul-killing job for a year could bring me a less awful one in this big organization, so I spend a small part of each day drinking a cup of tea and rationalizing going back out to the Faustian bargain that pays my heating bill and my blessed swim club membership. Water therapy is the only thing that really keeps the RSD from being total misery, and hitting that pool every day makes everything seem like it will be okay. Tomorrow I will be doing it  as a holiday, which is brilliant.

How to Have a Happy Birthday

Have your kid bring you one of your favorite sandwiches from a restaurant you went to back when times were easier. Introduce her to your co-workers and listen to them croon at her loveliness. Introduce her to a few of your docs and impress them with her grad school. Yay. A fun day. The crazies did not bother me today, and they were out in full force. Bring it.

Plotting and Planning

I had a horrible week at work; seven days of training instead of the ten or fifteen usual ones granted most other new hires didn't give me a lot of depth and I ran into a lot of crazy stuff. Every time I called the bosses for advice, they'd grab the situation away from me and things would get wild fast. My big boss, the nice but either ditzy or memory-impaired one, was out all week. So I came up with a new strategy; not ask those heifers anything. Call the few coworkers who have been nice to me for advice, run stuff by the big boss if she's available (ha, as if). I've got to hang on to this dreadful job. There's nothing else out there right now.
A super bright spot is that my child's too-short visit got extended through next weekend so we will have two more free days together before she has to go back. Plus she's home at night when I get here. So awesome. I get to smell her head; it never gets old.