Tag Archives: health

head cold

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This is day nine of a grinding summer cold. Normally I don’t, or am not able to, keep track of such things, but I happen to remember this one because I woke up with it on the day of my Primary Care appointment. She, Trecia, said that viruses have to run their course, which I knew, but I felt bad for her having to explain that a dozen times a day.

We live in a society where you’re not allowed to stay home, and you’re not allowed to go out sick either. People are pissed at you either way, so lots of us turn to doctors and urgent care for the answer. Because the choice is, stay home a few days until you’re not contagious, or go to work and school sick. Everybody faces this sooner or later, including you, so cut people some slack.

Yes, some people are slackers and malingerers, but there’s no way of telling for sure who, so this is something we have to live with. Yanno, like colds.

This is actually my second cold this year, the first having happened right after Horton’s arrival. It seems odd, because I normally only catch one cold a year, or none. This cold, Zor, the live-at-home spawn, dragged home in the second week of her new job. It involves a carousel of symptoms that began with a headache and an exceptionally sore throat that made my ears itch, and has added the usual symptoms–sinus pain, drainage, sneezing, coughing, fever. All intermittent, except the sinus pain. I finally took a forbidden decongestant, and am afraid to check my blood pressure.

I have also had ear pain, mostly in the morning. I suspect Horton’s high pressure blows mucous back into my head and into my ears.

This cold has made me completely self-absorbed. I find myself literally pretending to care about other people. I suppose that might mean I care enough to pretend, but more likely I just care enough about me to not want to napalm my relationships.

School started this week. I feel very sorry for myself trying to do JavaScript while strangling on phlegm. Thank goodness it is an online class, because every time I cough or sneeze I pee a little. Even though I have set a timer to visit the facilities every half hour, I still find it necessary to cover my desk chair with a hefty bag, and leaving the house is a roll of some very weighted dice. Not that I feel like going anywhere, but as I mentioned earlier, no one is allowed to stay home when they’re sick. I still have to taxi Zor, and run errands, and etc.

So until I can breathe again, I hope everyone has a good idea.

health and school, is there anything else?

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Way back in, what, May? When I first got Horton, I caught a cold. It was relatively minor as colds go, and was mostly a PITA because it made adjusting to Horton harder. On the third day of it or so, I pulled a muscle in my back coughing. It hurt for a day or so and quit.

Then T the CNP twiddled my medications (all of them it seems like) and suddenly that same muscle started hurting again.

I was supposed to wait a month and then go in for blood work. I did that two Wednesdays ago. Still no word on the results, but I have gone back off the statin on my own because I am crippled. It hurts to change positions at all, in any direction. It hurts to climb steps. It hurts to lie down, and it hurts to get up. It hurts to get dressed, and it hurts to undress. I want to whine and cry constantly. Hell, I probably do whine and cry constantly. I’m doing it now, right?

If I don’t hear from them about the results by Monday, I’m calling.

This pain thing is made worse by the fact that Mr Moth hurt his shoulder, and now we are both lamed up.

Meanwhile, on the school front, and also filed under People Who Won’t Give Me the Information I Need To Get On With My Life, my financial aid was terminated for Fall term because I had maxed it out. But, come to find out, they were still using my allowance from my first degree in Graphic Design. So I had to go in and get a new degree form from the financial aid office and carry it to the records office, who was supposed to fill it out and send it back to financial aid. Of course they didn’t do that until I called and nagged. So ten days later the financial aid office told me they had received the form and processed it, but it still needed to be entered into the system.

Another ten days later, it still isn’t showing up in Web Advisor so I can’t accept the aid, and it won’t be credited to my account. So I have to call some more. (Note to self, added to my Monday to-do list.)

Mind you, I’m not sure I’m able to go or want to go…but I don’t want the option to be taken away by failure of the school to process effin paperwork. I want to make that decision myself.

soldiering on with horton

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Sleeping with Horton is no picnic, but it’s not a constant struggle anymore. Or perhaps I’ve just got more used to this level of struggle. Nothing epic happens in any given night, just annoyances that seem relatively minor, mostly related to mask leaks.

I’m not sure if the mask leaks because my face is fat, or because my head is fat and the headgear rides up, or because my pressure is high. My guess is a combination of all three, but with an emphasis on the headgear riding up. I think next time I get headgear I will ask about the larger size.

The sites all say that having the mask on too tight makes leaks worse, but I started loose and gradually tightened until the leaks stopped. Well, they stopped in that there are no leaks when I first put on the mask. Then, at some point during the night, the shenanigans begin (usually). Whistling, burping, farting. Joy.

So an example of an, oh, lets call it a micro-disturbance, is, the mask shifts and starts to whistle. Kelly thinks it’s calling her, so she jumps on the bed and sniffs my face. I try to pet her, and accidentally pet Oliver, who claws me.

Yes, I know I could kick all the animals out of the bedroom, but if you know me at all, you know that isn’t going to happen. Overall, I sleep better with them in the room. Hopefully they will get used to Horton eventually…and by they I mean Kelly. He doesn’t bother anyone else, although once or twice Cobie has awakened me walking under the hose. He’s actually very good about ducking and going under the hose and not just ramming through; he was trained on Xbox controller cords.

Yesterday I read (somewhere, wish I could remember where to give credit) that if your mask springs a leak in the night, pull it completely off your face so the seal can reinflate, and then reposition it. I had reservations about this. For one thing, MyAir takes off points for mask removal, and I care ridiculously about getting good grades on MyAir. And for another thing, I have the thing cranked so tight, it’s quite difficult to pull the mask completely away from my face. But I tried it, along with pulling the headgear back down, and it seemed to help.

Waking up to adjust kind of irritates me, though…but my brain is working better so I suppose it’s all worth it. I almost beat my husband at Words With Friends yesterday. Almost.

I am so looking forward to the day when sleep in general and Adventures With Horton don’t dominate my thoughts. This stuff is geting teejus even to me. But until that day comes, have a good idea!

thankful thursday – a good night

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With thanks to Whee Kelly Doll, last night made up for yesterday’s cup o’ suck soup.  She laid right up against my spine, like Hannah used to do, and the warmth from her kept my back from hurting while the fan kept the rest of me from being a sweaty mess.  I have often wished Cobie would do this; his spine is at least as long as mine, but he doesn’t cuddle often.  Kelly used to cuddle more, but she usually prefers some nook, like the backs of my knees or my armpit.

Horton woke me up a couple of times farting, and I woke up once because I was coughing and strangling on snot, but I ate a mint and was eventually able to go back to sleep and rack up almost eight hours total.  That’s much better than yesterday’s barely five.  Yesterday I had to get up early and go see the CNP, which accounted for the suck.  Also I fasted and didn’t need to.

I may go into what else sucked, but for now it’s thankful thursday.

So, Horton.  He’s manufactured by ResMed, and late last week I finally signed up for this thing called MyAir.  It turns out, Horton is a snitch, and now sends my nightly sleep report directly to ResMed, where I can see it online.  He hasn’t yet reported in for last night, so when I sign in I see this from the night before:

Yes, Horton gives me a grade.  And if I scroll down, I get this:

From there I can click on each category and see more details.

When I first signed up, Horton had reported nothing, so apparently this service is voluntary.  No one even told me about it.  I discovered while exploring Horton’s menus.  It makes me a little uneasy, but I’m going to stay signed up, at least for now.  If I decide later I don’t want snitched on, I can always block him at the router.  For now, until my appointment with the pulmonologist who can give me more details, the reports interest me.  If anyone really wanted to spy on anything that matters about me, they wouldn’t wait around for me to be diagnosed with sleep apnea and plant a cpap spy, they’d use some less conditional technology like satellites, drones, or etc..

Or they’d read my blog.

oh joy a cold

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And now I have a cold.

It isn’t a bad cold.  It’s just a cold.  It has annoyingly run through my family one person at a time with a delay of weeks in between victims, and now apparently it is my turn.

You couldn’t hit me, stupid freekin cold, during the weeks and weeks I was waiting on the cpap.  No.

The RT at the HME company warned told me that many people think they won’t be able to wear their mask when they catch a cold, but most find that they can, and in fact the humidity provided by the machine actually helps nasal stuffiness.  And that much is true.  However, the pressure of the mask on my sinuses…ungood.  Very ungood.  Even for a minor cold such as this, ugh.

I am feeling very sorry for myself, in an, “I have felt like crap for so damn long, and adjusting to this machine is very difficult, and it is utterly unfair that I should feel worse and the adjustment should be made even harder,” sort of way.

Yes, I am a grownup.  I am aware that life is not fair.  I am aware that it could be worse.  I am aware that other people have worse problems.  (Technically, I have worse problems, and besides, has the whole, it could be worse thing ever made anyone feel better, ever?  Being reminded of the rampant suffering of others in the world has never made me feel better, that’s for sure.

None of that makes it easier to sleep in a mask that hurts.  I took the thing off in my sleep partway through the night, and put it back on this morning after I got up to tinkle.  It registered six point ? hours, but I have no way of knowing whether it counted the second session or both.

This stuff be hard.  I wish I were not too sensitive to live.  I am on my entire family’s nerves because I am ticked off all the time.  I am on my own nerves.  If I’m on yours, I apologize, but don’t really know what to do to stop.

crowned

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My temporary crown is on there.  They told me to avoid hard, crunchy, or sticky.  I replied that I have been watching that tooth flake away for years, and have been avoiding hard, crunchy, and sticky for a very long time.  I can do it a while longer.  

The temp is far too white, considering the tobacco and coffee my other teeth have survived.  Hopefully the permanent crown will be not quite as white.  What it will be is wider; they’re going to fill in a gap so my front uppers will present an uninterrupted line.  My teeth will not be picture perfect, but they will look…normal.  They filled in the chip on my left front incisor when they did fillings last time, and I am still startled when I look in a mirror.

So next trip, in June, I will be getting the permanent crown installed and some more fillings.  Dr A didn’t say how many fillings.  What she said was, “I’ll do as many as I can until we run out of time.”  I take this to mean they no longer feel the need to baby me along.  And it’s not as though I am trying to ironman it out, either.  I’m ok.  I had some very faint touchiness high in the gum, but I didn’t even feel the need to take ibuprofen for it.  I worried Horton might aggravate that, but no.  I could go back today if they wanted me to.

Instead I am working on a list that I hope to develop into a daily routine that will enable me to get things done this summer.  I lost most of last summer to dizzy spells and weakness, and the summer before that I spent lying around exhausted.  I thought that was because I was recovering from Portfolio Review and graduation, but I’m thinking that wasn’t it.  Or not all of it.

I live in hope that someday I will have things to share besides health updates and weather.  Speaking of which…

It’s cool enough today to turn the air conditioning off and leave the door open so dogs can come and go at will for a while.  They’re happy, so I’m happy. 

If Tyrion the Hammister wakes up, he’s going to be unhappy, because his cage is atrocious.  He still hates being handled, sigh.

Horton, days two, three, and four

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So by Day Two, I have concluded Horton (the bilevel cpap) is like having a baby.  You’re already exhausted from the pregnancy/apnea, and then you’re all excited until you realize you now have this thing in your face making smells and noises and waking you up repeatedly throughout the night.

Part of the problem is I have an excruciatingly high level (23) and the tech/therapist told me I am gonna leak regardless.  I get about two hours of sleep before the razzberry sounds against my cheeks and/or air blowing into my eyeballs wakes me up, at which point I discover the mask has shifted.  I just can’t seem to find the right level of tightness.  Too tight causes leaks (and is uncomfortable besides).  Too loose lets the mask drift which allows leaks.  I half wonder if I could polident the sucker into place.

I fiddled with some settings last night.  I turned the temperature down on the heater to 78°F, and the humidity down to 1, whatever that is.  I didn’t like trying to breathe tropical air.  The down side is, I woke up with the worst cottonmouth of my life, my cheeks were all stuck to my teeth and gums, and I really wanted a drink but was too tired/lazy to climb the dog gate to go get one.  I may have to start taking water to bed with me.  That would mean cleaning space on the dresser to put water.  That room really needs de-cluttered.

Day Two’s results are…I feel less dead than yesterday, a little headachey when I first got up, but that faded almost immediately.  I’m not sure how I feel compared to before that. 

(B.H.?  Before Horton?)

I also had some gas pains.  Actual pains.  I have never had gas pains in my life except post-caesarean.  So there’s another way Horton is like having a baby.

On the up side, Mr Moth said I seem (brighter? sharper? some tactful way of saying smarter) than normal.  I said, I didn’t know I seemed dumb.  I mean, I know I am dumb, I just didn’t know everyone could tell.  He replied, it had happened so gradually he didn’t actually notice until it subsided.

I asked him to continue to let me know if he notices anything else in the future because, yanno…hope.

Day Three:  I had to get up early (for me) and attend Zor’s (the at-home spawn and my youngest) college graduation.  Go, Zor!  The first sleep report said I used the machine for five hours.  I thought I was going to die climbing the stairs to a seat at the auditorium, but that might have been because I skipped all medication that might make me have to pee more until I got home.  Then when I came home, I took those pills and went back to bed, but only for forty minutes.  Apparently taking all those pills on an empty stomach was a huge mistake because I developed heartburn like I have not had–say it with me–since having a baby.  That sleep report claimed forty minutes of use.  I got up, had a drink, ate some chips, and went back to bed for another reported five-ish hours.  These hours were uninterrupted, because I cranked that mask down so freaking tight my face begged for mercy.  Apparently there’s a tiredness zone where you no longer care if a hunk of plastic is cookie-cuttering your head.

I went back to bed as soon as the dishwasher finished, around one-ish a.m..  Before I went, I used some of Cobie’s witch hazel to clean my face, because I read that mask slippage may be caused by skin oil.  I normally don’t wash my face at bedtime unless I’ve worn makeup, which is to say, almost never.  But witch hazel is cheap, and I don’t want anyone to say I haven’t given Project Horton a genuine effort.

I also read that my hair might be causing slippage.  I think manufacturers need to make headgear that can accommodate hair, because I am not going to shave my head or grow a ponytail.  Ponytails give me headaches.

Day Four:  Ten hours, no leaks until the very end, and only woke up once to tinkle.  I still feel droggy, though I’m not yet fully outside my morning coffee.  Also I discovered when I broke my medication routine on Day Three, I completely forgot to take the Victoza (injectable).   That probably contributes at least somewhat to me feeling less than ideal, although I have not checked my BG.  I have also not been checking my BP like I should.  That is allegedly one of the first things that responds to CPAP therapy, so I should start checking it.

And that brings me up to today.  I know none of this is fascinating to anyone, and I am just as obnoxious about posting boring stuff as a new mother, but this is what is eating my brain these days.

Things going on in the background include my attempts to prioritize my creative endeavors so that I can actually accomplish something instead of spending the entire summer wallowing in overwhelm, and catching up on some housework.  Well, not catching up.  I’m never going to catch up.

Once I figure out my priorities, I can hopefully establish a routine.

Oh, and I started reading a book.

That’s kind of huge.  I just can’t express the depth of actual grief I feel when I think about never really reading again.

CPAP Day One

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Yesterday, after a few hiccups and a major meltdown on my part, I picked up my Xpap machine.  I named him Horton, and warned everyone here that it is ok for me to make elephant jokes about the machine, but it is a crime punishable by slow death to make any remarks that might be even remotely construed as comparing me to an elephant.

I do not like Horton so far.  Or, more accurately, I don’t like the mask.  It’s the same mask they put on me during the titration study, and it presses too hard across the bridge of my nose and the adjacent cheekbones, it rides up, and then it leaks into my eyes.  I told the therapist this, but she insists it is the best one for me because I am a mouth-breather.  Well this mask should soon break me of that, since if my lips part company even briefly, the sheer force of air blows my lips and cheeks out so that I probably look like a floppy-flewed dog with its head out an airplane cockpit.  That wakes me up with a quickness.  So do the leaks, especially when they make flatulent noises against my face.

If I were at all classy or refined, I suppose I would call those sounds razzberries.  I hate them too much to bother with pretending to be refined, however.  I’m overly sensitive to touch and sound already, and having that sensation-and-noise in my face just hisses me off.

After an eternity or three, Mr Moth left for work and I turned on the television.  The bedroom TV has never served any purpose other than to let me watch school closings in winter without getting up, and since I’ve been able to get closings via text, I don’t even use it for that; it’s just a big clunky dust magnet.  But I turned it on, just loud enough for me to hear it, not loud enough for me to understand anything said, and afterwards I sort of slept, a little.

In between, I dreamed.  Wow.  Such dreams.  The Hound featured prominently.  I don’t recall ever dreaming about somebody else’s characters before, ever.

I woke up still exhausted.  No more or less exhausted than any other day.

While I was peeing, I noticed that, in spite of my fatigue, I do not have the splitting headache I’ve awakened with every other day for months.  So progress?  Maybe.

I still want a nap with all my heart.

Horton generated his daily Sleep Report, which alleges I used the machine for six hours.  I guarantee I was not asleep all that time, or even much of that time.  This time matters though, because if I don’t achieve some level of compliance–and I forget already what that level is–the insurance company will stop paying for Horton.  They’ll know because Horton is a spy, who reports via memory card.

My bedroom is still a cluttered mess from putting in the new bed, and adding Horton and his attachments made it worse.  Therefore I don’t want to take a photo at this time, but here’s a stock image:

placebo sleep

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Bear with me; I am obsessed with sleep.

I have always believed sleep was one of the things I had going for me, that sleep was something I was good at, not by skill but by good fortune.  If I was tired all the time it was because Mr Moth snored and kept me up, or because I hung up in dream sleep and never achieved the other stages of sleep where rest occurs.  But I have never had trouble falling asleep.  Shortly before the apnea dx, I posted on Facebook and had a discussion with my mother, about how strange it is to me that (I had read that) people make a conscious decision to close their eyes and wait to fall asleep.  I have never done that, ever.  I just put my book away and go to sleep.  And I have rarely had trouble staying asleep, unless I was ill, or the dogs were restless, or had a baby.  Even when I had to tinkle eleventy times a night, I had no trouble going back to sleep each time–although, come to think of it, each awakening did seem to require a disproportionate amount of extra sack-time.

I used to dream a lot, and vividly.  That’s apparently a sign of moderate apnea.  I haven’t dreamed in a long time.  Apparently that’s a symptom of severe apnea.  If I could remember when I stopped dreaming all night every night, it might give me a time frame for when this problem tipped over into severe.  It’s been since we lived here, but beyond that I don’t recall.  I suspect it happened when the Actos shoved me past some tipping point weight-wise, because everything really started snowballing when I went on that drug, but it happened slow-ish, and going back off it has not completely reversed the symptoms–because they are apnea symptoms.  I hope.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.  I wanted to talk about placebo sleep.

I surfed from Facebook to “14 Amazing Psychology Facts Everyone Needs To Know” because I am too brain dead to read anything real, and I was waiting for the plagiarism checker to process my final exam paper (because I am also too brain dead to trust myself not to accidentally steal someone else’s concepts or ideas simply because I can’t remember where anything came from.)  I was initially interested in the graphic that said, Don’t tell your goals to anyone, but I was quickly sidetracked to list item #10, that said:  Convincing yourself you slept well tricks your brain into thinking it did.

Did I mention I’m obsessed with sleep?

Here’s the source article for that, which in turn cits a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology conducted by Colorado College, which seems to indicate that being aware of how tired you are makes you more tired.

I’m not going to try to track down more links to back this study up. Instead I’ll just say that, if accurate, it explains a lot.  As soon as the sleep lab said, “You aren’t sleeping, you’re smothering, and we have computer readouts that prove it,” I nosedived, and hard.  Went from barely functional to practically crippled.  This study explains why that happened, if they took away my placebo sleep and that was really all I had going on, sleepwise.

And if that’s true, believing the xpap therapy will work, will make it work, at least to an extent.

I wish I were more convinced it will work.  I’ve been chasing this for so dang long.  I lost most of last summer to dizzy spells, and now this summer is here and even the bathroom seems too far away.

The Home Medical people finally called, and I’m supposed to go pick up the machine tomorrow morning.  Wish me good luck that this goes as smoothly as possible, because I am so tired.

apnea and stuff

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I suspect I’m not unusual in that, when I am diagnosed with anything, I go to the web and research it.  Probably everyone who does this, does it for the same reason I do–to get some idea what to expect.  That result is iffy; everyone is different.  But the internet really helped me, back when I was practically paralyzed with anxiety and discovered Sam-E.  I really think that, in addition to alleviating the anxiety and enabling me to function emotionally again, Sam-E (and the B-complex I necessarily took with it) has also protected me from the worst of the MTHFR issues I might otherwise have developed by now.  I have also not suffered any major boil eruptions since I began taking Sam-E, and I can’t even express how huge that is.  So while I have no idea how that might work, thank you for that also, internet.  (And sorry for the TMI-grossness.)

But right now the top headline in my health news is the sleep apnea.  I have googled around, and not really found any reports, blog entries, etc., on the topic that quite reflect how I feel.  And, yanno…we don’t really know yet that how I feel is entirely caused by the apnea.  We won’t know until I get my machine and commence treatment.  If it works, it’s the apnea causing my problems.  If it doesn’t, we’ll have to resume the search, and the next step will be a neurologist because pretty much all other possibilities have been eliminated.

I’m hoping it’s the apnea, frankly.  I’m so tired of the hunt.

It’s been two weeks yesterday since the last sleep study.  They said I should have the machine in three weeks.  I still have not heard anything from anyone, except a call from the Lung Doc wanting to schedule a follow up.  His employee sounded surprised I hadn’t heard anything about the machine yet.

Frankly the delays annoy me.  Everything annoys me.  Apparently this is not an uncommon symptom among people who are chronically sleep deprived.

I kind of miss the days of not knowing I was sleep deprived.  Now I notice that I am waking up repeatedly, panting like I have just run a marathon.  Less so, if I fall asleep sitting up on the sofa, but that is only good for a couple of hours, when my legs go to sleep and the tingling wakes me up.

I also try to sleep on my stomach, but that is not extremely comfortable either because, well…boobs.

Sigh.  What a whinebag I am!

And yet I whine.  Today’s whine is, I should not have to sit around for three weeks waiting on a phone call.  (It has taken me four days to write this entry.)  My three weeks is up on Sunday, so I called today (Friday) and spoke to a fellow named Mike who said my xpap is n the “final stages of pre-approval with the insurance company.”  That would be BCBSAnthemWhatever.

Color me unsurprised, and put some symbols in a little balloon over my head.  Rassafrassin sassafrassin insurance.

One of the side-effects of apnea is emotional instability.  So when you read on the news that some crazy middle age fat lady fed her pet dragon exlax laced with napalm and flew over the Anthem headquarters, you won’t have to wonder why.  You’ll know why.

She was tired.

Mike said that I should hear early next week, and if I don’t hear by Tuesday I should call their Respiratory Therapist Anne and inquire again.

Nagging.  It is my super power, and remains so even in my depleted state.

Making a grocery list, not so much, so I need to go do that.  Zor, our living-with-us adult kid, got a restaurant job this week so she can save up to buy a car and pay her tuition at the next school, and we are all adjusting to that.  They feed her there, so that means I don’t have to take her taste into account for some dinners, whee!  On the other hand, I don’t know what her schedule is going to be, so boo!

Flexibility.  I heard of that once.  I think it’s something reserved for people who don’t have obligations.

Peace.