These Things

 It's been a rough few weeks. Things seem to be falling apart at an accelerated rate recently. Here is a small sample of things contributing to this feeling:

I was in the ER about five days ago, a middle of the night trip. I came home with a few things ruled out (but no real answers) and an impressive collection of huge purple bruises from various attempts to put an IV in.

After that, I slept on the couch for about five nights because getting into bed makes me feel anxious. 

Dave injured his rib and a tooth (a crown actually). 

I've just been wanting to sit at home and eat junk food, but the weight I've accumulated during the pandemic is making my health problems worse, I'm sure. Thinking about dieting and losing weight makes me want to binge eat. (I did just finish off a bag of potato chips, but in my defense my lunch was a salad. It was a salad with lots of cheese and ranch dressing piled on top, but there were vegetables in there somewhere, too. Healthy, right?) The nurse practitioner I've been seeing put in a referral for me to see an endocrinologist. I got a call today. They scheduled me for an appointment in late May of next year.

Exercise has been so difficult for a year or more, one of the things I found out when they tested my oxygen saturation levels and realized that they're falling precipitously whenever I do things like, you know, walk across the room. Turns out my efforts to get more exercise were being hampered by this and by all the muscles in my body being chronically deprived of oxygen. And here I was wondering why I had to take a break to catch my breath and hang on to the counter just to unload the dishwasher or why it was so difficult just to walk from the car to the front door. (Well, I mean I still wonder why I'm unable to keep my O2 sats up, but at least I know it's not just because I am so horribly out of shape.)

I can see a pulmonologist in November and a cardiologist in December. But at least those are appointments for this year.

So I've been camped out on the couch, putting arnica gel on my bruised arms and using my incentive spirometer and watching a bunch of Netflix when I'm not sleeping.  (Though I've been sleeping much better on supplemental oxygen. I don't wake up several times in the night with my heart pounding out of my chest, something that's been happening frequently for the last several months. I'm actually waking up feeling rested and not in the kind of all-over, diffuse pain I had been dealing with before.)

I finished the two available seasons of Young Royals. It reminded me very much of Heartstopper, but is more complex and less of a fairytale than Heartstopper. I watched a terrible Michael J. Fox movie from the 80s called The Secret of My Success. I watched Twins (which I had never seen) with Arnold and Danny Devito. I started watching Slap Shot, the 1977 Paul Newman film about ice hockey that I saw as a kid and thought was funny. (It's actually an adult film--has become a kind of cult classic, actually--with a lot of dark humor and it holds up well, considering.) I started watching City of Ghosts, a kids' animated series about ghosts in and around Los Angeles. I like it. 

I've done a tiny bit of sewing, just working on what I was working on before, but only for a few minutes a day.

So that's it, some of the things going on in my life.