Erin Writes

JUST CALL ME BROOKE LAUNDERVILLE I mean actually don't, I like the Lundervilles a whole lot, even the ones that aren't my darling son, but I did get divorced, I'm Brooke Abbey now but what I'm trying to say is YAY I CAN DO LAUNDRY

So the GoFundMe thing worked out for me! It funded the purchase of both a fancy washer/dryer combo that is at a height I can access without pain, and a fancy (but tiny) drawer dishwasher that I can use either standing or sitting without bending and thus also without pain. There were some delivery hiccoughs, like, the washer got here two months late, but at this point that's a sorrow for Past Brooke and I have moved on to the phase where I wash SO MANY THINGS.

Hiccoughs is absolutely not how Canadians spell hiccups, but I picked up the affectation from god knows where and it's been long enough that I can't bring myself to spell it the normal way. Likewise with liquorice. Okay back to laundry.

Even on shitty, shitty pain days it's not too hard to start a load of laundry, and I don't have to do the math on whether I will have the energy to change the laundry - in the past when I wasn't sure, I would err on the side of not doing laundry, because playing Mildew Or Pain is a terrible party game. But with the combo machine, I load it, press a button, and boop, that's it, I don't have to think about it again until I unload it at my leisure when I have the energy again. (Or more likely don't; Greg loves sorting laundry and does it to wind down while I read the bedtime story.) Meanwhile it turns out that when it doesn't hurt to do the dishes, I'm the kind of person who does the dishes every single day. Or I am now, anyway. I mean it didn't hurt to do the dishes in my 20s and hahaha no, I absolutely did not keep on top of them anyway. But either I've matured or being grateful to be able to do them at all is motivating, or possibly just I'm avoiding the disappointed pronouncement of "Mama, you should really do the dishes" from Greg? Anyway, I see the bottom of the sink on the regular now and it's weird but good.

Health has been... complicated?

Still on the keto diet. I feel like I'm going to crack within the year and go back to my normal diet, 50% candy and 50% cucumber, because WOW do I miss desserts and restaurants and life is short, but carrying on for now in the face of my annoyingly fantastic liver lab results. Siiiigh. T&T had a sale on frozen precooked duck last week and that's helping stretch out my willpower.

Migraine is the same as ever, but I'm going to be trying a new procedure that might help with fatigue, stellate ganglion block. Which is kind of scary and invasive, it involves an injection deep into my neck, dodging the jugular and carotid and the thyroid and my lungs, so uh, hold still please? (Also they use ultrasound to see what they are doing, so it's a little less dicy than that makes it sound.) It's had great results in long covid and chronic fatigue, which overlap significantly with what migraine does to me. Actually I think I qualify for both those diagnoses, I just haven't bothered to formally get diagnosed because what would it change about my treatment: nothing, that's what. ANYWAY. First one is on Monday, then repeat in two weeks on the other side of the neck, then decide if it's doing anything or not, and see how long it lasts if so. (Despite the local anaesthetic they use wearing off in a few hours, it has lasting effects of weeks to months. Other kinds of nerve block work like that too, nerves are wacky.) So why would a nerve block in your neck do anything about fatigue, you ask? Aren't nerve blocks usually used for pain directly caused by that nerve? GREAT QUESTION, THEY USUALLY ARE! No one knows why this would affect non-pain symptoms. But it seems to in a lot of people. Something something sympathetic nervous system something something fight or flight something something. I mean the papers say "putative mechanism" and "it is generally hypothesized that" instead of the something-somethings, but lol they dunno. The doctor who is going to repeatedly stab my neck is suspiciously handsome AND quite pale AND has a strong romance-language accent, so... probably a vampire. Well, there's a doctor shortage, what are you gonna do.

My eyes have decided to join my liver and my head in the squeaky wheel department, and thus one of my retinas is bleeding. Not enough to affect my eyesight much so far, just an artful spray of blood around a blocked side vein (the picture was quite pretty!) so it's in the "we'll just keep checking every few months" bucket for now. My pupils have had dilating drops 3 times in the last month and it's a guaranteed ticket to migraine jail for days afterwards, which is better than sudden blindness but that's about all I can say for it. I did get to have a eye angiogram, though, which involves getting fluorescent yellow dye by IV, which meant days of NEON YELLOW PEE, and that was pretty amazing. You never saw such a cheerful toilet in your life, it was genuinely uplifting. Next up are some less colourful tests (I mean, I assume the MRI machine is still off-white; I know my regular ophthalmologist's diagnostic machines definitely are, and I have to specify regular because I have multiple ophthalmologists now, although actually my retinal specialist also only has beige and off-white machines, so I guess I didn't need to specify after all) to see if this is caused by glaucoma or caused by oops you had a stroke or just caused by We Don't Know And It's Weird Because You're Young-ish So It Could Happen Again Any Ol' Time, Call Us If You Go Blind. Very conflicted on which of those to hope for, so I'm lucky that I don't actually have any control over which one it is.

Okay that last sentence taxed my RELENTLESS CHEER powers quite a bit, but I'm going with it. I am excited I get a head MRI out of it! It's pretty clear my migraine is, y'know, migraine, but when your head has been hurting as badly and as long as mine has, it's reassuring if someone can take a look from time to time to make sure that your head isn't full of demons or crabs or a tumour the size of a grapefruit or an actual grapefruit that took a serious wrong turn. It's getting on to ten years since my migraine went chronic, so it's about that long since the last sets of imaging. There could be crabs now! But probably not because that's not a thing. Unless...?

My final health woe is I hurt my thumb playing too much Katamari Damacy. I regret nothing. Plus kind of refreshing to have a health problem I can just solve with an ice pack.

Chubblies are out and all my recent medical appointments have meant I have gotten to see a LOT of blossoms this year, which is pretty great. Greg and I even went to the aquarium this week for a combined chubblies + EELS day out, and it was splendid. I should pick a different word because the aquarium now no longer has Splendid Garden Eels, splendid is the one eel we did not see, but it was pretty splendid anyway. The octopus was plastered to the glass! Next to a sign saying "you might need to be a detective to find the octopus!" Not today, sign, not today. The sloth was active and hanging out at eye level! It looked at me! I got a photo, because when a sloth looks at you, you have plennnnnty of time to get out your phone. (Why does an aquarium have sloths? I don't know, but it does, and sloths are great.)