Tag: state of the gab

Once upon a time I had a friend who would get mad at me for being “thyroid tired,” aka hypothyroid. She would ask how it was different than being normal tired, and why I couldn’t just get over it, and why it was taking so long, etc… and since I was hypo, I couldn’t adequately explain it through the fog, and the inconvenience of it being such a hazy thing always made her so mad…

If It had to describe it now, it’d be like saying an eye mask of warm gel under your skin that goes through your eyes, up into your forehead, in your cheeks… a constant little humming heat of summer, sapping your energy little by little. No matter how much sleep you get, no matter how much coffee you drink, it’s always there. You can get momentary reprieves by taking naps and when you first turn on the fan, but it doesn’t last; pretty soon it settles back and your mind drifts back into the thick and murky water.

Your limbs don’t want to move… your eyes just want to close… you don’t necessarily want to sleep, you just can’t think straight, so you just sort of drift there until something stirs you again. 

But I have prescription refills again. Not just for thyroid, but for bipolar mania insomnia, too. Because that has not helped me at all whatsoever nopenopenope. 8);

And lots of unpleasant memories to sort through.

Heading out to a writing workshop for the weekend, and I’ll have very limited access to the internet from Friday-Monday! Got all of my stuff taken care of for work, got my manuscript stuff printed and packed away in my magical peacock box (with tiny business card-holding peacock book, extra reading glasses, and writing muse Theo hamster), the last load of laundry’s in the dryer, and… yeah! Totally stoked.  

Maybe I should pick out a pack of tarot cards to throw in there, too, though… that might help if I get stumped during revisions. HMM! 

ANYWAY. Wish me luck! 😀

Reasons for being away:

  1. Legs hurt too much to be at my desk
  2. New meds involve taking two sedatives at night, which is making me v nappy at any given time and v v groggy in the morning (will reschedule dr appointment soon to fix this; he’d intended to transition me to other things by now)
  3. I need to be working on my book so I’ve been cleaning the apartment and working on my new website instead
  4. Starbound
  5. Stranger Things
  6. Lady Dynamite
  7. zzzzz z z zzz z z zz 
  8. I think the sedatives are also making me somewhat antisocial because I do not have the energy to keep up with anything, especially scrolling through posts and/or dealing with people 

Seriously though I am gonna finish these rewrites and query agents by the end of August. 

AND HERE IS A CAT:

Sorry for the silence, been very busy.

Doctor appointment went well. He’s extremely loud but friendly and seems to know what he’s doing. I like him. Lab tests for blood work all came back GREAT (yes, even glucose and cholesterol, those of you fatphobic jerks), except for vitamin d, which I am apparently VERY deficient in. Added a med for the tension/cluster headaches that also acts as a mood stabilizer. Will be changing my primary anti-depressant med in a month after my recheck, too. 

He’s referred me to a vein specialist, too, because he wants there to be thorough testing for the edema, since he suspects it’s a venous disease, not lymphedema. They’re treated the same way, basically, but needs to be tested and evaluated by an expert, who I’d need to see anyway for said treatment.

It was encouraging, though. He said that my inability to lose weight isn’t because of failure to diet or exercise (though he said I should keep that up of course), but because there’s something else going on. Thank god. 

He said, “Thyroid cancer, PCOS, anti-depressants that are known for causing weight gain… GEE. Clearly there’s something more here at work!” with this big grin like of COURSE it wasn’t my fault and he didn’t think I was just lazy and a pig. 

I could have cried. 

He also said that clearly I was a person who wasn’t just going to accept my health the way it was. I wanted to hug him.

I don’t ever expect to be a super model. I don’t think I’ll ever be thin. And that’s okay. I want to be able to go camping. I want to be able to go on little hikes in the summer and keep up. I want to run really slowly in a community marathon for charity and not die. I want to be able to go to Disneyland and not have to worry if I will be able to fit in the rides or not. 

THESE ARE MY ASPIRATIONS. 

Anyway I think that’s pretty much it. I can’t wait for the LONG weekend. The new med has ‘may cause drowsiness’ on the bottle and bOY it is not kidding. I am going to sleep and do very little else.

I wrote a big long post explaining my latest mopey streak but then deleted it because… it was really long. Short version:

  • May is hard because my dad died five years ago on May 26th. It sucked. It still sucks. But things are slowly getting better.
  • I’m all sorts of worked up about my health because I gained more weight for no apparent reason, and it’s freaking me out even though I know it’s part of the monthly cycle and will be gone in a few days, just like that.
  • High stress, high paranoia, high ANGER levels. GAB SMASH, then curl up on the couch and cry because she is FOREVER ALONE. 
  • New doctor next week. I’m afraid he’ll be a jerk like other doctor’s I’ve had, but if I can just get him to find me a lymphedema specialist, I’ll be happy. It’d be nice if he gave me more ambien, too. 
  • If not I will fight him. Literally. Or verbally. IDK. 

Good things:

  • I rejoined weight watchers (online) because I can finally afford it again.
  • I’ve started learning Spanish because it bothers me that I can’t help more people that I meet on the train. It’s fun so far, even if my accent is terrible.
  • I’m pretty darn excited about San Diego. I have the silly idea of finding a bakery there to make us a (REALLY) tiny wedding cake. There was so much that we wanted to do for our wedding but couldn’t afford to at the time. 

I think that’s it. 

Y’know that sort of impending doom feeling that you get in your chest sometimes? That fills you with dread and you don’t even know what could go wrong but you know that it will? And you can already see your friends drifting away from you, there’s evidence everywhere, but you feel helpless to stop it because you’re so tired and it’s inevitable, anyway? There’s no permanence in this life at all, just adapting and hoping that the next wave of change won’t be too hard to wade through. That maybe, if you’re very very lucky, you’ll be left with some scraps of the friendships and projects you’ve built. 

Friends and jobs and fandoms and obsessions all burst into brilliant light and fade in a constant flow. It’s like life is a spider-web with moments of passion connecting all of the random threads together, but they give way to lulls for the next point of contact…

ughh

image

I’m adding a ton of art blogs to help dilute my dash of sadness.

Also some other stuff:

  • My mom called me to tell me that she found Calico Critters at Shopko
  • We’re going to try to make her go see Zootopia with us on Saturday
  • I upped my step goal from 5,000 to 6,000 on fitbit and am hitting it consistently
  • I should be doing my comic right now… *cough*
  • I finished reading Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children today, as recommended by Allie, and loved it. The only sad thing is that it’s a SERIES, aaarghh nooo why. I guess it’s also being made into a movie?! Which is awesome, but I want to use it for a comp for MY book…! 
  • Speaking of, only 17k left to go (how am I going to wrap this up?!)
  • I want to redo my website, but I think that’s largely because I’m supposed to be writing…

I guess that’s it.

Are the wraps helping? Have you noticed a difference?

Yes and yes. I have been using just the calf wrap (thigh is coming later this week, I think) on my right leg, and it has stopped it from being in pain. It’s heavy, but my leg doesn’t feel swollen, if that makes sense. Like double bagging a grocery bag, almost. And coupled with lying on the couch with my feet up for a couple of evenings, and wrapping during the day, I’ve had to run to the bathroom every hour. Which is annoying, but great. 

My leg is much smaller than it was even just two days ago. It also hurts way less than my left leg, which has never been quite as bad as my right. I hope I can order more wraps soon.

And here I get long-winded about lymphedema. TL;DR: yes, the wrap is great.

The lymphatic system is like a bunch of roots that go all over your body. Its job is to circulate all of that water that humans are made of. Going in, it drops off proteins and nutrients, going out, it washes the debris and bacteria away. But, just like roots, if the lymphatic system is damaged (through injury or, in my case, radiation during cancer treatments), it stops being able to do its job so well. It delivers the fluid and then the fluid just sort of… sits there. And the longer this goes on, the more damaged it gets, the harder your heart works, the more your skin stretches… and pretty soon you can get lesions and super bad infections and blood clots, etc, because your muscles and skin are saturated with this dirty protein water. Super gross. 

It can’t be cured because they have no idea how to repair the tiny little fragile lymphatic veins. They’re working on it, sure, but right now, all we can do is drain and compress. 

Draining is done with massage (manual lymphatic drainage/total decongestive therapy) by a specialized therapist. You can also do dry brushing yourself, massaging the skin to get the fluid to go back toward your heart. Gravity helps, putting your legs above your heart for long periods of time. That makes your legs more squishy and stuff, but the skin is still stretched out and the lymphatic system is still just gonna drop more fluid down there. So you moisturize your skin to try to get it healthy, elastic, and tight again, and put on a compression wrap (or sock, if your leg is small enough) so that the lymph fluid CAN’T JUST SIT THERE; there’s NO ROOM. This enables you to sit at a desk and stuff and your leg is like ‘man there’s lots of pressure, just gonna push that lymph fluid away.’ 

Lather, rinse, repeat. Every day. For the rest of your life. 

Re: Portfolio.

First of all, I emailed the guy who wrote the ‘Forget Style’ post to tell him how much you guys loved it. He wrote back and said he’s glad to hear it. 🙂 This is also the guy who is going to be critiquing my portfolio. I’m stoked.

Second, I researched a ton of paper last night, and then emailed my boss for his opinion. Dude knows his paper. I got into work today and he gave me his feedback and said that he put some leftover 12×18 100lb coverstock on my desk to look at. My boss is the best. I took home a sheet to play with and he was just like “okay!” 

Then tonight, I ordered two different reams of paper… a ream of 60lb and 80lb cover stock gloss paper (since cover tends to be thicker than text, and while I want this to be NICE, I have to be a little budget-conscious). I’m having them shipped to work, and they should be there in a week or two. Boss has already okayed my printing after hours on our industrial laserjet, since I don’t need that many prints for this project.

The binder that I have is a 24 page 11×14 Itoya Art Profolio, which isn’t as nice as some of the other books, but with my 40% off coupon at Michael’s, it was a quarter of the price of the nicer books. And while I could try to make my own book, I’m a little terrified of completely screwing up and ruining paper. Making a cover? Binding stuff? AAHH. Plus it needs to lay flat! How! At work we do these awesome booklets on 11×17 paper, but folded, they’re only 11×8.5, which seems like a waste… .. …. but a heck of a lot easier… 

ANYWAY… 

This leaves the problem of “I’m only allowed to have 15 pages” of art in a 24 page book that does not permit the addition or removal of pages. I can include a cover page, TOC (so overkill omg), contact page, thanks page, and a bio page, but that still leaves four pages, and it always looks so tacky to have blank pages at the end of a book…

It has been suggested that division pages could work, but part of me is not wanting to lump my art into specific sections… mostly because I would be worried that I was miscategorizing things, and that would make me look like an idiot. 

I could use one of them to hold postcards, which I guess is a thing that illustrators give out as promotional material for their work along with business cards… 

This is hard. 

But at least I know how to use InDesign thanks to my job, so it will be fun to lay this sucker out.