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.