New move, new changes

 I have been so very, terribly inconsistent about writing here.

That last post, about my dog? I mentioned I took a trip out of town? I was with a guy, and meeting his kids for the first time. Yeah, we got married. I probably should mention that. (He actually bought a ring to propose with right before that trip, unbeknownst to me.) We eloped on Mount Rainier in August, and now we're moving across the country! It's exciting and terrifying and stressful all at once. Apparently I just need to uproot my life and drag myself kicking and screaming away every few years because...that's the pattern I got, apparently.

My dog, by the way, is actually doing a lot better since his surgery. We think he was fighting a low-key eye infection for about a year before he gouged his own eye out. He was treated with eye drops for a scrape on his eye, but he started collapsing when walking and having some behavioral issues. But since his eye was taken out, these have mostly resolved! He still has arthritis, and that's going to be something he's going to have to live with, so we still take it easy, but he's able to do a lot more now. 

I've been trying to write more, just not here. You can read my published short stories by clicking here. I have an author page on Facebook here as well, and a Linktree, too.

I'll try to update here more as I become more consistent with writing. NaNoWriMo is going to take up a lot of my life this month (and also, the move), but I'm still alive and still poking here from bit to bit. 

The Sad Saga of Gimpy McOne-Eye

So on a recent trip out of town, I woke up to a series of frantic text messages and missed calls from my roommates. My dog had woken them up at two in the morning, screaming in pain and leaking bloody discharge from his eye.

They kept him comfortable until I got home. I was driving across the country. I didn't make it home for three more days, and had just wrapped 21 consecutive hours on the road when I came home, scooped up my dog, and ran to the vet.

Somehow, this dog punctured his eye and the bloody discharge my roommates described was actually the insides of his eyeball leaking out.

A year prior, he had done something similar nowhere he had cut his eye in almost the same spot, but without fully puncturing it. I really wish I knew how he managed it, so I could prevent it from happening in the future.

After waiting what seemed like an eternity to get into the vet, it was decided the eyeball needed to come out. 

My poor dog must have thought he had the most raw deal. First I left him for a week, whereupon he promptly gouged his eye and had to live in pain. Then I came home just long enough to leave him with some strangers who knocked him out. Then in the morning after waking up with one eye, since I had to work, he was picked up by my boyfriend. The dog doesn't hate my boyfriend per se, but he isn't super thrilled with him. Yeah, my dog was not a very happy camper.

Going potty was an immediate challenge. From my room to the back door where I let him out, there is a right turn. Right is his newly blind side. So Ozzy kept coasting past it and getting lost in the kitchen. Because the cone messes with his directional hearing, he can't figure out where I am when I call him. On more than one occasion, he got too lost and couldn't hold it and peed on the floor instead.

It also doesn't help that he now behaves like a Roomba: whenever his cone knocks into an obstacle (which is often), he will turn around and head the opposite direction. Venturing under table and chair legs is reminiscent of the old school pinball machine bumpers. He just bounces off one to collide with another, and cannot find his way out!

About a week and a half later I had to leave town again, and this brat knew. A few days before I left, he realized he wanted to scratch his incision but could not because of the cone. So instead he mashed his incision into the cone until it bled. It was a big swollen crusty-looking thing. I had to take off work to get him into the vet to make sure he didn't pull a stitch or get it infected. Fortunately the vet wasn't too worried, just sent him home with a preventative antibiotic.

He didn't stab out any more eyes while I was gone, and when I got home the swelling had gone down dramatically.

When he blinks, you can see the muscles moving now where his eye used to be, and it adds to his facial expression. He gets a follow up in a couple days to hopefully remove the sutures and the cone.

He's getting old an expensive, but he hangs in there. He is slowly adapting to life with only half a field of vision. We just take it a day at a time.

What's in my notes?

So I am a very studious notetaker. If I don't write something down, I know I will forget it. However, I simultaneously also suck at actually remembering to go and read my notes. And by the time I get around to it, the context is lost and so I don't know why I wrote what I wrote.

Here are some selections from the notes app in my phone, presented with no context, as the context has been lost to time:

"Carnage, in darkness"

"Peppermint stick"

"Car breakdown" (Which one?)

"Blog post drug addicts" (I don't know where I was going with this; I used to work at a cheap downtown motel so there are multiple stories here I might have had in mind.)

"Meanest burgers in town" (I think this was a math joke punchline but I don't remember the set up.)

"Screaming through the air in a hollow metal tube at 37,000 feet. Is it flying, or falling with style?' (I swear I have never done hard drugs!)

"The passed out drunk story" (I honestly have no clue what story this refers to.)

"Increase persuasive powers" (okay I remember this one; it came from a medical chart and the phrasing amused me, so I noted it. I maybe have stolen it for some of my own charting...)

"Questionable decisions"

"It's okay to be different; sometimes it's refreshing"

"Necornmancer" (no, not necromancer....neCORNmancer.)

"Dream with weird personal trainer"

Yeah, I really think I should start writing down contexts for these things....

My Covid-19 Experience

I had always had these romantic notions that when I got Covid, I would live-blog it. I did some Facebook posts, but the reality was I didn't have the energy during or immediately after. It's no joke. Covid was the second-sickest I have ever been, and the sickest I ever have been without going to the hospital.

The sickest I have ever been was when I was three, when an infected abrasion escalated into a systemic infection that landed me in the hospital for a month. My mom couldn't visit me because my baby brother had been born mere weeks prior, and they couldn't risk any exposure to him. They moved a recliner into my room and my dad left my mom and infant brother to quarantine with me so I wouldn't be completely alone in the hospital for the last couple of weeks. I think maybe there was a window where they could wave at each other but direct contact was a no-go until I was completely recovered. I don't remember much about it.

The third sickest I have ever been was when I was in my mid 20's and got norovirus. For 24 hours my digestive system slammed into reverse so hard, stuff was coming out my mouth that looked like it should have been coming out another end. Sorry, is that too gross? It was so gross. I had no appetite for two weeks, but mercifully the worst of it only lasted a day.

I would take that norovirus again over Covid any day.

At the skilled nursing facility where I work, we had a Covid outbreak in May, if my memory serves. For a good portion of the summer we had a cordoned-off Covid wing. I spent hours sweating in personal protective equipment (PPE) working in close-contact with patients who had the virus. No eye-roll was ever hard enough as my friends and family on Facebook whinged how they could breathe in cloth masks, while I had an N95 donned for ten-hour days and my sweat made the plastic gowns adhere to my skin. In all that time, I never got it. As summer waned, our facility was able to clear out our cases, and I thought I was safe. 

Then, in December, a case snuck in. I found out over a weekend a patient I had been seeing tested positive. I wasn't super worried; we still wore full PPE with patients in our observation unit, where new admissions were quarantined. I am not sure how it snuck past my PPE; I am guessing I reached up to absentmindedly adjust my glasses at just the wrong time and it got in through my eyes, but that's only a guess. Through my anecdotal experience, it seems like prevention is 50% proper PPE and 50% sheer luck.

On my weekday off, about three days after I had last seen that patient, I woke up with a cough. That wasn't a big deal on its own; since moving to Eastern Washington I have always gotten bronchitis every winter. I checked my temp to be safe: 98.1 degrees. Well within normal limits. I went out to an appointment, and then headed to the laundromat to do my weekly laundry.

It was at the laundromat when I first realized something was wrong. First, the always enticing taco truck wasn't appealing to me. The laundromat was fairly busy, so I was waiting outside in my car and staring at the truck. It was lunchtime, but it wasn't appealing. Second, as I went in to switch machines, I just felt...off. There wasn't a specific symptom, but it was that sort of generic rundown feeling. By the time my dryer was done, I could feel my chest congestion worsening, and I felt like an absolute trainwreck. The exhaustion was real. My boyfriend had come up to meet me at the laundromat, and I just looked at him and said "I think I need to go home, like right now. I think something's really wrong." He was disappointed that I refused to kiss him.

My laundry takes about an hour to wash and dry. That's how quickly I went from feeling fine to knowing something was definitely wrong.

I went home and I slept. And I slept. And I slept. And when I finally woke up, I felt freezing.

I turned to my boyfriend. "Is it cold in here?"

"Not to me."

"Fuck!"

"What is it?"

"I got a fever. The medicine cabinet behind the mirror has a thermometer...can you grab it please?"

I had a fever of 99.9. Not high, but definitely higher than what I took in the morning.

That was 5pm. At 6pm, that temperature climbed to 101. At 7pm, it was 102. My boyfriend started to panic. I told him I wanted to wait and if it hit 103, I would take a Tylenol (I was trying to let my immune system do its thing without intervening) and if it hit 104 we would go to the ER. Around 8pm, my fever peaked at 102.8 degrees. It came with a headache every time I coughed that felt like a hatchet was splitting my skull in half.

I texted my boss and my workplace's director of nursing to find out how quickly our weekly Covid swab results would come back. We got tested every week, but typically didn't hear about the results. No news was good news. I had been swabbed on Sunday, and today was Tuesday. I was told to come into work the next day for a rapid test.

The next morning my temperature was down to 96.9 degrees, and I looked up what the actual hypothermic limit was (below 95, if you were wondering).  Just sitting upright felt absolutely exhausting, and standing was dizzying. My boyfriend drove me to work; despite my attempts to send him home he had stayed with me. One of the staff met me outside with the rapid test. We hadn't even made it home when I got the call confirming my fears; I had tested positive for Covid-19. 

The next couple days my temperature danced between 97 and 102. The fatigue was the most crippling. If I wanted to brush my teeth, use the bathroom, and take a shower, I couldn't do it all in one go. I would have to lay down between each task and rest for five minutes or so. The coughing also progressively worsened; it was a deep chest cough that came with that splitting headache each time. My back also hurt like hell.

The boyfriend and I debated on how best to handle his exposure. Should he stay with me and ride it out, or go home and isolate but potentially expose his family in the process? After three days he went home, which I didn't agree with. He ended up testing negative a few days after, so it worked out for him. Remember how I said it's 40% luck? I can't say I'm not a bit envious of him.

On Friday, I started coughing up frothy blood in the shower. I called the ER, but they said I would just have to go in since they couldn't give advice over the phone. I knew our local hospital was close to capacity and I didn't think I could sit upright long enough to drive there anyway, so I downloaded some apps to figure out how to the our telehealth benefit I had. A couple hours later, a doctor on the phone said as long as I wasn't feeling short of breath, it was probably a small tear from coughing hard and wasn't a major concern. I sat and thought real hard about if I was actually short of breath or just anxious and decided to stay home.

"Have you lost your sense of smell yet?" The doctor asked.

"No, thankfully not yet."

"You're lucky."

I was not lucky. That doctor jinxed me, I swear!

That night, I had the weirdest dreams. I have not done hard drugs, but that night is what I imagine a bad trip would be like. If at any point I went hypoxic, that was the night. (I am disappointed my pulse oximeter was at work, because it would have been interesting to find out.) The best way I can describe it was that it felt like my brain was folding in on itself. At one point I considered I might have been stroking out and thought about calling for help, but I couldn't find my body to tell it to reach for my phone. It was bizarre. I don't know if it was Covid or not, but it was odd enough I figured it deserved a mention.

The next morning I couldn't smell my blankets. You probably don't think of blankets as having a smell. It's not something I noticed until I suddenly couldn't notice it. Rushing to the bathroom, I grabbed perfumes and essential oils. The small few I could smell seemed like the smell was very distant and far away.

That's when I cried. I had friends who had Covid who couldn't smell for weeks or months, and it was such a disheartening thought. I remember going to let my dog out and when I got outside taking off the mask I wore to protect my roommates, and feeling absolutely despondent that I couldn't smell the fresh air. This wasn't a clogged sinus and stuffy nose blocking my sense of smell; this was an entire sense missing. With my smell gone, all food tasted like cardboard.

Fortunately, despite my fears, it only lasted a couple days.

Monday, six days after my symptoms started, my sense of smell returned about 60%, as I noticed I could smell my body wash again. I was still coughing like no one's business, but my fever had been gone for a whole day and I finally felt just a little bit stronger. I sat up in a chair and lasted about five minutes before dizziness sent me back to bed. Then I tried six minutes of sitting. Slowly, I built up to two hours sitting in the chair, smelling all the essential oils I could and trying to will my strength and senses back.

Working in physical therapy in a skilled nursing facility, I tell my patients all the time to get out of bed and just sit in order to build up their endurance. After Covid, I have a whole new appreciation as to how challenging just sitting can be!

Over the rest of the week my cough persisted but the fatigue slowly lessened and the sense of smell slowly strengthened. Friday I was officially free, per CDC guidelines, and I went for a very short, flat hike that winded me. I was able to return to work the day after.

The cough lingered for a couple weeks, but lessened each day, and I managed with cough syrup and cough drops. (My doctor suggested Robitussin over Dayquil, as the former is an expectorant.) Oh, and remember that swab I got the Sunday before my symptoms started? Yeah, the county health department called me to let me know I was positive two weeks later, after my quarantine period had ended and I was already back at work. (Per CDC guidelines, you are clear 10 days after your symptoms began, assuming you are fever-free for at least 24 hours on the tenth day.) No wonder our healthcare capacity was so impacted with the labs running that far behind on notifying cases! I was so thankful I had access to the rapid testing through my work to verify my diagnosis instead of waiting on the county labs.

Today, when hiking or doing any exercise, I still get short of breath quicker than I should. According to my Fitbit, my resting HR increased while I was sick and then quickly went back to normal, but after a week of recovery gradually crept up into the upper 70's when it should be in the low 60's. Three months later, and it seems like this week it has started to decrease a little bit, but we'll have to wait and see if that trend continues to return it to normal. It makes me wonder what the underlying damage is.

Bonus: My Covid Vaccine Experience

A few weeks after I recovered and returned to work, we were offered the vaccine as frontline healthcare workers. I asked if I should get it since it was so soon after recovery; my director of nursing shrugged and said the CDC didn't say anything against it, so I figured I better stay with my "phase" and get it since it might be logistically more difficult later. We got the Pfizer shot.

I have never had an arm so sore after a shot. The ache lasted about five days, though the day after was the worst. The first shot I got in my non-dominant arm and the second shot in my dominant arm; I hoped that since I moved that arm.more the second shot might hurt less. They both hurt the same.

Both shots gave me a slightly elevated temp, and both made me exhausted the day after. I slept most of the day after (fortunately my normal day off) and felt back to normal by evening.

Despite having side effects from both shots, the vaccine reaction was not nearly as bad as the actual Covid. As much as people seem to be afraid of those reactions, getting the actual disease can be so much worse. 

I stayed out of the hospital, but I was still pretty damn sick. I have had friends end up in the ICU with scarier symptoms than I had. I had friends who stayed out of the ICU but became "long haulers" who didn't really recover from fatigue and pain and shortness of breath, who have resorted to literally crawling around their homes because they lack the capacity to walk. One of those felt so debilitated and despondent that she took her own life over it. 

The disease is so much scarier than the vaccine reactions. If I were you and had to choose between one of the two, I'd choose the vaccine in (an elevated) heartbeat.

On Communication

2020 has been a wild year and I haven't written much about it, thanks to burnout and depression. There are a lot of things I have wanted to talk about. Things like my experience with Covid, and then the vaccine. Things I have been learning in therapy. Later when I summon the energy I can talk about those. But right now, I want to share how I am dating a guy and I think he might be the One, and all because I told him I was mad at my insurance company.

My company switched health insurances. After a bunch of "don't worry you can keep your doctor" talk, it turns out like 80% of the providers in this town won't work with this insurance so I suddenly need to find all new providers. And because this is "network-free" insurance they don't have a list of providers for me to pick from...I have to basically find someone who is taking new patients and then go through a bunch of hoops to find out if they take this weird insurance. It's frustrating as hell. 

Anyways, I was making phone calls and getting trapped in robo-phone-trees while doing my laundry when my boyfriend called me. He could tell by my tone of voice that I was upset, so he asked "is something wrong?"

In the past, I would have stuffed it. In the past, I would have said "It's nothing; I just don't want to talk about it." Even now, my knee-jerk reaction was to push away and isolate. It wasn't his business, and it wasn't anything he could do anything about.

But I decided to try this new thing called talking to people. So instead I said, "Actually I'm really frustrated because I'm dealing with stupid insurance stuff and the insurance is stupid and the doctors are stupid and the pharmacies are stupid and everyone in this town is stupid and it's pissing me off, so now I'm in a real shitty mood."

In the past, I would have been told how I was overreacting, how it wasn't that bad, how I just needed to "suck it up and deal with it." I would have been told this by parents, supposed friends, and romantic partners. At some point, I just stopped opening up. Opening up always lead to invalidation, so why bother?

This time was different though. Because, as I regularly seem to need to remind myself, my boyfriend is not those other people.

This time, I was met with, "That sucks. I don't know if I can help, but let me know if I can."

Maybe that seems like such a small thing, but when you spend decades of your life being told your experiences are invalid and you're overreacting, that small gesture of acceptance and tolerance becomes a really big thing.

I am relearning how to open up and be vulnerable, because I was met with so much antagonism in the past. Slowly, bit by bit, conversation by conversation, I have been getting there.

Don't invalidate your loved ones. Because when you do, you make them shut down, and opening back up becomes a long and hard process, even if it doesn't seem that way from the surface.

The Haunted Library

We don’t tell our guests about the library.

Here at Chateau de Livres, we have a wide array of amenities. An Olympic-size lap pool, a world-class spa, a Michellin star restaurant, and of course luxurious guest rooms. Despite our name, though, the library in the basement is strictly off-limits to all but a few select staff.

Unfortunately, the breaker boxes are in the basement, and the spirits there like to play tricks so sometimes we have to go down there.

The breaker boxes are along the wall. Sometimes it’s a one-minute walk to them, sometimes twenty. It depends on how the library is feeling that day. Whatever you do, stick to the wall. No matter how long your walk, as long as you stay on the perimeter you will eventually make it out. If you venture off into the stacks, it’s a death sentence. You’ll be lost forever.

The apparitions are best ignored. If you ignore them, they’ll ignore you. They wander about, but as long as you don’t interact with them you’ll be okay. Don’t give them more than a smile and nod. If you try to talk to them, stare at them, or run from them, they’ll drag you off into the stacks. 

Don’t follow any sounds you hear in the library. The sounds will try to lure you off into the stacks. Whatever sounds you hear, ignore them.

Just last week, I took a trainee down there. Joe. He did a fair job ignoring the apparitions. It took us five minutes to reach the breaker box. Once we reset everything, we started our walk back. About twelve minutes into our return trip, we heard a loud thud, and then a girl crying. Joe started to look for the sound. I tried to pull him back, but he shooed me away. “I’m just going to peek around the corner,” he whispered. He stepped maybe five feet into the stacks, around the corner, and was gone.

I felt bad for Joe. I almost followed him to try and call him back, but the stares of the apparitions told me what didn’t need to be said. Don’t go into the stacks. I smiled, nodded, and continued on my long walk back to the stairs. The apparitions returned to their usual business of walking about and ignoring me. I dreaded having to tell my boss that we lost yet another employee to the library.

We don’t tell people about our library.

Anxious Reflections

I know I have been very, very absent on the blogging front lately. I have been burned out for about a year which has resulted in one of the longest bouts of writer's block I've had. But something else has also come up.

I feel like the first few months of this pandemic, I was doing okay. I was actually losing weight and walking around the neighborhood a lot. But as time wore on, my energy and focus suddenly dropped. It was hard to stay focused at work, and things that once gave me joy like hiking (and writing) became dreadful, energy-sucking chores. I've also started experiencing what my doctor thinks are panic attacks, and I've had them in the most benign and random settings like when I'm folding laundry.

Talking to colleagues, I am not alone. Everyone's anxiety has been sky-high. Several of my colleagues have been seeking out either counselling or medication to help cope, which I believe is a good thing because it means they're taking the steps they need to take to care for themselves.

My first meeting with my new therapist when we were talking about my anxiety and where it began, I explained how it's been worse over the past year, but to be honest it's something I have struggled with for a long time. I told her how my normal outlets have been cut-off with the pandemic.

"I think what's happened with you is that you've been able to run away from what's bothering you and have been able to sort of stay ahead of it for a long time," she told me. "You've been staying busy and have been able to push it aside and cope with it that way. But now that you're basically stuck in one spot, you're being forced to actually confront it."

Damn. That struck me. I feel like she hit the nail on the head.

With subsequent sessions, she also seems to think I probably have PTSD, though we're still figuring out from what. People who know me immediately assume my ex-husband, who was abusive, but my anxiety runs back to before I ever met him, so we got a whole lot of digging to do.

So here we go. I wanted to share the start of my therapy journey because in these trying times, I think it's fine to ask for a little help on the mental health front. We shouldn't stigmatize it. Hopefully when I come out the other side, I'll be a bit happier and a bit more focused. Maybe I'll return to updating this regularly, who knows?

Hang in there, be healthy, and take care!