Laughter Through Tears

In the midst of my carpal tunnel and trigger finger both flaring up (my fault, for playing too much Wylde Flowers on the weekend), it's fun to discover that my topical painkiller might be interfering with my thyroid test results.

Love this. Love the juggling act. Love to have three thousand balls in the air at all times, which represent all or my organs and tissues and conditions and prescriptions and specialists. Love to be able to think about everything *except* the work I want to be doing right now.

My knee's been twinging a lot this week. This afternoon, I also had a migraine. Relatively mild, but it shook me because it's been a while. And because I had planned to work in the afternoon and cook in the evening, but I'm not up to either of those.

I caved and now I have an appointment to the same doctor who treated my wrist (a year and a half ago) to deal with the trigger finger in my left hand.

And blood tests, but it's probably not the arthritis.

The specialist appointment went... fairly well. She took my history and did some weird neuro-ish physical exam stuff (reflexes + other things that I'm not familiar with). She also replaced my triptan with another one from the same family which should hopefully kick in more quickly. She seems wary of the side effects of preventative treatments and was weighing them against how disabling my migraines are, in terms of work days lost. Since I typically lose half a day per episode, and I've been getting 2-3 episodes a month... I guess that falls on the side of "not quite disabling enough".

Weird how often that happens to me. Makes me feel like I'm the buck being passed, so to speak.

The general weakness and malaise that I feel after a migraine episode might be down to side effects from the triptan, which means that there's a healthy chance that it will be less severe with the new med. Fingers crossed.

Got an appointment with my endo tomorrow. Hopefully, he will suggest something that can help with me feeling like my brain is melting. I had plans to work today but my brain is just mush, and my blood tests don't look happy, either.

I don't enjoy being on 10 different medications at 37, but it's better than the alternative.

i was making real progress with my tendonitis and getting back to writing but I must have pushed too hard too fast because last night my right wrist started hurting pretty bad and it still hurts today. i used a painkiller cream and an ice pack but they only helped a little temporarily. I think the real fix is to take another several days' stretch of zero computer use. which i hate. i was finally making a little progress and now this on top of a minor family crisis. it's just a really bad combination at a bad time.

gonna skip pilates tomorrow. not feeling up to it.

Today was a long day. Good, but long, and very tiring.

I went out to pick up a coffee in the morning and that (and my bad memory) ended up making me late for my ERG appointment. The ERG is an annoying and slightly gross eye exam that I get for side effect reasons, about once a year. And it requires eye drops, so when I got out of the test I could barely see and sunlight bothered me even more than normal. Yeah, it wasn't quite cloudy enough for my taste.

I made my way back home and managed to get some rest and some lunch -- and to wait out my pupil dilation. Once I was sufficiently rested, I headed out to one of the university libraries. They're operating on a program where you book seats in advance so that they can make sure they don't go over the legal limit for how many people can "congregate" in a closed space. And they assign desks to make sure social distancing is in effect.

Being outside all day is still super weird and a little anxiety-inducing. But I had the option to work somewhere outside of home, and I snatched it up. I might be able to book another afternoon this week, I hope, because I was *so* productive.

This morning I had to reset the password on my migraine app, which tracks my sleep patterns. When I ran a search on Gmail (so that I could tag all the notifications and not lose them), I discovered that back in 2015, I emailed myself a bunch of "migraine logs". This was back at my old, bad job -- when the headaches first started getting really bad.

I'm both more and less smart than I thought. I started tracking them back then, but then stopped and didn't start again until 2019. And what's more, I only recently started doing it in one, consistent place -- as opposed to spreading it around wherever I write about my day, which is at least three or four different places, now.

I don't know why Grammarly insists that this entry sounds "friendly, optimistic and confident".

Wednesday: summer. Friday? winter. Next Sunday, summer again. Ah, spring.

Today I spent part of the morning going through my box of meds and comparing it to what's on my 3-month scripts, to see what I'm short of and what I have extra. Then I took my annotated list to the pharmacy, where the pharmacist was remarkably patient with these shenanigans. I told myself that I was going to be good, but I decided to reward myself with iced coffee all the same. Especially given how nice and sunny it was, and the fact that it was steadily inching closer to lunchtime.

I have some more tests and things lined up, but I'm also doing a little self-imposed "writing retreat" next week, so there's something to look forward to.

( Covid stuff )

We live in uncertain times.

I got a phone call today and I have a date for the medical committee.