For those who have read my blog before, you know that I’m relatively transparent about things in my life that are about me. I might hedge on stories that intersect with Andrea or Jacob, particularly where some things are not my story to tell, but on my side of life, I’m fairly open. I feel at times that it is part of my zeitgeist with respect to the blog. There’s no point having a blog of my experiences if I am sugar-coating part of it, or turning it into a “sunshine and rainbows”-type social media feed, where you only post photos and updates that reflect well on you.
So over the last couple of years, I’ve talked about my weight, some heart stuff, tests here and there, etc. But one thing I haven’t talked about, mostly as it wasn’t that significant, was a problem I have with my legs. Like many overweight and/or diabetic/pre-diabetic people, I can get swelling in my ankles and shins, extra pooling of water, and normally you can “dispel” the water by wearing compression socks. Exciting, sexy, squeeze the water out of your shins, stockings.
I have a couple of pair, and if/when things get bad with my legs, I can wear them for a few days or weeks, and things return to some semblance of normal. It’s not super comfortable, but it gets the job done.
But I also have a specific spot on my right shin that I bang regularly. I’ve banged it for years, all the way back to being a kid, and while lots of people have scars on their knees, I have a bunch where I scraped my shins. It’s a little bit gross, I admit, but when my legs swell, the scars tend to fill with a bit of water. Once in a while, I’ll break the tissue layer on something, the water will run out, it leaks for a day or two, it heals, it goes back to normal. Annoying, but not exactly serious.
Then about 3 months ago, I rapped my shin a good one. I seem to recall it being something simple like a laundry basket of clean clothes sitting near my bed. I walk from the bathroom to the bed in the dark, and if I forget that I put the basket there, I can easily catch the side of it on my shin as I pass by. I do, and I did, except this time? It took a very large chunk out of a big area, and it has taken a long time to heal. It bled initially, I didn’t even notice at the time other than it was stinging, and I ended up washing it all off in the morning. It leaked, no biggie. Except, as I said, it hasn’t healed.
Now, lots of older people in their 80s and 90s get these types of skin breaks that take time to heal, but young guys like me (as the nurse said earlier today hahaha) should heal faster. In the meantime, I was in a cycle of it being irritated, drying out, showering, getting irritated, drying out, etc. A few months ago, it was annoying me, and I put some anti-bacterial cream on it for a day or two with some bandages, kept it covered, seemed fine.
Until last weekend.
Last Saturday / Sunday, it started to get sore. And a few times this week it really suddenly “pinged”, like a sharp pain almost like someone stuck me with a pin. It was sore to the touch, started being redder, but then it would fade, all good for a bit. More worrisome, but not alarming. Until last night. What had been simply red and irritated suddenly looked all yellow, gooey, and gross, like it was infected. Plus it hurt like the Dickens (the devil, not the writer).
So I snapped a pic, asked Andrea to be equally grossed out and validate my concern that I was a gross, overweight slob who was probably now infected too, and reached out this morning to my normal doctor’s office to see if I could get an appointment.
Now, I need to step back a moment. My doctor is part of a larger “teaching clinic” so there is the supervising physician and several resident interns usually, and they are housed within a long-term care hospital, so the rules for visiting are a bit strict. I tried to have my eye looked at in the fall, when I had pink-eye which negates going pretty much anywhere, and didn’t get very far. I ended up just doing AppleTree who did tele-medicine for me. Honestly, most of the time it is easier to get into AppleTree after a couple of hours of waiting rather than my clinic’s several days to get in. One nice part for the main clinic was that it was close to work, so if I was going for a regular appointment, I could pop out and back during the day. Now? Not so convenient.
But the magic words are “I think it might be infected” and they managed after much juggling and texting between triage and the clinic to find me a spot this morning at 11:30. It was a crapfest of a day for my schedule at work, but 11:30 it was.
Off I go, they even had room in the parking lot for a change, pass through screening level 1 and then 2, and then arrive in the empty waiting room. As an aside, the screening person told me I could put a new mask (PPE-style) on over top of my existing mask, which seemed odd, but okay. Then as soon as I arrived in the clinic, one of the doctors immediately told me I had to take my regular mask off and just wear the PPE. Okay, I live to serve. Just tell me the correct rules, I’ll follow them! You’re the ones on the front line, I’ll do what you tell me.
Appointment was relatively fine. Sure, I know the horror stories out there. People whose infections don’t get under control, spread up the leg, cause lots of pain, huge risk of sepsis and even death, although far more likely to lose the leg than anything, if things go south. Or north as the case may be.
Anyway, mostly I was just pissed at myself. The reason I’m having this problem is that I haven’t taken advantage of the last 9m at home to really turn some health corners. I’ve held my ground, and made a bit of progress, but there are bigger gains on the horizon once I get there. This however is one of the types of complications that comes from NOT solving the problem earlier. 100% preventable. And if it expands, there’s only me to blame.
Fortunately, the infection hasn’t spread, it’s still local and not too extreme from the looks of it. Anti-biotics and some clean dressings should have me right as rain in a couple of weeks, hopefully. They are worried about the excess fluid in the legs, so I’ll have to revisit compression stockings, and they have custom ones that fit better apparently, which sounds oh, so wonderful.
I think the doctor thought I was over-reacting a bit until I showed him the photo from last night. He didn’t even think it was the same wound at first as I’ve cleaned it up and taken a shower this morning to clean it all out. I got high marks for wound care, at least.
I also took advantage of my visit to revisit my gaping hole in blood work to make sure my blood pressure and diabetes-related meds are working, and he was not as impressed that it has been so long since my last test. I was due last spring, just before the world collapsed, so he wants that done asap, and some other referrals related to the wound care (CCAC, etc.). A few things to put in place as soon as possible, and while not necessarily critically urgent, I’m trying to tick as many boxes as I can today. The day was already a crapshow anyway.
I won’t post actual photos of the leg, it’s pretty gross looking, and I’m having a bit of a self-esteem problem already today. Hopefully I can use that as a bit of a motivation for change, but I’ll settle for a short-term motivation to get the wound healed and try out some new compression socks.
Like I said in the title: stupid leg, stupid me. But at least it’s not irreversible and relatively easily treated to start. Fingers crossed.
As I start to write this post, I actually have very little idea of what I’m going to say. I’ve struggled for weeks to figure out what I want to say about the year that is past or the year that is ahead. I have no words of wisdom, no reference point to help others understand something that I don’t understand myself, no insights to help me reframe my own situation let alone our collective experiences.
I generally pride myself on an ability to look at a situation, cast it in a different light, and find some way to structure my thoughts around it. Even the death of my parents did not challenge me to come up with a frame. I thought of it as, “What would a perfect day look like to them?”, if there was an afterlife and you got to live THAT moment forever in time when time was irrelevant.
Or about being a parent to Jacob and the experiences of the NICU, the angst, the worry, the stress, the joy, the love, all of it, I found it easy to know what to write about on my blog.
I have always been able to rely on this skill for work. I’ve done it for my HR guide, to help others understand the processes of competitions. And I’ve been doing it of late with astronomy stuff, helping people to understand how to think about different types of scopes or my specific scope.
I like doing it, and others often read my stuff and comment how, for the first time, they feel they actually “get” it. That I’ve presented it in a different way, with more accessible language, or a different structure or metaphor, and they came away feeling like they learned something. Even if I’m just regurgitating other people’s content, I put my own spin on it.
But this year is like no other year in my experience, no other event in my lifetime. I have no metaphor that will help me understand it. I have no reference point for comparison.
Of course it sucked, but not as much personally
It is easy to say it sucked. It blew chunks repeatedly. The death of a friend. The isolation from others. The fear, the loathing, the sense of helplessness with no obvious end in sight. And all of that despite the fact that I had buffers to prevent the majority of the effects from hitting my family.
My wife and I have great jobs, steady jobs with steady income. There was no change for us financially because of shutdowns, we transitioned to Work from Home, and we kept motoring along. Our son transitioned to virtual school. We’re actually probably better off financially as we had nowhere to go, no big purchases or debts looming.
We also had no major health impacts, which is surprising. In a household that would be classed as high-risk, the worst we dealt with all year was probably some normal dental surgery. We’re less mobile, less active, more sedentary than normal. But not permanently so.
Heck, we didn’t even get our flu shots this year until earlier today. Every time we were going to do it, the pharmacy was out of the shots completely or didn’t have dosages for kids. But a local pharmacy had some, and we did it this afternoon. They were barely even still set up, we had waited so long. Yet part of that wait was we never GO anywhere. Whereas in past years, we would have been out and about and made special trips to doctors or the pharmacy, we almost never go out as a family. I run errands, I come home. Jacob rarely goes anywhere, Andrea mostly for appointments.
For us, the worst has been the social isolation. I’m an introvert by nature, and even *I* find it challenging. I missed not being able to do star parties this year, for instance. Way back on March 12th, I made the call to cancel a telescope clinic that had been scheduled for Saturday March 14th. We didn’t know what was happening, or would be happening, but myself and two others all felt it wasn’t really worth the risk. Mind you, NOTHING had shut down at that point. At the time, lots of people thought we were over-reacting. But March 13th, everything changed for Ontario and our surrounding area, and in hindsight, it’s ludicrous to think we actually debated whether or not it should have been cancelled. Of COURSE it should have been cancelled. J has been separated from school friends, A has been separated from social outings.
We work, we study, we eat together. I’d love to say that it has been this whirlwind rejuvenation of close family ties, but it has been more frayed than that. Harsh words have been spoken at times, the harshest I’ve ever used in an adult relationship probably, both with A and J. We have all reached our limits at different times.
But it probably amounts to #FirstWorldProblems or the #BenefitsOfPrivilege.
So what do I tell myself?
The shortest description I have for the year is simple: trauma.
Unwanted, sustained, and uncontrolled / uncontrollable pressure over a period of time, with acute spikes throughout that can overwhelm your current level of resiliency, leaving you physically or emotionally vulnerable to whatever effects come through to lash at your body.
A friend regularly comments, if anyone talks about silver linings, that there can be no silver lining in a trauma. It’s just simply awful, you have to get through it, you have to survive. You can’t just make the best of it while it is happening, all you can do is find a way to stay on your feet and to keep fighting regardless of what damage is being inflicted on you.
One half of me finds that entirely logical. It resonates with me strongly. I want to embrace that metaphor, that this is a trauma to be endured. An outside event with a start and an end, and the only way “out” is “through”.
But the other half of me knows that one of the biggest “predictors” of future mental health, after a trauma, is how you interpreted the trauma while it was happening. What you told yourself. In essence, how you start “processing” the trauma before it even ends. There are countless stories of people in giant catastrophes, often front-page human tragedies, and there will be two people who had similar backgrounds, similar social supports, similar lives really, and yet have two totally different outcomes after the same trauma. One ends up catatonic, the other highly functional. Psychologists have no real idea why, although many like to latch on to concepts of resiliency, cumulative trauma management skills, etc. But one thing that often stands out is that the ones who emerge more stable afterwards, less in need of sustained supports, are those who pre-processed the trauma in some way. Such as those who talked to themselves in healthy ways while it was happening.
Generally speaking, saying you’re going to hunker down to weather the storm is not the healthiest of approaches for mental resiliency. Instead, it often reinforces that everything is happening TO you, that you have no control anywhere in your life, that you are flotsam and jetsam to be tossed about at the whim of external forces, that the Gods are playing dice with our lives.
So I have relied on some common tools that help me pre-process chaos.
Planning in chaos
Over the last 25 years, I have consistently set goals for myself for the coming year, New Year’s resolutions of sorts. They really have nothing to do with NY’s other than the timing. My birthday is in June, so the calendar year makes a good planning cycle with my birthday as the mid-year check-in. A big symbolic end-date and subsequent start-date.
Some years I go whole hog, all-in on planning, with literally dozens of goals for the year. I don’t expect to do them all, just to make progress on them. In the next few days, I’ll look back on 2020, and reflect on my “accomplishments” against my planned goals. And I’ll update my list and planning tools for 2021.
But tonight I’m more interested in the “game mechanics” of how I play, how I make moves, more so than the what or why.
One thing I did, which I have done before, is recognize that it is a terrible planning environment. I don’t have control of my game board. I can’t plot strategy if I don’t even know what borders are going to stay stable, or if some wild change is going to alter the rules from playing a nice game of checkers only to find out halfway through that the game is now Othello. Or that there’s been a coup, and pawns in chess now move like Queens.
Generally this means that I protect myself from myself. Whereas normally I might be a bit anal about tracking progress and berating myself that I wasn’t “doing more”, I had no standards to measure against, deliberately so. My colleague and I constantly joke at work about the term “baseline year”, the idea that if you keep changing your indicators every year, you never have to measure since every year you’re establishing a baseline. 2020 was definitely a baseline year. I generally threw my plan out the window up until mid-summer. Until I realized that knowing that no plan would survive engagement with the enemy that was the chaos of 2020 was not sufficient reason to have no plan at all. So I started planning again. With no sense that I would have to make progress on anything, just that I would try.
And overall, that’s probably the biggest single weapon in my arsenal. That I would try. In late summer, I started seeing it as “choice within chaos”, I still had daily choices I could make, even in the face of adversity. Some were simple choices about my website. Others were about safety and relationships with family. I needed to remind myself that I still had choices to make every day, and so I blogged about them (the Today I Choose series).
I would love to say I ended up racking up a series of impressive wins. I didn’t. I made progress on a serious reorg of our household contents; we have A in the office upstairs, J on the first floor, and me in the basement. There’s still a LOT to be done. Basement, first floor, garage. We have ideas about a pool next year perhaps. Or a trampoline and an observatory for me. Again, though, that’s the what, not the how.
For the “game mechanics”, so to speak, basically it is that my life is relatively unchanged at its core. I’m still employed. I’m still married. I’m still a father. I’m still an analytical introvert. I’m still me. And the way to talk to myself during this time, the way to help me through that trauma, to help me pre-process the effects, is to keep being me. The best version of me that I can be, if possible, given the circumstances.
So I planned. I blogged. I talked about it.
I feel what I feel
I mentioned above that it’s been a hard year, and sometimes my stress and emotions got the better of me. As the time increases, I find myself more emotional. I’d say more empathetic, but it’s almost the opposite of that, really. That’s kind of hard to explain.
So I’ll give two examples. First and foremost, I can cry easily at sad movies, and I don’t care who knows it. I cried at my wedding, I cried when my parents died, I cry at sappy commercials for Christmas. I’m comfortable with feeling those emotions, I don’t wallow in them or anything, but I’m fine for J to see me cry and to know that it’s okay for a man to do that. If anyone has a problem with that, they can take a flying f*** on a rolling doughnut. 🙂
And I find myself more weepy than normal when watching TV. Some of it is lowered resilience, some of it is fatigue, some of it is just the duration of the isolation and its cumulative effects. But I’ve bingewatched a bunch of shows, and sad scenes where people are saying goodbye to each other can wipe me out easily. Even tension between love interests can have me reaching for tissues. If there’s a sad death in the show, as opposed to a Jurassic Park snackfest? Yeah, I’m likely toast.
Normally, my first instinct would be to think of it as a heightened sense of empathy. That somehow, on an emotional level, I am bonding with the characters, that I’m feeling their pain. But I’m not. In effect, what I’m feeling is my own loss. Characters I’ve invested in for repeated shows, a show I like, and it’s “over”. I’m not ready for it to end. It’s not their loss I’m feeling, it’s my own. On top of other losses of other kinds in real life.
How do I know? Because of a second factor. I’m not sure how to word this nicely, or to not feel like a complete a**hole as I say it, but I feel like I’m out of f***s to give. It’s not depression, I know what that feels and looks like. This is something different.
Battle fatigue is probably closest to it. Or trauma fatigue. It’s gone on so long, and there’s been so much devastation, I feel numb. BLM. Thousands of COVID deaths. Financial ruin. People losing jobs or their businesses. Families getting destroyed.
In an abstract sense, I care. Of course I do. I’m still me. I still have my principles, my sense of injustice, I want to rail at systems, people, the universe. But when everything you see is an injustice, it’s hard to keep feeling the injustice very deeply each time.
In business management, the frequently recommended reaction to a giant temporary crisis was to “stick to the knitting”. It was said that it was not time to branch out, not time to innovate in new areas, unless your survival is threatened. It literally advised in the past to batten down the hatches and weather the storm.
Mentally, I feel like I have. If my wife and son are safe, then my priorities are met. Anything after that is gravy.
I see myself doing it frequently. I find myself reading a story about a horrendous black swan of circumstances swamping someone’s personal boat in the storm, and yet instead of being moved by their situation, I end up looking for lessons learned to further reinforce my own situation.
Should I do more? Should I reach out more? How do I help?
The boy in the plastic bubble
Way back when I was young, there was a TV show about the “boy in the plastic bubble”. I don’t remember the exact details, a kid who had some sort of immune deficiency and thus lived within a sterile plastic environment, so that was his life. It was all his body could handle.
At the end of each day, the reality is I often feel like I’m barely keeping my head above the emotional and mental waterline. Even with greater self-awareness and greater attention to how I talk to myself amid chaos, I have no extra energy reserves to expend.
I love my sister S and used to call regularly. Every few months. If I was in Peterborough, I’d visit. Equally, my brother D lives alone, and I sat with him back in the summer for a socially distanced lunch on his front porch. But months have gone by and I haven’t reached out further. It’s not that I don’t care, or simply that they’re not on Facebook, but that I don’t have the energy reserve to expend on reaching out. I don’t remember, it just brushes past and is gone. Another example? We ALWAYS talk on Christmas day. None of us called, in fact it was today before I remembered mid-afternoon to call. Normally when I remember it’s after midnight, long past her bedtime. I’m still playing tag with my brother.
How have I connected with others? Mostly through FB. I can time shift it to later at night when it is less “urgent”, less “time intensive”, less likely to respond to something off the cuff and not nuance it properly. I have hosted trivia nights a few times, I’ve kept a reading group going.
Over the course of the fall, I “gave back” by taking on major duties for our workplace charitable campaign. It was “doable”, it was “controllable”, and it was “productive”, at a time when I wanted all three.
I’ve also spent a bit of time online helping people. A woman who was looking to buy a telescope for Christmas and just needed someone knowledgeable to help her through the decision tree to what she wanted. If it wasn’t for COVID, she could have gone to a local star party and solved her questions in minutes. Instead, we had long conversations over messenger. I’m more active in astronomy forums in general, in multiple places, helping newbies figure things out.
I’m more active in a group dealing with Cerebral Palsy, timeshifting my responses into the wee hours of the morning, openly sharing my experiences and emotions, in the hopes that it will resonate with the recipient whose Qs often show up in the group as raw, emotional, stressed.
I’m still being me
In the end, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I feel like I’m still me, I’m still trying to be empathetic, I’m still trying to be supportive of others in my universe, but it is a bit more structured. In ways that prevent me from being overwhelmed myself.
In some ways, I feel like I’m the boy in the bubble. I experience life, but it has to be on much more narrowly defined terms these days. Each day comes with new questions, each day comes with new opportunities and challenges.
Each day comes with choice. I know that. I tell myself. There is trauma overall but there’s still choice.
And yet.
It sucks. It overwhelms. There is no “silver lining” to be embraced, no positive benefit that outweighs the overwhelming cost. There are some benefits that mitigate the cost (“Yay, no more commuting!”), but that is far from the same thing.
So tonight, as the year turned from 2020 to 2021, I hugged J for the last time of 2020 and the first snuggle of 2021. I am so relieved that the year is over, that we are hopefully turning a corner towards a symbolic year of hope and light over despair and darkness.
J thought at first that I was laughing during the hug. I wasn’t. The tears were flowing, as they are again now as I write this. The rawness remains.
I am me. I exist. I cannot say that I am living.
Maybe the year 2020 will have been a chrysalis that leads to emergence in 2021.
More likely it is and has been a mere hibernation leading to a Spring awakening on a radically different world than the one before Winter fell.
Either way, I hope you and yours have a happy and safe new year.
I haven’t been doing my daily blogging, taking a break through to the new year probably, but today I have an entry. About a month ago, I had a tooth that was sensitive. Actually, two were hurting, one right above each other. It was hard to know which was sore and which was only radiating / referring. I thought at first, hoped at first, it was just a standard sensitivity problem and a day or two later it would be fine. Extra brushing, extra flossing, it would be all good.
Nope, it got painful over about 4 more days until it was almost impossible to eat some nights. I’m a giant baby when it comes to dental stuff, anyway, but this was extreme even for me. I felt like on the pain scale I went from simple 1-2, through 3-4, 5-6, and by the end, a few 7s and 8s. And the throbbing was incredible at times. I discovered the alternate-stimulus method i.e. interrupt the signal with a different sensation, so I took to rubbing my check or beard to send a different sensation through the same nerves so that the pain didn’t reach my brain. It was good for 5-10-minute reprieves, but wasn’t sustainable.
It started on a Thursday, ratcheted up by Monday, and I phoned my dentist first thing Tuesday morning (they’re closed Mondays). He couldn’t seem me for at least a week. Ruh roh. But he gave me an antibiotic to hold me over, and it took the pain away almost completely. I had my appointment, and I needed a root canal. No cavities, nothing else going on, just a routine root canal. My first, but still, routine.
Because of my own stress and past experiences, I need stuff like that to be done under sedation, and so his assistant set me up for the “first available surgery” day which was the 17th of December. Almost a month away. Sigh. There was some question of her competency, and maybe she was new, but she had very little ability to work the scheduler, the payment system, any of it. It was a crapfest. But she very clearly booked me for 10:00-12:00 for the 17th, i.e. today. I would have to arrive an hour early (9:00) to take my relaxant before the appointment. But I was booked. If anything came up in the meantime, I should call.
Nothing came up. My tooth was a bit sensitive here and there over the last month, but never above a 2/10 for pain and rarely even above a 1. But the scheduling was a bit more complicated with COVID.
Because I do sedation, I can’t drive myself to the appointment or take myself home afterwards. I need someone else to do that for me. Andrea can’t drive, so I was taking a taxi there, easy enough, and a neighbour drove Andrea over so they could pick me up and bring me home. Problem solved, and grateful for the help even if I have to impose on a neighbour.
Today started slow. I really wasn’t in a great mindset to go, worrying too much about the surgery, the unknown recovery, the potential complications, the taxi, the pickup, all of it. If the vaccines for COVID would change the world by February, I might have tried pushing through until then.
I took a taxi, and distracted myself with my frequent topic-of-conversation with taxi drivers about how business is going (generally terrible). Upon arrival, the new people working the desk (hint, hint about the previous person), came to let me in and said, “Oh, you’re really early”.
I thought they meant that I was an hour early but I reminded them they wanted me to come early to take the pill onsite. Yes, she knew that, but I wasn’t scheduled until 11:30 a.m. WTF? There was no mistake in my earlier booking. It was 10:00 a.m., AND she gave me a piece of paper with the info that matched what I put in my e-calendar. Plus it was the same schedule as last time. Arrive at 9, surgery at 10, cleaning around 11:00, done at noon.
The taxi had already left, so they let me stay and suggested I could just stream something on my phone. Uh-huh. Whatever. Waiting wasn’t the issue, I needed to see if Andrea could now come at 1:30/2:00 instead of noon. Yep, they adjusted, it was all good. Worst case scenario, Andrea would just come in a taxi and get me. Okay, set.
So I was supposed to start now at 11:30. Which would mean not taking the relaxer until 10:30/10:45.
At 9:45, the woman comes over with the glass of water and pill, and I’m like, “Wait, aren’t we a bit early?” Nope, they’ve *changed the time* around and haven’t told me. The 9:30 person didn’t show up. Why? Because they thought they were booked for the 22nd. When the clinic isn’t even open. Which I got to hear her tell the person about 25 times during the phone call.
It was patently clear that the idiot I dealt with the first time screwed a LOT of stuff up. And apparently moved people’s appointments around in the system to make room for other things without ever telling the patients. Yet while I was sitting there this morning, the scheduling assistant was calling around to move other things, and they got me back to my original schedule. Great, right? Except I had already MOVED MY RIDE!
So I had to call Andrea and get her to confirm she was okay with the new time. She was, they were, it worked. Okay, time to focus. Relax. Meditate.
I go in the room, the chair that they use is in the same bit of disrepair as it was in a month ago. The left arm works fine, the right arm keeps collapsing. Guess which one my arm has to rest on to do the IV? Yep, the right. Anyway, the anesthesiologist tries to fix it, no luck; the dental surgery assistant tries, no luck. Then, while they’re PUTTING AN IV in my hand, the doctor is using wrenches and tools on the chair I’m sitting in to fix the arm. Meanwhile, I have to hold my hand out level for about 10-15 minutes (no exaggeration) while the woman tries to find a solid vein in the back of my hand. I hadn’t drank enough water, so find the vein was a challenge, but I also had no place to put my arm, and the doctor kept raising the arm on the chair to the point of bumping my arm. Each time, the anesthesiologist was like, “Hold it still, please”. The Marx Brothers would have a whole skit written before they left the room.
Meanwhile, the anesthesiologist is asking for my list of current meds, which I had already given to the woman at the desk earlier, so had to remind myself of their titles. 3 are easy, 1 I tend to forget. Got it out, marked, okay. Then the dental assistant says, “Wait, this is for a ROOT CANAL? I don’t have the right tools for THAT!”. No one told her I wasn’t the 9:30 patient, but the 11:30 patient. The fact that I was clearly not Diane didn’t trigger a thought process.
All in all, I wasn’t getting the warmest fuzzies for professionalism and organization. Oh well, I’m in the chair!
Eventually, the chair was fixed, my arm could rest, we got going, and I was OUT. I don’t remember anything after he got the arm rest fixed until I woke up mostly post surgery during a cleaning. There were x-rays happening in there too, I think, and the cleaning was much more aggressive than I expected. I think they turned the drip off early. The whole point of doing the cleaning was that I would still be out. But it was a much-needed cleaning…they might have sent out for extra tools from Home Depot, for all I know.
Andrea picked me up at noon-ish, I don’t remember much until she got there, and I vaguely remember paying but those details are slipping. The head nurse escorted Mr. Rubber Legs out to the car, I saw our neighbour, we got a ride home in her Tesla, but I wasn’t really tracking the conversation so I might have dozed off en route. At home, I went up to bed and crashed for four hours. Much of the details of the day are fading.
Andrea woke me up and brought me some food and drink. Apple sauce, I think, but those details are fading too. But I was awake now and went downstairs and had some toast. After 24h of fasting, basically, I was a bit hungry. For supper, I was able to easily eat chicken stew, milk, and I even managed ice cream. I haven’t had anything crunchy yet, will wait on that until tomorrow, but no sensitivities for warm/cold yet. I’ll hold off on “hot” too.
My mouth is probably at about a 2-3/10 on the pain scale at the moment. I was surprised, they gave me no follow up meds. I assumed anti-biotics and pain would be standard, but I guess not.
Overall, the logistics were a sh** show, but the work seems fine. It’s sorer now than it was a day ago, because of the trauma of the day, but I’m not “in pain” generally. I remember more of the day this time than last sedation — that time I remember being at the dentist and taking my pill, getting in the chair, paying, getting OUT of a cab at home, and waking up. About 15-20 minutes worth of memory in an eight-hour period. This time, I remember most things up until the chair was fixed until the cleaning was almost done. There was some serious gagging in there that had me freaking out with latex flashbacks to another dental appointment, but it’s done.
Today I chose to have a root canal. And despite being worried, despite lots of stressful quirks during the day, the surgery part seems to have gone fine, and now I can just milk my injury for some TLC at home. I’m hoping for a morning omelette. 🙂
I am, by all accounts, a night owl. Growing up, I had a LOT of trouble falling asleep. Literally hours sometimes tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling, with or without music, too hot or too cold, screen time, no screen time, doesn’t matter. This pattern has continued through-out my life where I go from semi-normal for me (midnight to 1:00 a.m.) and going until 8:00 a.m. to not being able to fall asleep and pushing it to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., and waking up at 6:30 or 7:00 at the latest.
Which of course then likely ends up with a crash sometime around 5:00 p.m. Earlier if I let it, later if I push through. The last couple of weeks have been tough. I feel like I’m sleeping but not getting any REM. My sleep machine monitor says otherwise. But I’m fighting migraines, sinus headaches, and just pressure in general, and it is sapping my energies.
Tonight I fell asleep around 6:30 and almost slept through dinner. I needed 30 minutes to get me moving again. J and I watched X-Men tonight, then I did some stuff on my desktop and website to set up a table for my music reviews, another tick mark on my to-do list on the whiteboard, and now I’m crashing at 10:30 p.m. Wish me luck.
I have been fighting a bug for a few days, a bit of congestion, a bit of a headache, a sore throat and the gastro issues I self-inflicted on Sunday messed up my sleep last night. I have been super active in the last few days, so I should have slept like a log according to the logic of my mother. I can even hear her voice saying it.
Instead, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. Tossed and turned, tried to go to the washroom without success, back to bed, another 90 minutes of staring at the ceiling metaphorically, back to the washroom with success, and finally crashed back to sleep around 6:00 I guess.
Woke up at 9:00 feeling like a zombie. Things have improved generally over the weekend, and my sore throat was mostly gone but my digestive issues were going batty, my congestion was back, and my CPAP machine gave me an air pressure headache to start the day. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t COVID-serious, just an annoying bug of some kind. But I decided to crash and take the day.
Andrea might have the same bug as of late tonight. Hopefully, she’ll do her normal great job of kicking it quickly. I have a bunch of stuff tomorrow for work, so I’ll definitely be “back”, but I might push a few meetings to later in the week and focus on the core duties.
