Category Archives: Health

Greetings from Sunday.

Health, Work

In which I bitch about my current work schedule, but find some stuff to be excited about.

I had yesterday off, which made it my Saturday. I have today off too, which means it’s my Sunday even though it’s your hump day.

I hate my new work schedule, I really do. Let’s look at the monstrosity again, shall we?

Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm

It’s a horrifying mix of days, nights, and weekends. Last week I worked a respectable Monday-through-Friday daytime gig; now my schedule looks like I’m nineteen and working at a 7-Eleven in Compton.

Luckily I’m scheduled to meet with my boss tomorrow about adjusting it. Since the NOC1 is open 6am-10pm on weekdays and 8am-8pm on weekends and there are only six bodies to cover all those hours, it’s hard for anyone to get a decent schedule (but especially if you’re me and have mad experience but no seniority).

I told them at my interview that I love working swing shift but need weekends off to be a rockstar, and they said they understood. I agreed to work the Awful Schedule for a few weeks as needed, but basically no one else wants to work weekends or nights so someone has to get stuck with a shit schedule.

I’m going to make an adult compromise and ask for the weekday swing shift (1pm to 10pm, Monday through Friday). If they agree it will mean I can never gig on a Friday again, which SUCKS ASS, but at least I’d be at work at the same time every day and not have to do this sucky nights-to-days translation every single fucking week.

Seriously. Let’s transpose the Awful Schedule to daytime hours and see just how fucked up it really is:

Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm 7:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm 4:00 am – 1:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm 9:00 am – 6:00 pm

Four in the morning?! I can’t figure out how the poor guy who was working it did it for as long as he did. If I have to do this for more than a month I’ll explode. Or go postal. Or simply pull a no-call-no-show because I’m ASLEEP.

. .. … ……….. .. ……… . … .. .
There’s good news, though. Deep thought revealed that my schedule change might enable me to find a yoga class!

The last time I looked into yoga classes, I couldn’t go to any of them because I was always at work when they were offered; now that I work swing I have my mornings free. I dug around online and found two yoga classes on Friday mornings and emailed the studios to see if I can join. One’s actually a Hatha yoga class that starts tomorrow!

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

-Four Great Bodhisattva Vows [pdf]

I also found a Buddhist meditation day retreat (with an enticing “focus on gratitude” theme) that I’d very much like to go to, on November 21st. Of course I’m currently scheduled to work that Saturday, but a girl can hope.

I could really use a meditation retreat right about now, so I’m hoping they’ll let me attend even if I haven’t been to any of their group meditations or classes. It’ not like I haven’t been meditating for twenty years, even if in a different tradition.

I’d find a retreat closer to my own discipline if there was one. A quick google shows there was an ISKCON in Walla Walla once, but as it’s no longer listed on the main site I guess it’s closed. No other hits. Buddhist meditation will have to do… and if I get to go I’m sure it’ll do just fine.

—
1 Network Operations Center.

Update 11/12: Good news! My new schedule is equitable and starts next week: I work 1pm-10pm M-Th, have Friday and Saturday off, and work Sunday from 11am-8pm. Sundays after gigs will suck, but that’s what coffee’s for, yeah?

In lieu of real content, I tackle the subject of The Curseâ„¢.

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In which I’m going to go on and on about “women’s troubles,” so depending on who you are you may just want to stop reading right… about… HERE.

This morning I felt noticeably better than I did yesterday.

At first I attributed my calmness and clarity to my recent daily intake of Vata tea, but then The Curse™ arrived so I attributed my lack of misery to the fact that I was starting a new cycle.

Within two hours of the arrival of The Curse™ I had peed five times and probably weighed five pounds less. WATER RETENTION SUCKS, OMG, SO VERY MUCH. YOU CANNOT EVEN BELIEVE IT. Until it’s happened to you, it’s just one of those weird and stupid symptoms you only know about from Pamprin commercials. But until you yourself have gained twelve pounds in a mere two days, you simply have no idea what it feels like to suddenly wake up one morning in what is arguably the wrong damn body.

Every second or third cycle my body decides to bloat up, and for two weeks when I get out bed in the morning my feet feel like they’re going to split open when I step onto them. All my joints feel swollen and scratchy. I have to avoid salt, alcohol, and caffeine, and stay hydrated even though I’m already FULL OF WATER, because that’s what all the home care articles say to do… and I’m nothing if not dutiful when I’m verging on miserable.

And I am. Kinda miserable, I mean. During my luteal phase, at least. All my discomfort – the annoying tendency toward anxiety, those effing palpitations, and the damned stupid bloating – happens after ovulation. This makes no sense to me since the older I get the lower my progesterone levels are, but I’ve been charting long enough to know that it’s true: I hate my freakin’ luteal phase these days.

I feel fantastic the first half of my cycle – just fantastic! I have energy, I exercise, I start projects! I feel like myself. Then an egg no one even cares about explodes out of a follicle, and it’s all downhill from there: fatigue, lethargy, anxiety and panic and their attendant mild depression, water retention, and what has to be nothing other than dissassociation. I feel literally heavy: simply moving around is a chore.

And if that weren’t enough I’m far too inward, too: I more or less quit paying any kind of real attention to my environment and coast through on autopilot. I’m lucky that I’m smart or I’d have a hard time passing for normal. And I get so spaced out it’s amazing I don’t get hit by cars. I become absorbed with my thoughts and my internal bodily perceptions, and weirdly detached from the actual external world.

Maybe I feel better during the first half of my cycle because my estrogen is highest then? I don’t know. What I do know is that up to half my life these past two years since the PMS started in earnest is unacceptably blah, and there doesn’t really appear to be much I can do about it that I’m not already doing.

In the window
Please enjoy this totally unrelated
image of orange star-shaped lamps.

My diet is good. I quit smoking, I quit caffeine (well, mostly: I still eat chocolate). My alcohol consumption has lessened dramatically. I do my sun salutes. I walk every single day. I’m mindful of my sodium intake. I have a good attitude about my body. In short, I CAN’T TRY ANY HARDER WITHOUT BECOMING A RENUNCIATE.

And it keeps getting worse. Gah.

I’ve officially decided that I’m coming back male in my next life, and that’s all there is to it. I realize that males are simple creatures, many of whom can probably only perceive the middle range, but at least they don’t have to put up with the bewildering and fucked up “miracle” of female fertility. They appear to pretty much feel the same every day unless some outside force intrudes. Day after day! Consistently! And for that, I envy them. Lucky ducks.

Maybe being female is worth it if you actually use a female body for what it really does, but mine was pretty much bad out of the box. Apparently this body just doesn’t function that well reproductively, and I’m tired of having to live in it when it’s being stupid.

Female fertility is ineffably complicated. (It’s amazing people manage to get knocked up at all, really.) From menstruation through ovulation you’ve got your rising levels of estrogen and your follicle stimulating hormone. There’s your luteinizing hormone. There’s your testosterone and progesterone from ovulation through implantation. And several other hormones I can’t even remember, all doing an intricate, weaving dance in month-long cycles.

Frankly, it’s a mess.

And even if it mostly works (I do ovulate, for instance, have no luteal phase defect, and have been, for most of my fertile years, nice and regular with no pain or PMS whatsoever) it can still be just broken enough to cause quality-of-life-affecting symptoms like mine.

Actually, nothing’s “broken.” Not really. This is just what they call perimenopause. As a(n ex) smoker who has never delivered a baby, I am – hooray – statistically likely to begin perimenopause earlier and have more severe symptoms for longer. Go me.

And for some perspective: I’m not in pain, I’m not sick, nothing’s really wrong… it’s just that sometimes I don’t have any enthusiasm, I don’t feel engaged, and I don’t want to do anything. During those two weeks each month, my tiny life is almost unmanageably large, and all I do is live in my grandmother’s attic in a redneck town people only know of because its name is a joke! I have very little to accomplish, and I barely manage to get even that much done. Which sucks. And that’s what I’m bitching about, really.

I’m fairly certain that I had my first hot flash the night before last, in the evening, while sitting at the kitchen table. AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I’m beginning to suspect this is, if not just something really good to complain about, also a journey of surrender. As in, “Oh, yeah. Human body? Idiotic bag of fluid, amazing they work as well as they do, turns out I’ve located mySelf as an entity other than my wacky body after all. Lovely day then. Cheerio. And by the by, it turns out that Self transcends gender after all! Hah!”

Quitting Smoking: Day 4

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In which I write about a topic that is probably only interesting to me.

cigI really dig smoking.

A lot.

But I’ve done a great deal of it, and for the past year or so it’s been becoming less and less fun. I’m a judgmental bitch, so let me inform you here and now that I’ve always had a big problem with smoker’s coughs because I think they’re just utterly tacky and icky.

Which is why it was Not Good when I realized I was developing one myself. It was mild and inconstant, and thank God I hadn’t begun those nasty daily morning hacking sessions, but still. I was clearing my throat all the time.

And the smell is bad. Period. I don’t smoke in my house or in my car (only because I don’t have one), but that didn’t stop me from smelling like an ashtray. I was always aware during hugs that I was probably offending whoever I was hugging.

The cost was getting absurd, too. Sure, I was only smoking half a pack a day, but that’s still over $120 a month. (I could buy entire Etsy outfits for that!)

And it’s not like I haven’t already smoked enough. I’ve smoked upwards of 180 thousand cigarettes in my life! I’m quite certain I have the whole thing grokked by now, and that further research into the subject would only reveal me to be stupid.

Then there were the stains on my fingers, which I simply never considered. I mean, I knew they were there, and I scrubbed them in the shower, but I just didn’t think about them.

Then there were all those cigarettes I didn’t enjoy. I started noticing when I cut down to half a pack that my first one each day was yucky, and that I was only smoking it for the nicotine: the actual physical experience was one of dizziness, nausea, and mild discomfort.

My hygienist never failed to mention my “smoking habit” and its effects on my oral heath when I went to get my teeth cleaned.

I was still enjoying my before-bed cigarettes quite thoroughly, booyah, but the more of those I had, the worse my mornings felt. Nasty mouth, gummy eyes, hard time waking up. Fucking fuck.

I got laryngitis one weekend and went and read the article about it on WebMD. In the home care section it said, “especially avoid smoking,” which was just about par for the course since every other goddamned illness or symptom I’d looked up on the Internet in the past year had said exactly the same thing. Fucking fuck!

Then there was the really gross stuff. The kind of stuff you do but don’t think about because it’s just so foul. I have, during my smoking career, done all of the following more than once:

  • gone through all the ashtrays and garbage cans in the house looking for butts to smoke
  • smoked multiple very dirty, stinky, short butts because I didn’t have any whole cigarettes
  • smoked butts out of strange or public ashtrays
  • chosen to buy a pack of cigarettes instead of a meal
  • stolen cigarettes out of unattended packs
  • gone to get cigarettes when I would not have left the house for any other reason (like when ill, or practically snowed in, or profoundly lazy and comfortable)
  • smoked when I was not only sick, but very sick. Like bronchitis sick.

= = =
The Internet tells me that nicotine is really hard to kick. As in, more addictive than crack, with only 10% of quitters staying quit.

The Internet also tells me that it’s really easy to quit smoking ’cause all you gotta do is, like, quit smoking.

The Internet also also tells me that it only takes three days to get over nicotine (or get it out of your system, I’m not sure which), which means that tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life.

= = =
I don’t feel any better, but the compulsive throat-clearing has eased. And I’ve already saved fourteen bucks. And I don’t smell like smoke.

I just WANT SOMETHING all the fucking time. Which is really fucking annoying.

Since I’m pretty much always on a diet, I gave myself several days of carte blanche eating while I quit smoking. Instead of caving and buying a pack of smokes on my lunch hour I’ve been buying stupid junk food instead, like cups of Starbucks Signature hot chocolate, or entire bowls of soup from Quizno’s (AFTER I’d already eaten my lunch), or giant cookies. For dinner last night, I ate an entire chile relleno platter from Rosita’s. That’s about 2.5 meals worth of calories, and at least two days worth of sodium.

I’ve been avoiding places I smoked (like the porch on my house), I always have a beverage in my hand, and I can barely even look at an ashtray without being half-disgusted and half-jonsed.

On Monday, the extra calorie shit will stop; I’m just being nice to myself this week. (I would much rather have lung cancer than be obese. I know that makes me shallow, but I’m just sayin’.) I think if someone handed me a cigarette right now, I’d go outside and smoke it even though I know it would be gross and taste bad and make me lightheaded.

Luckily no one is going to hand me a cigarette, so I’m safe for the rest of today.

But tomorrow will be another story, because I’ll be riding with a smoker to and from a gig in Richland. Hopefully remembering all the things I’ve written here will help me resist nicotine’s damned powerful siren call during those two hours.

The voice, it is not doing so well.

Health, Music, ,

In which I’m a little worried about my instrument.

I’m playing the Rally In The Valley – a biker rally, natch – tomorrow night. Outside. At night. It will most likely be both damp and chilly: not good conditions for a weak voice.

Then I’m supposed to play a chichi benefit gig on Saturday afternoon in the Tri-cities.

Both of which are awesome, of course, except for the fact that my instrument did not respond well to being used during band practice last night. I sang for less than an hour, and not even in full voice, and today woke up sounding like a bullfrog.

I have enough voice to talk on the phone at work, but I (a) don’t think I’m going to make it all the way through the gig tomorrow night and (b) will probably be utterly voiceless on Saturday.

This is bad because I want to do a good job at these gigs and I want the money.

I haven’t had a voice-related problem not concurrent with an upper respitory infection in twenty years, but I have been through it. The only cure is time and liquids and rest; and if I don’t do those things the instrument will just drop out completely and there’s nothing I can do about it. With gigs to do, the whole thing is just bummin’ me out.

In other news, my dad is arriving in town on Friday, and my mom is arriving on Saturday and they’re both going to expect to be able to hang out with me. (They divorced when I was 13 so it’s pretty amusing that they’re both showing up the same week; I haven’t seen either of them in a few years.)

Query: is it possible for your parents to give you laryngitis remotely?

Stuff to cover with my GP. When I get one.

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In which I make a list.

Since I’m in the second half now, I should start establishing baselines. Don’t you think that’s wise? I haven’t had a regular doctor since I had a pediatrician, so no one really knows what typical or normal readings are for me.

I’ve decided to choose a GP more or less at random and go in for a meet-and-greet and suffer through a basic checkup. Because when I’m sitting in front of a doctor I always feel fine and I forget all the things I wanted to cover, I’ve decided to make a list so I can get everything on the table in the six-to-twelve minutes of actual facetime I’ll get:

Continue reading Stuff to cover with my GP. When I get one. →

Valley Vision is Awesome

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In which I want the whole Intarwebz to know how good those folks are over at Valley Vision.

Last month, I acknowledged that I really could not see anything clearly any more. I know what traffic signs say because of their shape and color, but I had to admit I really could no longer truly see them, and that on those rare occasions when I do drive I’m probably a heinous menace to everyone else on the road.

I asked a local where I should go; Teh BF – who doesn’t even wear corrective lenses, and was therefore mostly just guessing – said I should “try Valley Vision, over on Main.”

So I went to their website to get their phone number, and discovered that I could not only make an appointment online, but I could also fill out and submit the intake sheet before even setting foot in their offices! And I received an email confirmation! The next morning, they called me to confirm my appointment! Awesome.

When I went to my first appointment, the receptionist greeted me immediately. She explained the fees, and allowed me to walk over and make a payment in advance while I was waiting. My time in the waiting room was barely five minutes, and all the front office service was fast, friendly, and professional.

I went through the various stages of my exam with no waiting; the doctor came in immediately after the assistant was finished with me, and when all that was done I was escorted over to the optician to choose frames for my new glasses and he helped me immediately.

With my old contact lenses in, I was seeing 20/100. That’s, like, half legally blind, people. Totally should not be driving a motor vehicle like that! (It’s amazing how the brain works; it really will fill in an awful lot of missing information by drawing on experience. It’s why people can listen to transistor radios and think what they’re hearing is music: their brains fill in all the missing resonances.) I have mild presbyopia (loss of focusing ability), but not enough to need bifocals – thank God. (This is a really cool article for those of us who have never understood what the hell their optometrists were talking about.)

When I picked up my glasses, they service was again fast and friendly. When I picked up my contacts, I was given an exam by the doctor to make sure they fit and was asked back in two weeks for a follow-up.

Today the doctor checked the fit of my lenses extensively (even used yellow dye to check tear pooling under the lenses), gave me another Snellen chart exam, and determined I actually need another set of stronger lenses. I can pick them up next week and give them back the ones I have now.

Over all, killer service. I am now able to actually see things, and when I get my new new lenses I’ll be able to see EVEN MOAR. (I’ve been wearing gas permeable hard contact lenses for twenty years and never had a doctor have me back for two follow-ups and then give me another set of lenses to make it right. HOW HOT IS THAT?!)

I-84 at Arlington 12302008

In other VERY EXCITING news, we’re going to see Adie & Adam in Portland for New Year’s Eve. Hopefully I-84 down the Gorge will be clear, and we’ll get there in time to actually go out before the year changes!

Bored to tears and it's not even hump day yet.

Blurbs, Health

In which it’s winter. And slow at work. And I can walk! (Oh, wait, I already could walk. Yeah. It’s that I can see! Yeah, I can see! It’s a miracle! A five hundred dollar miracle!)

I overheard the moms in the office saying that the schools will be closed tomorrow… due to the weather.

The weather that has been here now for three days. Ahem.

The roads and parking lots are slowly being plowed. There doesn’t appear to be any sand or de-icer down anywhere yet, so everything is still completely treacherous. The busses and cops and ambulances are all running chains.

Right now, it’s 2 degrees out and there’s a winter storm watch in effect.

I never thought I’d have anything really good to say about the city of Fairfield, but I’ll tell you what: when you live there, you don’t wait three days after the sky dumps a foot of snow on the ground to see the damn tractors out!

Work was hideously slow today, so I made this, this, this, and this. During my lunch break our network went down for nearly an hour, so no VoIP calls, no surfing, and no control panel. Fun times.

Yesterday, I picked up my new glasses. I can see really, really well through them. It’s wonderful.

Today, I picked up my new contacts. I can see really, really well through them. It’s wonderful.

Did you know that you can buy contact lens solutions on the cheap if you get them directly from your optician? Well, I didn’t! Not until today, when I purchased a box containing a bottle of conditioning solution, a bottle of cleaner, a contact lens case, and 4 liquid enzyme cleaners – for only $8.49! At the store all of that would cost over $25. I’m astonished! And pleased!

And also pissed off, because it means that in the twenty years I’ve been wearing contacts I’ve paid much, much more than I should have for Boston solutions. Gah.

Surprize Drugz

Health,

In which there was an unexpected overnight package.

Since I have a gig tonight immediately after work, I had Kaje drive me home on our lunch hour so I could do my hair and face and change clothes. (I straightened my hair, but blew off the clothes-changing and merely packed my makeup into my purse. Lazy girl.) Waiting on the kitchen table when I got home was an overnight envelope, containing:

Formula 303

Pills! (Homeopathic muscle relaxants! From him and her!) And a love letter! W00t!

I *heart* you guys. Srsly. Thank you.

Waaaaah! I SAID, Waaaaah!

Health

In which I bitch and moan.

The best thing about blogging is that one can complain all she wants. Which is exactly what I’m going to do. You probably should not read this:

My neck and upper back are totally fucked up. I can’t turn my neck, and have to rotate my entire upper body to look at things not directly in front of me. I feel really, really, really sorry for myself. In addition to the pain, I’m on day three of what seems like an endless anxiety attack, which means I’m essentially misinterpreting normal bodily sensations as NEAR DEATH SYMPTOMS and am swimming in adrenaline and forgetting to breathe, like a dumb ass. It makes my muscles hurt. And on top of the misery of all that, I seem to be retaining water. In the middle of my cycle. For no good goddamned reason.

Someone should, like, fucking shoot me. Srsly. I’m a waste of perfectly good oxygen.

In other news, I watched Brazil last night. I TOTALLY LOVE THAT MOVIE.

Fat and sodium and calories, oh my.

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In which I look at my data.

One of the interesting things about using software to count calories is that it does all sorts of interesting math. Behold, my intake from last week:

sodium

Of course there are many other things to track, like sugar and iron and fiber and so on, but it is interesting to note I’m always under what (they think) I should have for protein and over on sodium. I mean, WAY over on sodium, holy shit way over.

I don’t worry about the protein. From what I understand, your body has to make it out of amino acids anyway regardless of what you eat, and I get tons of those grazing on fresh veggies the way I do, not to mention that overconsumption of protein has been linked with ass cancer. So. Moving on.

The sodium intake is interesting, though. It’s freaking EVERYWHERE, all processed foods are packed with it, and if you’ve ever read the label on a can of tomatoes (or tomato juice) it’s just shy of astonishing.

All those high-fat days are ones where I ate something nuked. (I work a full-time job, so I eat a lot of TV dinner-type crap.)

Anyway, long story short: being an American and eating well are pretty much mutually exclusive. Even if you try to do it, odds are you’ll fail. Isn’t it fun living in a rich country?

Note: While my fat intake is probably high, it’s not as high as it looks. This is because when I enter things into the software, I often approximate: I might have had homemade potato soup, but I choose a commercially-prepared item which generally has more fat since most of it isn’t actually vegetarian.