health

Sickness and Silver Linings

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this on the bus on my way to work. Yesterday, I stayed home sick. I couldn’t manage to drag myself out of bed until 1pm, and I neglected to write a blog post for this morning. I wanted to stay home today, too – I’m still feeling pretty under the weather. But there are too many things I need to get done today, and I don’t have enough sick time left, anyway. 

It’s been a week of emotional processing. I’m thinking a lot about the future and what I want the next year to look like. Nothing is concrete enough yet to write about in detail here, but my mind has spent a lot of time racing lately. 

In the midst of all the mental chaos, though, have been reminders of how good I really have it. My partner’s dad visited us last weekend and helped us acquire and move around some furniture, and our apartment is feeling more like a home than it ever has. I’ve gotten to spend some great time with friends, including one friend who is moving away soon, so that time has been particularly special. I’ve gotten back to knitting after about a week of ignoring it.

My mind may be struggling a bit, but really, things are okay. And there’s the promise of improvement, which is always exciting. I just need to remember. 

I’m Back!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, internet! I have returned from my tiny hiatus! I honestly didn’t give a whole lot of thought to what I’d kick things back off with once I returned, and I haven’t really done any writing in the past few weeks. So in order to shake some of the rust off the writing gears in my brain, I’m going to go with the old fallback of a five-item list of things that happened while I was away:

  1. I went to Seattle for 16 hours to attend my high school best friend’s wedding. It was lovely; she and her husband are adorable, and I am so, so, so happy I was able to be there!
  2. Between Seattle and another trip with my partner, I went through airport security four times in two weeks…and got patted down every. single. time. Dear TSA: your security lines aren’t moving slowly because someone forgot to empty their water bottle or take their laptop out of their bag. They’re moving slowly because you’re making everybody go through those goddamn useless body scanners twice. (The first thing you see once you’re through security at Midway is a Ben & Jerry’s. Well played, sirs. We definitely had coffee ice cream for breakfast on our way out of town.)
  3. I threw out my back. Thankfully, it hasn’t held a candle to whatever the hell I did back around Christmas, and I’m already feeling better. But since my partner currently isn’t supposed to lift more than five pounds and can’t raise his arms over his head, it’s made for an interesting week.
  4. I had my intake call for mental health services at our local LGBT clinic. I’ll find out later this week if they’re able to fit me in with someone there; if they can’t, they’ll work with me to find a competent provider elsewhere. It’s definitely time for me to work through some of the heavier emotions I’ve been ignoring.
  5. After a couple of weeks of letting it slide, I started getting back into the habit of taking at least a few minutes each day for guided meditation with my tarot cards while we were out of town. Since I’ve been feeling a little rocky this week (mostly, I think, due to the back pain), it’s been a really great, stabilizing influence.

A Smile (and a Tiny Hiatus)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m scrambling to write this On the bus Thursday morning. Life is particularly busy right now, and writing has fallen a bit by the wayside. 

I have had ample reasons to smile despite a slightly overwhelming schedule, though. Here are a few of them:

  1. After feeling really burned out at work for a few weeks (to the point where I was brushing up my résumé in case I decided to look elsewhere), I had a great conversation with my department manager on Tuesday that has me feeling much better about where I’m at and where I’m going, and much more appreciated for what I’ve been doing. 
  2. I’ve been hanging out with friends a lot lately. There was a long time when we moved that I felt like all my friends were really just my partner’s friends, but we’ve developed our own relationships now and can spend time with mutual friends without feeling like we both need to be there. It’s been so great finally feeling like I’m really connected here in Chicago. 
  3. There’s been a lot of medical stuff going on at our house (everyone is going to be fine, don’t worry), which has been pretty overwhelming at times. Generally, though, it’s served to remind us how well cared for we really are. I am incredibly grateful for our support network all over the country. 

The next two weeks, my partner and I will be out of town, and I’m going to take those two weeks off from blogging. I’ll have something up again on the 27th!

Silver Linings

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m still feeling pretty rattled as I try to figure out where to go for this rheumatology follow-up. I’m feeling a lot of things, really, and not many of them are particularly pleasant. But I’m trying to look for reasons to smile, and really, if I take the time to step back a little and breathe, it’s not hard to find them. So here’s a short and sweet list of some reasons I’ve found to smile this week:

  1. Even though the humidity has caused an uptick in my general discomfort and has most of my joints feeling pretty stiff, I’ve managed to keep knitting pretty regularly. I’m on a sweater/vest kick at the moment. None of my projects are progressing very quickly, but I’m enjoying them all.
  2. Next weekend I’m headed to Seattle for a wedding. I’m super excited for the couple (my high school best friend and the great guy she’s been with for several years), and looking forward to a little 24-hour adventure.
  3. I’ve been digging deeper into some friendships here in Chicago, and it feels really good. I am reminded every day that I have an incredible support network, and that makes everything else life throws my way feel a lot more manageable.

Adjusting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am going to be honest: I really want to write something happy this week, but I’m really not feeling it.

I have dealt with chronic pain for years, but have never brought it up to a medical professional (or much of anyone, really) before, for a variety of reasons. I went to the doctor on Saturday (luckily, my insurance card finally made it to me on Friday) with the intention of changing this, because it’s been getting steadily worse, and is starting to affect my quality of life in ways I’m not okay with.

Long story short, I spent three days waiting to hear back about lab results, wrestling with the fact that I’m probably looking at either rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia – in other words, a thing with pretty straightforward treatment options that will probably be increasingly debilitating as time goes on, or a thing that is super nebulous and hard to treat that’s debilitating in different ways.

I finally got the call from the nurse on my way home from work yesterday – these initial lab results were nothing definitive, but they weren’t normal and indicated the possibility of RA, which means I now need to schedule some further tests with a rheumatologist. And whether it’s the weather this week or the fact that I’ve been actually acknowledging that pain is happening recently, I’ve been in more noticeable amounts of pain all week. So now I am grouchy, and anxious, and generally struggling to focus on much of anything else, even though I realize there’s nothing I can really do about it right now.

Hopefully next week I’ll have more of an action plan together and will be up for writing something more profound or happy or, at least, less “woe is me”. For now, though, I’m going to give myself time to adjust to the fact that pursuing a diagnosis for whatever-this-is might illuminate the best way to deal with it, but it also means it’s real, and this is a reality I’ve been ignoring for a while.

Faulty Coping Mechanisms

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Sometimes (and this should come as a surprise to no one)…I make mistakes.

I knew, all through last week and most of the week before, that I was starting to run low on my medications. I put off sending in the refill request, because my new insurance card hadn’t come in the mail yet. Last Thursday morning, I took the last pills I had. My insurance card still hadn’t come, but I didn’t really have a choice; I put in the refill request.

Unfortunately, my insurance card continued to not show up, and the pharmacy didn’t get going on the refill right away, and I was feeling very overwhelmed and low on spoons and doing a terrible job of expressing to my partner what was happening, and, long story short, I had no meds over the weekend.

I’ve been on the same duo of medications for six years. There have been times when I’ve run out of one or the other (never both at once), or missed a day, but neither of those things have happened often, and neither have happened at all in probably two years. I had no idea what to expect. I assumed that I had a day or two, at least, before it really started working its way out of my system, but beyond that? Not a clue.

I felt increasingly off as the weekend progressed. I finally told my partner what was happening on Sunday. Monday morning I overslept  (in part because it was stormy and so dark outside that I think my brain decided it couldn’t possibly be day, and I turned off all but my last alarm in my sleep), which meant that I was already not in the best place when I got to work. A few hours into my day, I realized I was feeling pretty shaky. I started sweating profusely. My head hurt. It gradually dawned on me that the withdrawal had finally hit.

I logged into my pharmacy’s online portal and saw that the one medication that was most likely causing the worst of the withdrawals had been filled, and my old insurance had covered it (I’d forgotten that I submitted a refill request when I got a reminder email from the pharmacy a month prior, then realized that, because I only take half a pill per day, I didn’t actually need it yet, and had never picked it up). I decided I’d head to the pharmacy after work and at least pick that one up.

I ended up leaving work around lunchtime, because I realized that the withdrawal symptoms were only going to get worse, and headed straight to the pharmacy, feeling increasingly desperate.

As it turned out, even though I didn’t have my new insurance information, I was able to use a clinic discount to get my other medication at a reasonable price as well. I tried not to beat myself up too much as I headed home with the medications I probably could have picked up over the weekend, before things got out of hand.

Thankfully, in the midst of getting my brain back on track, I’ve had plenty of folks around to help me keep moving. A friend invited me to join a weekly roleplaying game, which meant I got to spend a good chunk of Monday and Tuesday coming up with character ideas. Tuesday evening was the game, and there’s nothing quite like several hours of collaborative storytelling to get you out of your own head. Work has been especially busy, which has been challenging, but has also provided a really good gauge of how quickly my mental state is improving – I felt so much more capable of focusing and getting work done yesterday than I did on Monday, which was encouraging.

I’m still waiting for my insurance card to show up, but now HR is aware that there’s a problem and is working on rectifying it. I’m making myself a list of appointments I need to schedule when it finally gets here (and I’m hoping it comes before the appointment I have scheduled for this weekend). Finding a therapist to help me work through some of the underlying emotional things that are siphoning off my supply of spoons is at the top of the list. I am not letting myself get back into the position I was in at the beginning of the week every again, if I can help it.

Here’s to finding new and more reliably effective coping mechanisms.

Fighting Frustration

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s 10pm Wednesday and I’m finally cranking out a blog post for this week. I’ve been trying all day to come up with something write about, but I’ve been largely unsuccessful – it was an immensely frustrating day at work, in ways that my job is not usually frustrating. I am torn between a desire to bitch about my day (which is something I promised myself I wouldn’t do often, back when I started Accidental Fudge), and a desire to put something positive out into the universe (which is a challenge today, because it’s been so frustrating).

I’m going to err on the side of positivity, though, in the hopes that it’ll set me up for a better day tomorrow. So here are three things I’m looking forward to as we launch ourselves into July:

  1. Three day weekend! Particularly in light of how frustrated my Wednesday was, I am super excited to have an extra day to myself this weekend. I’m planning to get together with a friend in the afternoon on Friday, but the morning will be me hanging out around the apartment, at this point without much of an agenda – there are some creative projects I could work on, or I might read…I’m going to try to resist the urge to sleep it all away.
  2. New (and hopefully better) health insurance! I decided last month to switch my insurance plan from a HMO to a PPO, and that kicked in as of July 1. The major thing I’m excited about is being able to go to specialists without needing to get referrals. I want to be more intentional about dealing with mental health stuff and am going to seriously pursue therapy now that I know my insurance will cover it. I’m also (finally) going to talk to my doctor about the chronic pain I’ve been dealing with for…well, years, and I’m glad I’ll have the freedom to choose a specialist in whatever field my doctor suggests, instead of being locked into one medical system.
  3. A less hectic schedule! This is the first time in two years that I’m not taking any classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. It’s weird, but I think it’ll be good – I’ll have more time at home to work on projects (read: major reorganizing) we’re working on, and won’t have to ration my spoons as much if I’m not being as social. And I still have my weekly volunteering gig in the school’s Resource Center, so it’s not like I’ve cut the place out of my life entirely for the next couple of months.

Gratitude and Grace

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

May has been an interesting month so far. This week has been particularly full of surprises:

  • I woke up feeling pretty miserable last Thursday; when I tried to say I’d work from home the second half of the day, my boss convinced me to take it easy and actually rest so I could recover. I wound up taking Friday off, too, and by Saturday I finally felt like a human being again. I made good use of my convalescence, and got a ton of knitting done for our friends’ baby who’s due to join us in this great wide world in about a week.
  • Sunday night we wound up at a concert at a super Irish pub (by which I mean probably 80% of the patrons were from Ireland, as were the folks behind the bar).
    • Somewhere along the line my partner got to talking with a woman at the bar who informed him that her kid had just recently come out as trans. We didn’t hear much of the concert (both because it was loud in the bar and because we were distracted), but spent the whole evening talking with this woman and her friend (a rather drunk Irishman who laughed a lot), who bought us several rounds. (I think I had more to drink Sunday night than I’ve had in the past two months put together…)
    • I can be a pretty cynical person a lot of the time, but I found myself telling this woman repeatedly that her kid was going to be okay, because progress is happening everywhere. And this kid is just going off to college – just imagine how much farther along we could be by the time they’re done!
    • Rather remarkably, I woke up feeling pretty great on Monday.
  • Tuesday night after songwriting class, I was invited out for wings and drinks by some of the other guys in the class. It was the first time in my life I had the experience of just being “one of the guys” in a non-queer context. It was a little weird, and pretty wonderful.

Which is all to say that life is good, and I have a lot to think about and a lot to be grateful for. I’m a seriously lucky guy.

Rest and Recovery

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

As a meditative practice, I draw a tarot card each morning when I get up and use it as a focal point for some journalling and introspection. There’s been a major theme over the past week of rest, and healing, and struggling to let those things happen.

I am not great at rest.

Don’t get me wrong – I thoroughly enjoy being lazy a lot of the time. But as a chronic insomniac and a person whose brain never really shuts down, the concept of “rest” is one that I struggle with a lot.

I’ve needed to work around that this week. I’ve been in recovery mode since my surgery last Wednesday (which was relatively minor but still came with post-op restrictions and several stitches), and it hasn’t always been easy. I’ve been tired, both because my body is putting itself back together and because the pain medication I’ve been on tends to make me feel a little foggy. I worked from home last Thursday and Friday, but have been out and about every day since Sunday, which has helped keep me from feeling stir crazy but has also meant that I’m experiencing rather more pain and awareness of my limitations at a week post-op than I did the first day or two. As I’m writing this Wednesday evening, I haven’t managed to make it through a full day at work yet (though I’m really, really hoping that doesn’t continue to be a trend). I’m incredibly lucky that my boss is more concerned with my general well-being than anything else, because I’ve not been anywhere near as productive as I’d like.

I am definitely on the mend. And I am learning (ever so slowly) that it is okay to have limitations. This is a lesson I’m sure I’m going to keep coming back to many times in the coming months. I’m hoping it’s one that gets easier with practice.

Tilt-a-Whirl

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, my lovely readers! First and foremost: I am so sorry there was no blog last week. A lot of things about last week did not go as planned, my schedule was totally off, and I honest-to-god did not realize until Monday morning that Thursday had passed me by.

The reason last week was so out of whack was this: I have been avoiding dealing with a minor but persistent and annoying medical issue for many months now. I finally got myself to the doctor at the end of March, who wrote me a surgical referral, which got to me mid-April. I called and made the appointment for Tuesday, May 5, because that was the earliest day that my partner could get off work to come with me.

It is worth noting at this point that this is basically the first time I’ve ever been referred to a specialist – I always had a PPO when I was under my parents’ insurance, and since getting my own HMO plan, I hadn’t looked very seriously at any sort of specialist care. So I am totally new to this process and have no idea what I’m doing.

I was under the impression that this was going to be a super simple, very quick, local anesthesia, in-and-out sort of deal, but I wanted my partner with me both because I did not relish the thought of facing a strange doctor who may or may not be at all trans-competent alone, and because I wasn’t sure how much help I was going to need with aftercare stuff.

So we got to the surgeon’s office Tuesday morning, and as soon as the nurse came in and started talking to us, it became apparent that this was not the actual surgical visit, but the consultation for a rather more involved procedure than I thought I was going to be in for. This would have been really nice to know ahead of time, but in the end we just sort of rolled with it. The surgeon and nurse explained the procedure in more detail (which is still an outpatient procedure, but will require general anesthesia and something like five or six hours in the hospital, and someone to drive me home), gave me some information to take home, and told me to call them to schedule a date once I’d figured things out on my end.

I had totally cleared my schedule for Tuesday and for Wednesday evening, and I decided to keep it that way. Unfortunately, not having my usual activities to trigger my brain, I didn’t remember to post a blog about it last week.

I’m writing this on Monday afternoon, because Tuesday I won’t have time, and surgery is scheduled (for real this time) for Wednesday. I’m nervous, but not as nervous as I had been: even though my partner can’t be there, a friend offered to take the day off to keep me company, and another friend is going to take me home when it’s over. I feel so well cared-for, and so lucky to have the friends that I do.

All that to say, it’s been a couple of wild weeks emotionally. I’ll be glad when Wednesday is over (and I will try to add some sort of update before or shortly after this goes live to let you all know how it went).

Update: Surgery went well; I was very pleased with the care that I received and I had great people looking out for me. I’m feeling very loved.

And, at least as of 6:30 Thursday morning, I’m not in much pain at all. I’m going to work hard to stay on top of the pain meds (and therefore on top of the pain – once the pain kicks in, it’s hard to get it back down), but I’m feeling well enough that I’m at least planning to get some work done from home. Today (and probably tomorrow, too…I don’t know that I’ll be up for public transit yet by then).