This afternoon I was digesting my lunch and updating my knitting entries over at Iowa Chicks Knitting, in between processing Evergent emails, when suddenly I felt a rush and I was extrememly dizzy, my palms were sweating, and my heart was racing. My chest hurt. My vision was fuzzy, spotty around the edges. I thought I was going to pass out, or that I’d just had a heart attack. I felt nervous, freaked out, amped, and supremely scared and uncomfortable.

It was sort of like doing a big fat line of coke, only it wasn’t fun.

I started to breathe deeply, then I worked up the balls to check my pulse. (Yup, still beating. Too fast and too hard, but it’s still beating. At least the dizziness isn’t the result of no fucking blood flow to my brain fer chrissakes!!!) I got up and walked around the building for awhile, breathing. Then I went outside and walked around the block, breathing and letting my mantra roll around inside my head. I tried to return to my desk five or six times before I could actually stay seated. I was tingling, practically hyperventilating, and saturated with adrenaline. I wanted to crawl out of my skin and take a nap in a corner somewhere.

(By 2:07, my heart rate had slowed down to 106 BPM. All I was doing was sitting here in an office chair, copying emails and pasting them into a Filemaker database, and my heart rate was so absurdly high that it took time for it to slow down to 106.)

I googled “rapid heart beat” and got all kinds of scary shit about cancer and anxiety disorders. (Bad news is *just* what I need when I’m in adrenaline hell. Yay.) But then I read that this exact experience is one had by – are you ready? – periomenopausal women.

Periomenopause? Hello! I’m 36! I’m not that old. Is it possible that I will quit bleeding as early as 38? (Do people do that?) Are the majority of my symptoms (as my Well Woman care provider has repeatedly suggested to me) “simply” symptoms of periomenopause? Is this shit really all normal fucking aging?!?!
Continue reading Hot flashes?! Ya gotta be fucking kidding me! →

I have a cold. A basic, run-of-the-mill Fall cold. This means I’m tired, have a sore throat when I wake up in the morning, and am feeling sorry for myself.

My co-worker Tim has one too, and so does his girlfriend.

It also means that all I want to eat is cheese. Why is that? You get a cold, and all you crave is stuff that will make you even more congested. Argh!

I’ve managed to keep the dairy to a minimum, though. Last night I ate a spicy Egyptian soup (from the Moosewood cookbook) and stuffed bell peppers; save the mildly cheesy feta sauce served over the pepper, the meal had no dairy at all. I mean, the stuffed peppers and the soup were both dairy-free. The sauce was just a condiment.

Today I have my old Nissan thermos full of Cold & Flu tea – I really need to replace it because it’s all dented and the cup’s broken – and while I did have an AM cup of coffee it was very small.

I like autumn clothes: I’m wearing jeans, a pair of those soled moccasin slip-on shoes all the construction guys love to wear, and a hand-me-down wool Intarsia sweater. So cozy.

Mr. Brett got himself drunk last night, unintentionally, and didn’t feel very good this morning. I fed him a cup of coffee and a fried egg sandwich on marble rye with Swiss. He said it helped. Now he’s up in the barn with Jimbo and Brady building custom cabinets for the new coffee shop going into the Telegroup building. (It’s a branch of the coffee shop in the Broadway building, the name of which escapes me. And I think it’s going in the Telegroup building but I wouldn’t testify on it; it could be going in some other professional building.)

I’m still madly in love with my new PPC. It’s so thin! So cute! Such a great screen! *sigh*

Things I want: a new Nissan thermos, a case for my PocketPC, and a cozy nap.