not to 1055

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One of those medical assessment posts for my glitchy memory.

Established with cardiology yesterday. I had a cardiologist a couple years before and after my radio ablation for SVT back in 2000, but insurance changes flipped me to another network, and I'm just now establishing again after the May hospitalization for uncontrollable blood pressure breakout. I am fabulous right now, so I don't have to go back until next year, but at least now I have direct call waiting and email to specialist if I need one. I think my primary is relieved.

Ramping slowly back up to 300mg 3x a day on the gabapentin per neurologist, again. This is the third time I'm trying. First time (winter 2017) went up too fast and turned into lethargic zombie. Second time (May 2018) coincided with amlodipine and got significant leg swelling, plus the amlodipine wrecked my diabetes. This time it's slow and the only med being changed. So far I'm sleeping better and getting up easier, no weight gain or fluid retention that I can tell. Being commanded to watch blood pressure after stopping amlodipine, have been able to solidly correlate pain level to blood pressure since I also ramped down the gabapentin and now ramping back up. It's one thing to say pain causes high blood pressure, it's another to actually see it on paper. Clearly I need to stay on pain management, now that I'm below the 140/90 target again. I'm still on toprol, of course, but my pain levels easily override control when I try to tough things out and power through, like I was brought up to do through my childhood. Looking back, I can see that powering through probably set me back through much of my adult life, as I gritted my teeth and held on through college and jobs and trying to be a good parent for kids in school. The band president year was pretty rough. I loved it, though, and I don't regret it. Stuff like that. But yeah, I fought hard to stay as normal as possible in between month or year long stretches of complete disability and severe immobility.

Also, the stenosis in my neck is bad enough now that even slightly turning my head either direction sends shooting pains down shoulders (so fun in traffic!), and if there is really less wiggle room in there, maybe it's time to move past chiropractor. It was a lifesaver over the last decade as I was going through core strength in physical therapy, but all that is stabilized now and I rarely need adjustments any more. I knew this would be part of Plan C, moving on to the meds.

Can Neck Manipulation Relieve Spinal Stenosis?

I'll still need ASTYM maintenance or I'll freeze up solid, but you can't ASTYM a nerve trunk, lol. The thought made me giggle. There's a special kind of humor in pain lifestyle.

There is also irony, like slamming through a week long tweetfest one week before carpal tunnel surgery. 😂 I have really been enjoying #SharknadoWeek on Syfy, but barely able to hang onto anything because of it, like flipping a spoonful of yogurt on my good blouse, casually tossing my phone into a wet sink, I won't even bring up keys. Too late. But yeah, it's crucial to always close the toilet around a person like me in the house. Anything could go anywhere at any time if my hands even pretend to touch something. You'd laugh if you could see how klutzy I am trying to moderate on a game server. Just trying to type a short command under pressure is hilarious when the player has one of those long names spelled weird with caps and dashes and extra x's sprinkled around.

Let's see, what else. Allergies are so bad right now that I've tripled my zyrtec and benadryl, ears feel like I'm underwater or flying 20K feet, throat is on fire and sore to swallow. I'm mostly fine inside my house. We have 3 hepas now and I'm so stringent on laundry coming in that most of it stops at the door, but even just driving into town in a climate controlled car with air filters has me swimming in snot. I was chunking more antihistamines in traffic yesterday only 15 minutes from my house. Between all the mowing and the rains and wind now in a high humidity region, I am breathing particulate soup everywhere I go.

Is this boring? I feel boring. No one ever talks about the conspiracy scenes in Sherlock. Oh, yeah, the fan theories, but you know, like the background scenes and stuff... Here, lemme distract you from that before you actually think or something.

The Cases Are Fake: A Theory That Totally Changes Sherlock

Except that all falls apart in season four, when we find out it wasn't Mycroft...

Ok, I'll give you a nibble. Like the clock scene when Moriarty is giving the raspberry in the air sending a text off to Mycroft. The time is 10:55. Check this out, from What are police codes? What is the meaning of the police code 1055?

10–55 means “dead person” or “coroners case.” This would be the ten code used on a police radio when an officer arrives on the scene and finds something dead. Although the code is meant to describe dead people it is often used to describe other dead things like a dead car battery, a dead radio, or dead animal.

Yeah, I know that's a stretch because that's a U.S. code, but still fun to think about. I could make a whole list, though. I still say the filming was brilliant, whether it was purposeful or not.

And because I free associate right off the page, I wound up here

The Kiss of Judice: The Constitution Betrayed - A Coroner's Inquest and Report, Vol.1

Great, now I need another video so I can escape.

august

click pic if you'd like to download full size

A lot of people think stuff like that field across the road from my house looks messy. I think it looks beautiful. It's not exactly native prairie, but at least it's fairly indigenous nowadays since it's been neglected so long.

I finally wrapped my head around school shopping. I've decided that this year I need to fix up my bug out bag with a mobile med kit in one of those plastic pencil boxes (I'm always needing alcohol wipes and latex free bandaids or a nail clipper), a mobile post office (cards, stamps, address labels, birthday confetti, address book, colored pens), and possibly several other organized kits. It's silly being caught flatfooted so often. I thought about mailing out a birthday card to my sister 3 different times, and I finally sent it off today and it's going to be late. Anyway, I've also been anxiously checking for my college to show up in the back to school stuff, and there we go, today there was suddenly a whole bunch. And of course, Bunny has corrupted me, I found adult sized Shopkins sox, so I'm ready for back to school now.

I saw my neurologist today for 6 month follow up. I've been going every 6 months for several years. I've had 2 full needle workups making sure my nervous system is still working ok, and he coaches me into physical therapy and meds here and there. He's rather insisting that I try to ramp back up and hold at 300 mg of gabapentin 3x a day again. (I've tried it 3 times now, I keep coming back down to 200 3x.) The ultimate goal is to keep me moving as much as possible, particularly now that I have 'frozen shoulder' coming on, which is when the entire shoulder area gets so difficult to lift that you finally just can't, and the muscles 'freeze' up as they harden with scar tissue. Between the ancient car accident and subsequent years of fibromyalgia, and now arthritis starting to show up with the documented nerve impingement, I'm on my way to losing that arm if I don't keep using it as much as I possibly can. The last round of therapy last spring was brutal, but I am still retaining full range of motion even though the pain is pretty sharp and it's hard to keep moving through it. And by sharp I mean like someone stabbing me hard with a long needle into the nerve that runs over the top of my shoulder. I've been working on this arm since 2015. It was so bad in 2015 that I could barely use that arm at all, and I was close to losing the use of my fingers. I remember my mom's arms and hands finally just curling up until her hands were just fists. Aging doesn't have to be that horrible, but it takes a bit of effort to slow that down if you've got aggressive illnesses like diabetes and/or arthritis.

I'm already hearing stories about knee surgeries, lol. Scott's coworker said whatever I do, do NOT skip the pain med coming off the anesthesia. He said that was about the worst pain he ever went through till the med could kick in again. Personally, I've been through so much pain I kinda doubt I would think it's the worst, but I sincerely don't want to feel it, no.

Today's blood pressure in the office was 151/94, so it's going up again, and obviously both pain and diet related. Even with cutting calories, I'm still getting too much salt. I totally felt that yesterday. I ate an ounce of Cabot seriously sharp cheddar with a normal portion of bite sized Tostitos corn chips and wowzers, talk about a nasty headache. I'm getting so salt sensitive it's unbelievable. I started looking up diets for hypertension and ran into the DASH diet, which is part monitored fasting and mostly very restricted processed animal proteins and lots more fruits and veg. Since my diabetes is already well controlled through diet, now I've gotta control sodium. I obviously can't eat the amount of grains that DASH recommends (too carby), and I can't do the nuts and legumes (allergies), but I can definitely eat more veggies and substitute yogurt for cheese. I'm also going to cautiously try some fasting, but more like how you calorie restrict before a digestive system procedure and you have to empty your whole gut. They make sure you still get 500 calories of clear liquid, but if I do that I'll have to be smart about it, because it can get dangerous on a busy day. I'm not very good at powering through a headache, and I tend to get goofy and make poor decisions anyway, so I'll save that for days nothing is going on.

Oopsie, got lost in youtube. Time to move along.

pinkscape

click for texture pack

Pretty sure I've done that pic before. One of these days...

So yay, I was told to stop taking the amlodipine! 😁 24 hours is making such a difference already. Don't know yet if blood pressure probation is over now or what, go back in next week for a recheck.

I'm thinking about doing a Farscape marathon while my people are on vaca. Making a list this week for my kind of goodies so I can live on salads, nachos, eggs, and cheese while I have the house to myself. I'm going to cook as little as possible and let my brain fall out.

super pinky

Nearly 4 years later, I suddenly notice I can put more on my mobile. I fixed up both Pinky blogs a bit, probably be adding more soon. Much more shows up beneath posts now.

Had one of those sudden diversion weeks, no laptop for several days, and now I feel outrageously behind in everything. Which is weird because I'm suddenly getting so much done again.

STOP DROP AND ROLL FOR MAJOR DIVERSION INTO STUFFS

Ok, I'm back. Power point on stuffs-

• More LittleLexx.net discussion about nameserver updates and which domain registry to use.
• Currently behind posting last weekend's #latenightmovie chat and there's one tonight, so that's piling up, lol.
• Started a super cool moc wither fight storyboard post, need to pick up where I left off and get that out.
• Game server party pix post from the end of May needs to get done.
• Not even going to list real life stuff.

The hospital stuff from the other day is best sifted down to powering through poor pain management 4 days ago till I set off an outrageous breakout blood pressure that had me almost too delirious to call 9-1-1. It happened in the shower, and I can tell you from experience that the 5 minutes you might spend trying to decide whether to get on the phone for rescue or put underwear on first can be really fuzzy, I can barely remember it. BP was 228/121 on their arrival, and the nitro helped only about 20 minutes before it broke over 200 again. Got a 12-lead, showed a blip so they gave me a shot to dilate my veins, got worse, another 12-lead and the fastest CT I've ever been rushed through, another 12-lead, and bam, up to the 4th floor. From there it was overnight fasting for stress test imaging, and THAT stuff is also supposed to dilate veins and bring blood pressure right down. Mine was only down to 187/102 after all that previous stuff, and when it held steady as a rock out of spite, the entire room went silent. They almost never see that happen. After that was additional meds and another overnight monitor, and finally down enough to go home.

So I'm on double my regular BP med plus another BP med that is double what I used to add during breakout episodes in the past, and with nothing else warranting action presenting during testing and monitoring, I was given the all-clear. If they'd seen anything, I would've been sent to surgery immediately. During my stay I had two shots in my stomach, I think for precautionary blood thinner, several IV pushes and cups of pills, some of it precautionary. I can't even imagine what might've happened if I hadn't made the call. I had no idea my blood pressure was so high, didn't even feel that. All I felt was the initial pain stab and then utter delirium. I could have wound up with a major stroke or even a heart attack just from runaway blood pressure over a nasty pain spike. The veins around my heart were in danger of becoming inflamed or developing clots from the pressure. I've had a number of breakouts that have been ER monitored, but I'd always been sent home after 4-6 hours. Not this time.

Goal now is solid pain management, so the gabapentin doses are going back up. I missed a physical therapy appointment during all that, and since I've been getting extreme deep tissue shred and massage on shoulder and all around shoulder blade, that nerve center was definitely on full blast. All it took was one move to spike some really nasty pain and set all that crazy blood pressure off, and naturally I should be on muscle relaxers and nsaids and possibly even a steroid, but my poor body is so med maxed out I just can't keep that up any more. I'll need to finish out my therapy appointments light, and no more power shopping the groceries and hauling all that in myself during the summer heat. I'm also relieved of after school kid duty for the summer, so I need to get back on taking daily naps, or at least taking an hour off to lay down. I'm going to push my carpal tunnel surgery further out, there is no way they'll use anesthesia until I can control this on my own for a few weeks.

The rest is up to me. I'm tightening up an already pretty focused diet because I've gotten slack. I had made the most beautiful homemade coffee ice cream. Got home and threw it out. Ice cream isn't worth that kind of suffering and cost. Back to the diabetic diet combined with cardio diet, 30 minutes of exercise every day, and monitored caloric intake.

To all those memes going around facebook that say chillax and live your life because we all die in the end- yeah, you can choose to coast out really miserable at the end. If I had lived that belief I'd already be dead several times at an early age, and coming back from early immobility sucked bad enough. That's a bunch of crap and a lie. They want you to die lining their pockets with the tiny little bit of money you've barely got. There are CEOs making 6 figure salaries talking about food dyes and sugar and how to make profits and get their raises while people in poverty eat and drink themselves into a hellish misery. Do they care that their products do that? No. I haven't had a real autoimmune flare up in at least 3-4 years now, longest I've ever gone, and this blood pressure thing could have easily kicked off into an autoimmune response sparking pericarditis. That would have sucked so bad.

I think what bothers me most is my sleeves feeling tighter...

Super Pinky can't happen on a 12-lead.