Posts Tagged ‘wtf’

Mood whiplash is FUN!

Wednesday, November 8th, 2017

I should, like, make more of an effort to write in here again. I’ve gotten far too lazy in just barfing my thoughts solely on Twitter, and the temptation to do so has gotten only stronger because of the upgrade to 280 characters.

It’s only Tuesday and this week has already been several kinds of WTF. I knew things would be odd because 3 doctor appointments in one week, but… damn.

Monday: I had to go see my main doctor as a condition of getting my med renewal charges restocked. The doctor is a tiny old Filipino man who doesn’t really talk much (picture someone like the nameless homeroom teacher from Evangelion) but today he was unusually chatty, asking about my BiPAP machine since he has the previous model. Like, REALLY getting into it. Internally I’m like “wait, he actually talks?! Holy crap!”

As an old habit from WAY back when I was in Kaiser, I assumed the doctor would want blood work and did the fasting thing (me being a fatty mcfatderp, it’s probably a periodic check to make sure I didn’t get whacked by the diabetes stick… or maybe because of thyroid stuff. Probably both). And I was right to. BUT, because the doctor had a new, fussy and time-consuming patient ahead of me, there was a long wait for him to actually get to me. That’s not a problem, the fact that LabCorp would be closed before I could get there was. Sooo… I fasted for nothing. Fun times!

(WHY MUST YOU CLOSE SO EARLY, LABCORP? It’s not even a 9 to 5 thing! It’s 9 to 4! An hour makes a huge difference for slowpokes like me!!)

My mother got takeout on the way back, both because a pointless fast is awful and also she hadn’t eaten yet so we were both super-hungry. So the day was salvaged, I guess.

Tuesday: I had to redo the fast, and got up earlier to go do the blood work before lunch hour. More takeout, too! Unusual circumstances, so it’s okay– there wouldn’t have been enough time to go home and make lunch because…

Another doctor visit, only this time I get to hoof it to Eastvale since that’s where Pacific Eye Institute is. (For being such a fancy, lavishly-decorated facility, it gets a ton of Medicaid patients. Huh. The name and appearance implies it would be for rich people.) My old opthalmologist retired, so I got bounced to… basically the next one available, who I saw last week, and he was all “oh I should bounce you to our new keratoconus specialist” and boop, I am asked to return today to see said new person. As awkward as that scenario sounds, it was actually for the best. Why?

New eye doctor, for one, is basically Kal Penn if he had a SLIGHTLY wider head and thick-framed coke bottle glasses. Yay! Also yay: he’s actually getting the ball rolling on my corneal transplant, which has ONLY been in limbo for the past two years since old eye doctor (who was basically William H. Macy but taller and with lighter hair) was super waffly and fat-shamy– like, he was convinced that my keratoconus was a result of my being fat and he thought he could blow off doing the corneal transplant by throwing glaucoma eyedrops at me. It’s not glaucoma, jackass. Your tech flunkies said so.

New eye doctor WOULD have set up the transplant fairly soon, except being new has a few administrative complications. Like most new employees, there’s a bit of a probation period– in his case, it’s a waiting period while he’s authorized to perform surgery at the hospital he was hired at. He doesn’t seem to be bothered much by me being a “patient of size” so I don’t expect much finger-waggling there.

I’m prescribed a second set of eye drops to stack on the brimonidine, only these drops aren’t being used in the “let’s just act like we’re dealing with glaucoma” context, this prednisolone is more of a “let’s try to fix even a little bit of the scarring in the meantime until we can book you for surgery” thing, so at least there’s considerably less bullshit to deal with.

It seems like a really good day so far! I get home and lie down a bit before raid night in WoW. Yeee, we’re gonna finally punch Heroic Kil’jaeden and I’ll still get my pizza later because Tuesday is pizza day! A few minutes before we’re set to begin, I get up to go to Blastoise, but Daisy was on my desk. I didn’t notice her, and she wasn’t aware of me approaching since I wasn’t wearing my slippers, so she got startled and toppled my almost-empty water pitcher that I had moved to my PC desk to make room for sorting my medicine that morning and… uhhh…

It wasn’t a lot of water, but juuuust enough to get into my keyboard and mouse. Aw hell. Welp, I figured both were totally wrecked and I’d have to withdraw from the raid until whenever I could secure replacements. My mood just tanked SUPER hard.

I went back to lounging in bed and– oh, the guild got Ahead of the Curve and WELP THERE GOES MY CHANCE TO GET A KILL VIDEO WITH NERDSCREAMS, FFFFFFF– a few hours later came back to Blastoise to confirm that my stuff was still dead.

It wasn’t. Both the keyboard and mouse recovered.

WHAT.

I’ve never had a good track record with any kind of water damage, however rare it was. I’d lost a nice keyboard and my old Macbook to water damage and I was sure my current keyboard and Naga Chroma were done for… except they survived. Somehow. I should just shut up and be grateful that they aren’t hosed, right?

Now I’m just in this weird… mood whiplash headspace. I was prepared to be just miserable for potentially the rest of the week, and while I appreciate my guild offers to replace my stuff I don’t think I could deal with the shame of having to sponge my way back, not without treating it as a commission and throwing art at them in return. (And it would have been WAY worse if Robert did it. Which is really out of character for him. Bro out-pennypinches Scrooge McDuck, he’s the last person I would expect to volunteer to replace my keyboard and such.) Ahh, residual disability-related guilt sure is fun, isn’t it?

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Quit Your Belly-Aching… Oh Wait

Sunday, November 1st, 2015

Three words: Incarcerated Ventral Hernia.

or, “why Yoshi kept having to go to the ER since late August”

I… think I was kind of aware that a hernia was forming since last year I noticed a small mass forming in my belly, but it wasn’t causing any problems then, and unless it’s acting up there isn’t much that can be done.

Except in June (and more intensely as of August) it DID. I’d gone in thinking a bunch of things, that it was a UTI, that it was my appendix, that it was a bowel obstruction, and while two of those three were true, they were influenced by a larger issue.

Earlier in October, the ER doctors were all “you should probably investigate elective surgery, have your doctor issue a referral to the surgery clinic.” Um, sure, that’s a good idea! I’d like to not have to keep going back because I ran out of hydrocodone (aka Norco aka the pill that keeps the pain away) and I imagine the ER and medical/surgical wing doods are sick to death of me bouncing back, so I did exactly as they said. My primary doctor, however, was very much “WTF are they thinking, making you wait? They should really do the emergency Premier Image Cosmetic and Laser Surgery!” he said that there had been way too many clinical negligence cases lately.

But we kinda have to work within the confines of the insurance. This is Medi-Cal after all. I don’t have to pay for any of it, and never properly paid into it by working. I struggle every day with the guilt, with feeling that I don’t deserve the help I have (Medi-Cal, SSI, disability status, etc.). So, I feel like I didn’t have room to really push the issue and go along with what was asked of me.

The Friday evening of the 23rd, though, the shit hit the fan (oh man that’s incredibly appropriate given what we’re dealing with). My medicine was no longer effective. I thought it was because I took it after eating dinner rather than before, so I tried to just tough it out while waiting for a delayed activation… except it wasn’t happening at all. I couldn’t sleep at all that night, despite trying different positions or even taking additional medicine, and eventually I started getting nauseous despite having anti-emetic medication in addition to the hydrocodone. Oh dear.

So after briefly telling my brother what was going on over battle.net’s IM/global tell thingy, I go back to the ER yet again. The surgeons are called to look me over and they’re all “oh shit, this hernia is incarcerated, we gotta open her up right away.” Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Was it scary, the thought of emergency surgery? …no, not really, since there wasn’t much time to think about it. Since it was Saturday, and surgery isn’t usually done on weekends, it’s not like I had to wait long, I basically had a full emergency surgical team ready to go. They wheel me into the OR, plop me on the table, push the anesthetics and I wink out within a couple minutes.

No, it was AFTER the surgery was done that’s hellish. I wink out and wake up in the ICU not only intubated (2 attempts, I’m told, and the roof of my mouth is kinda shredded and tender as a result for the time being) but also with that infernal NG tube and TWO IVs (one is a backup and said backup ended up failing) and EKG leads. Yeah, I’m wired up alright, like I’m on my last legs! And I’m in the big BariAir fat person bed, which I would later learn is not very comfortable at all despite everyone’s assertions, and not designed for free entry/exit like the standard beds.

The respiratory therapist doods had to give me a steroid to drop the swelling that had formed in my throat (as a result of intubation), and it took two days to get the tubes out. And let me tell you, the dreams I had while drifting in and out of consciousness post-surgery ranged from depressing to outright scary, and I couldn’t vocalize anything I felt until after I had been extubated. It all hit me with the force of a Mack Truck, and I really wish my mother hadn’t been so victim-blamey and dismissive and most definitely”poor-me” when I broke down that evening. Argh.

Oh and it gets so much better, you see, because that bed doesn’t let me get in and out so easily, and it was such a huge pain to get a bedpan in after they removed the foley catheter, so… yeah. I couldn’t exactly get up to use the bathroom and was frequently buzzing the nurses for cleanup. They were really nice and professional about it and never once complained to my face, but I get really anxious about that stuff and hate bothering people over it and it definitely did not help my post-surgery depression.

They also attempt to put a CPAP mask on me and, uh, I was just not having any of it. While we got the settings enough to be bearable, I was having some pretty bad claustrophobia and I was already extremely stressed out because of everything, so that was stopped and they decided keeping me on supplementary oxygen was good enough. I still have a sleep study booked, so we’ll try calibrating that again under better circumstances.

Eventually I got moved to the usual med/surgery floor for less-invasive monitoring. (In a private room, thankfully, because of the size of the bed.) I get put on a clear liquid diet, which I am okay with because I get lots of chicken broth, and on the last two days I get upgraded to regular solid food (not renal, not cardiac, not diabetic, but the “normal people” food with a notation about keeping pineapples the hell away from me). I am told I need to be cleared by Respiratory, Occupational and Physical Therapy before I can be discharged, and those happen rather quickly– despite having been in bed for almost a week, I didn’t weaken much and didn’t get dizzy or anything when I sat up and could walk just fine, so they let me go home Thursday evening.

Right now I have a JP (jejunum-placed) drainage tube connected to some kind of Fisher-Price-esque flask that’s supposed to collect whatever fluid-stuff that formed from my stitches. I have staples in my lower belly (ew) that are supposed to be taken out along with said JP flask in a couple days– tomorrow, potentially…? And we’re looking at least a month before I’m fully healed, so, uh, more pain pills! Woo!

But, yeah, that hernia bullshit (huh huh) is officially fixed. Yesterday I got a letter from the AlphaCare doods (the actual insurance underwriter) that said that the consultation for what would have been the elective surgery wasn’t until December. There is NO EFFING WAY I would have been able to hold out that long, even if I had unlimited hydrocodone and all the morphine I could guzzle. It’s true that if this had been done laproscopically it would not take as long to heal, but… them’s the breaks, I guess. At least the doctors fixed me, even if it was a less graceful method.

Uhm… aside from that, I don’t feel as lopsided in my belly, and I notice that more when I’m sleeping because I used to kinda tip to the right. (It has the unfortunate side effect of not letting me easily swing my left leg up to rest on my bed while sitting, since now my guts are more evenly balanced rather than there being deflated on the left side. Oh well, I’ll get used to having to try a little harder there.) Because of the heparin shots I got (standard practice if you’re hospitalized, it prevents blood clots from forming due to reduced activity, otherwise you have to take dangerous blook thinner drugs, which can cause side effects. You read about them at http://sideeffectsofxarelto.org/current-xarelto-lawsuits/.) the bruises from all the IVs and blood draws are taking longer to heal, and it’s especially tender in my wrists because they got needled a lot. :P

For the more medically-technical-minded, or those bored enough to google, it was an open repair (approx’ 8-inch incision that barely avoids my navel). Thankfully nothing necrotized despite repeated paralysis, and it was supposedly a simple “push everything back into place and cut away the newly-formed tissue” repair job with no mesh needed, surprising because when it comes to fat people getting hernias it is very rarely this easy. So, uh, lucky me I guess.

Man, I don’t even want to THINK about how much all this would have cost if I didn’t have insurance. Yay Medi-Cal, because I probably would have been rendered medically bankrupt several times over.

I’m already back in the raiding saddle, of course. It doesn’t hurt me (more than the passive/always-on “oh hey, I have stitches and they’re kinda sore” pain) and being able to hang out with Robert and my raid groups keeps me from dwelling on how otherwise I’m a giant sad sack. :P I joke that I didn’t need a Halloween costume, I could be female Gorefiend or Patchwerk because of my grotesque stitched tummy. And, of course, the JP drain flask provides additional spooky factor, heh.

Lazy Bloggers

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

Okay, I am apparently all kinds of terrible at posting here. Well! That’s going to get fixed soon enough.

Hi.

What HAVE I been up to, anyway? Uhm… not a whole lot, really. Being kind of a forced shut-in has made things take a turn for the majorly-boring (and depressing, since I’m direct witness to all the parental drama). Even though I’ve regained my mobility since before I was hospitalized (and then some!), it’s been decided for me that I’m “too weak” to go out or learn to drive again, and apparently the comfort of dogs trumps my need to be able to get around the house to see my cat, of all things, so I’ve been stuck in this non-bedroom of a Birdcage. I can’t even get Blastoise moved down here because there isn’t enough room in this rathole to set him up properly, so I’ve had to use Dinah exclusively. Not having dual monitors sucks! (Dinah’s ability to output to an HDTV via HDMI doesn’t count, it’s too far away to function effectively as a second monitor.)

On the upside, I did nab a Wii U for Yoshi Day. (Wow, did THAT one pass without me even posting about it. Well, here’s why: what should have been an awesome 30th birthday got TOTALLY tainted by stupid narcissist parent drama.) Specifically, I got the Mario and Luigi bundle, the one that has New SMB U (and the Luigi DLC). Still need to loot Mario Kart 8, which I can probably afford after taking all these Gourmet Ramen commissions.

Yeah, that’s right, I’ve been painting again, primarily Gourmet Ramen stuff because, well, I really do need money! Try as mother may, getting people to believe I’m “disabled forever” is not happening and the process of getting SSI/disability approved is slower than molasses. (Though, I guess deep down, I kinda want this, because some part of me thinks that if I get disability, I’ll have “given up.” And also be “cheating” because mother wants to pass off my thyroid problems and other not-disability-worthy stuff as evidence I’m supposedly disabled, and if she gets her way I feel like I’d be taking resources away from people who are legit-disabled.) ANYWAY. Because “normal work” is a bitch to find and painting is one of the only two things I’m good at anyway– the other being PC building– I’ve been trawling Twitter and the Diamond Club community for any takers for Gourmet Ramen commissions, to some success. So far I’ve made… enough to pay up my WoW account until next year, which is a start! I need to pile up more, though, because the renewal for this site’s hosting comes up in late October.

…which leads to now.

I need to, uh, do something about the design of AP. There’s obviously some outdated widgets and side pages I need to fix up, and possibly see about a newer layout down the line. Also WOW, has this domain really been around for, what, 13-ish years? I also missed the 10-year anniversary of Instant Ramen Sketchbook (which began the day I got my first tablet, that ratty old Aiptek, bless its parts!) D’oh!

I’m no longer posting to LiveJournal, since it seems, like, nearly all of my readership from that has moved onto places like Twitter and Facebook. I’m just going to have to be more proactive about posting here directly and better integrating my social media stuff into this blog (which goes back into repairing/replacing widgets and things).

Sooo, watch this blog! Again!

Detour Downstairs

Thursday, May 10th, 2012

Uh… well that just happened.

I woke up to a BOX!!!1 on my side-table. It was my video card, of course, but like hell am I going to crack open Blastoise until I’ve nibbled something, because Yoshi+ empty stomach + robo-surgery = faceplanting on dusty desk with potential to inhale extra case screws = NO.

And then… I get summoned downstairs (!) with Dinah (!!) for an experiment: the installation of a curtain over the puppy gate. In theory this would stop the Berserk Cacophony of WOOF that gets triggered whenever I come downstairs for whatever reason (usually to take pizza delivery). This also comes with the bonus of keeping Evil Stepfather from staring at me like a creeper.

I wanted to do the card swap while there was daylight because Blastoise’s case is painted such that it sucks out artificial light (but not natural). But… this sounded worthwhile, and I kinda wanted a change of scenery for the day anyway, even if the most likely end result was that I’d just sleep on the couch all day because it’s not often I get to sit on a real couch. :P

…which is exactly what happened, albeit interrupted by my cat jumping on and shuffling around on top of me, that little purrbot. Though… I DID get pizza and discovered I actually have the Blu-Ray version of the first Men in Black. I think it came with one of the Blu-Ray drives I installed. It was still in its shrink-wrap and cardboard insert, haha!

Anwho, experiment is a partial success. Dogs can’t go berserk at the sight of me, but incidental (and unavoidable) noises like doorbells still set them off. Well, it’s SOMETHING, I guess.

Blastoise gets cracked open in the morning. Hopefully nothing goes bad and he’s up and running before raid time. :P Cripes I miss dual monitors.

My Office Sucks

Monday, April 9th, 2012

I’m pretty sure the general lack of art posts (or me just being on Blastoise much outside of raiding) is because my office is quickly becoming a not-comfortable part of what little personal space I have left. Let’s assess:

– My chair is 10+ years old, creaky and falling apart
– My floor mat is cracked and sunken
– I’m down to a single monitor because while New Video Card is AWESOME, it is also weird in that it won’t take twins. Something about virtual display fusion blah blah blah. TRIPLETS OR GTFO.
– I can’t add a third monitor because my “desk” (actually two sewing tables in an L formation) is a total mess with boxes and other old crap that I piled up so Kestine couldn’t wander behind the monitors.

Basically it comes down to me having to make a concerted effort to clean my desk space to free up room for another monitor. Odds are what will end up happening is that I’ll retire my 19″ Samsung CRT (that was Yoshi Day loot from 2003; it’s a miracle it still works, as it’s super-ghosty and is interfering with Painter, which is why I can’t do Instant Ramen even in forced single monitor mode) and pick up TWO monitors– one to replace said CRT and the second to fill the third monitor slot. The secondary display (also a Samsung) is thankfully in perfect working order.

And that’s just the monitors. There’s also issue of my demon chair… this awful thing that makes me fall asleep and one of my hands go numb because it’s an ergonomic nightmare. Too low to the ground, and I can’t scoot in because the floor mat’s cracked and… ugh.

The desk cleanup has to come first, at least. The only reason I dread doing it because it’s sure to be noisy as hell, which means those evil bulldogs downstairs will go into a clusterfwegh of WOOF and then everyone will be all pissed off over the noise. Only way to lessen the drama is to do it while parental units are out (preferably on a vet trip with one of the bulldogs) since there will be less barking and human yelling.

Not looking forward to dropping lots of coin on this overhaul (two monitors + new chair + floor mat) but it’s necessary in the long run. I should troll like hell for commissions when this is all done to take the edge off. :|