Categories
the human body is made of bullshit worldcon

Heading to Worldcon. I guess.

Yes, I’m going to Worldcon this year. I haven’t really been talking about it much because… well, I’m going to be honest. I’m having a lot of anxiety and while I’m looking forward to doing vacation-y stuff in Scotland, I am dreading the convention more than a little.

I’m a writer, so I guess I’ll write about it.

A large source of my dread is, in all honesty, that I’m on business meeting staff this year. And while I really love the rest of the staff team and am excited to be working with them, there’s also the 100 fucking page long agenda (available from this URL if you want to give yourself sympathetic anxiety: https://glasgow2024.org/whats-on/wsfs-business-meeting/business-meeting-agenda/). I don’t feel like I’m talking out of turn to acknowledge that there are some controversial things on the agenda, thanks in no small part to a previous business meeting I did not participate in, and I’m also well aware of some of the shit that’s being said out there in the community.

I don’t have any programming at Glasgow other than the business meetings. Because they’re going to run so long, and because I had to take a hard look at both my mental and physical health and concluded that there is quite literally no way I could do more programming as an author and guarantee that I’d be even marginally pleasant and energetic for it.

I can’t really blame WSFS entirely, however, and it would be very unfair to do so. The rest of it is of a piece with the physical and adjacent mental health issues that I’ve been struggling with since November 2022. Things are improving (I’m still in remission! I’m finally starting to taper off immunosuppressants!) but I feel like I am not even living in the neighborhood of my old self yet, and who knows if I ever will again.

This is the first large convention I will have gone to since all of this bullshit started. Up until now, I’ve basically been living like a recluse in my own basement, because I’ve been taking my nephrologist very seriously when he’s told me how fucking bad it would be to catch even a cold while I’m on cyclosporine, let alone COVID. (Having had a single cold and a resulting sinus infection during this time has only highlighted how right he is.) So I’m incredibly anxious about the plane flight and the convention, since those are the times when I’m going to be around a lot of people in enclosed spaces. You can bet your ass I’m going to be wearing a mask all the time!

And frankly, I’ve never been really great with crowds, though I do a decent job of pretending when I’m “on” and being an official, friendly author person. But now, it’s been over a year and a half since I’ve been around any kind of sizable group of people that I’d like to actually interact in and that’s kind of freaking me out, too.

There’s one other thing, too, which feels vain and stupid but here we are. I’ve gained a lot of weight in the last year and a half, thanks to long-term high-dose steroids and being at times just very physically unwell. I’ve always taken pride in being a very natty dresser, and I know it’s how people tend to find me in a crowd. All that’s gone out the window; frankly, my old, nice clothes no longer fit me satisfactorily, and I haven’t had time, energy, nor budget to remedy that situation. So approaching this Worldcon now feels like heading for a battle without any armor.

Bonus author anxiety: I haven’t really done any writing (other than some tie-in work that I am proud of!) in a year and a half. Feels bad, man.

So yeah. I wish I could say I was looking forward to Worldcon, but I really can’t at this point. I’m hoping that once I’m there I’ll be able to relax and have some fun and see people I haven’t gotten to see in a while. Please, if you’ll be there and you’d like to hang out, let me know! I’m not really in a place to go to a party or barcon it, but I’d be up for grabbing lunch or sitting outside and having a tea* or going for a walk. Something low key.

On the other hand, if you see me and I look weird or am being unusually quiet or seem really anxious, I promise it’s not you. It’s me, and the fact that my kidneys tried to literally murder me a year and a half ago and I’m still not over it.

Also, please wear a mask at the convention. In all indoor spaces, really. I know I’m not the only immunocompromised person around.

 

* – guess who’s going to Scotland and can’t drink alcohol right now. Me. I’m talking about me.

Categories
me the human body is made of bullshit

Hell of a year.

It’s July, Alex.

Hi, it’s me. I’m not dead. Surprisingly. You may have noticed that I started getting pretty quiet in 2022. At the start, this was for a good reason–well, all the reasons have been good ones, this was for a happy reason. I was writing a book for Activision-Blizzard, and also writing an absolute butt-ton of scripts for Marvel Move (yes, that’s right, I am writing Thor and Loki). I just did not have available brain juice for anything else. This website fell by the wayside, and then I pretty much gave up on social media as Elon Musk made Twitter progressively less pleasant to be on.

I will also be frank, I was also having some mental health issues, including a bout of depression and anxiety bad enough that I finally got on SSRIs, which is what had me functional enough to do the aforementioned writing. So at least as I went into autumn of 2022, I was feeling pretty good, I was just… busy. Very busy.

Then everything changed when the fire nation attacked when I was about to get on an airplane for a nearly month-long family vacation with my best friend and niblings in Japan.

I’m about to get into some medical stuff, which always edges the line of oversharing. I think in this case, it’s stuff that’s actually important to share, because I had no fucking idea I was in serious trouble until it was very serious trouble. And as with many health-related things, it started in a way I could shrug off because I’d never heard of other people having issues like this. (For good reason, it turns out.) But I will warn you, what follows is going to involve a lot of stressful medical bullshit, and also a lot of pee.

Cue literally twelve goddamn hours before I get on an international flight. I notice that my ankles are kind of swollen, which is… weird, but not unheard of. For about the previous week, one of my ankles had been kind of puffy off and on. I chalked it up to having shitty joints and having recently eaten some very salty food, with a mental note to bring it up with my doctor post-Japan if it kept randomly happening. Go to bed. Get up. The ankles? Even more swollen. I know enough to realize this is not a great thing to have happening on a long flight, when one’s ankles might swell up to begin with. But twenty minutes from heading to the airport, I wasn’t going to call things off and pay ticket change fees so I could go to the doctor, if I could even get a same-day appointment. I bought a pair of overpriced compression socks at the airport and kept going.

I had an absolutely fucking great time in Japan. I want to be clear about that. Despite everything that was going on with my body, I still had a ton of fun and loved being there with everyone. But even as I was eating my way across Osaka or going for a boat ride in Kobe Bay, I was aware that something was Not Good. My legs kept swelling up. I ended up with what I thought was a rash all over my calves, which was concerning enough that I did a phone visit with a doctor; the best we could come up with was cortisone and time. But it looked gross enough that I didn’t end up going to an onsen at all because I wouldn’t want to share a hot pool with someone whose skin looked like mine.

(This was not a rash, it turned out. This was just my skin reacting to how much it was being stretched by the rapidly building edema.)

And my legs kept swelling. And swelling. My feet looked like balloons. The edema started creeping up, like I was a latex glove being slowly filled at a sink, first all the way to my knees, then over my knees, then halfway up my thighs. It was difficult to bend my knees if my legs had been straight for a while; if I pressed a finger against my skin it formed a deep and persistent pit in the swelling. I could tell I’d also gained a lot of weight elsewhere (which I blamed on being fat initially–it wasn’t). My joints ached. I was glad I’d brought my collapsable cane with me, because I started needing it to get around because I was so creaky. I started developing a cough, mild at first, which was non-productive even though I could feel something crackling in my lungs. The cough got bad enough that I blew out a little blood vessel in one of my eyes, which wasn’t painful, but it looked disgusting. Annoying, I thought, that once again I’d gotten a travel cold despite masking on the plane.

(It wasn’t a cold.)

With all that going on, it’s probably not a surprise that I noticed but utterly dismissed what was actually the most important factor: every time I peed, it was foamy like a fucking beer. Like persistently foamy. Huh, weird, I thought. I don’t think it’s normally like that? Probably something about the cleaning products in a different country.

I’m going to tell you right now that if you have persistently foamy pee, and it’s a weird new thing in your life you’ve just been ignoring, stop reading this blog post and make an appointment with your doctor. Right now.

Through it all, I kept telling myself that I just needed to make it through until I was back home, because I didn’t actually feel bad enough to want to go to a Japanese emergency room, where I’d have to drag my best friend’s husband there with me for who knew how many hours for what was no doubt nothing but would get me told off for being fat. (And this is what medical fatphobia does to us.) And he did offer; I simply didn’t feel bad enough to think it was necessary.

Until I was two days out from leaving for home. I split off from the group in Nagoya because they were going to spend a bit longer doing strictly family stuff in another city, and I was supposed to go spend a day in Kyoto and then my last day in Tokyo. Instead, I got sick. Like massive vomiting, diarrhea, coughing so hard I was constantly in danger of either shitting or pissing or both myself. Another blood vessel in one of my eyes blew out, a much bigger one that had half my sclera bright red like I’d been in a fight. I spent an extra day shut in my hotel room in Nagoya because I couldn’t imagine getting on a train, and just desperately hoped it would pass in 24 hours so I could get on my flight home. I thought about going to the ER; I probably would have asked if I’d still had access to a native Japanese speaker to help me. I tried to figure out if there was a way I could get a COVID test before getting on the plane, because considering the way I’ve reacted to the vaccines, I was terrified I’d finally caught COVID.

(It wasn’t COVID.)

But I did feel better after 24 hours, good enough to make it back to Tokyo and have some fun for my last evening in Japan. The flight home was fucking horrific; the edema in my legs and abdomen was so bad, I had to wedge myself into the seat and almost couldn’t buckle the seatbelt. I couldn’t stop coughing, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I wish I could send a personal apology to everyone who had to sit in the airplane’s cabin with me, along with the good news that hey at least it wasn’t anything contagious.

The minute we landed, I texted my housemate to let her know I was on the ground. And when she picked me up, I told her to take me directly to the ER. Which was the smartest thing I could have done, then.

By the time the ER got a look at me, my systolic blood pressure was over 160–which is not quite a hypertensive crisis, but heading that way, and also deeply worrying for me because I’d never had a blood pressure that high in my life. The 12-lead EKG picked up irregularities in the electrical transmission in my heart. The doctors ordered a ton of labs and then started me on furosemide (a diuretic), because they had no idea what was causing what, but it was very plain that I had a lot of extra water in my system I needed to pee off. They sent me home with strict instructions to see my primary care physician as soon as possible, or to come back to the ER if I started feeling worse.

I’m not going to go into detail about how December went for me. But over the course of a week and a half, after getting bumped up to 40 mg furosemide twice a day (that’s a lot of furosemide), I peed off over 30 pounds of extra water I’d been carrying around. That solved the blood pressure issue and the cough, even if we still had no idea why it had happened. I bounced around specialists, from pulmonary to cardiology, had a real scare with an echocardiogram that, on re-do once I was minus all that fluid turned out to be fine. And then I got referred to the nephrologist, because hoo boy, my pee was spicy**.

**Spicy here does not mean ow; there was no UTI or anything like that. We started calling it spicy because I was pissing out all of my protein in massive amounts, which is Very Bad.

Turns out I had what is called Nephrotic Syndrome, which means my kidneys were not filtering my blood properly. But what was causing it? That became the real question. It wasn’t until January, after a kidney biopsy, that there was finally an answer for what was causing my kidneys to go haywire: focal segmental glomerulosclerosis. (aka FSGS.)

So for my 42nd birthday, my body got me a rare autoimmune condition. Thanks, pal.

The good thing about having a diagnosis is, even if the diagnosis is scary (and I will not claim this one isn’t) at least there is an answer. There’s a course of treatment. There’s ways to track it and ameliorate it. And even the scary things (like the specter of dialysis and kidney failure) still mean you can start mentally preparing yourself for the worst to come to pass. You might not like where you’re going, but at least it’s not a terrifying unknown.

The treatment for FSGS turns out to be: a lot of immunosuppressants. Anyone with a chronic condition that’s autoimmune is no doubt nodding at this point, because you know what’s coming next, and it’s an absolute shitload of prednisone. I’ve been on prednisone before, but this was an amount of prednisone that involved me signing a waiver indicating I understood that it could do fun things like give me diabetes or permanently fuck up my ability to make my own cortisol. But you know what both those things (and everything else on the possible side effects list) are? Less scary than the certainty of my kidneys completely shutting down.

High dose prednisone is a wild fucking ride. I spent the first month unable to sleep for more than about three hours a night; I had energy, but it was all bad, frenetic energy of the kind of that makes it impossible to form useful thoughts. I was always hungry; I put back on most of the weight I’d lost that had been edema, this time because I was just constantly fucking ravenous and also felt so shitty that I couldn’t even try to temper it a little with exercise. And not eating? Not an option. Because it also made me aggressive and cranky and angry, which translated into being hangry all the damn time. I was not fun to deal with.

It’s now July and I’m finally on a low enough dose of prednisone that I’m starting to feel sort of like myself again. Because the prednisone has been replaced with cyclosporine, which is an immunosuppressant normally given to transplant patients, but apparently it’s pretty awesome for getting your body to stop trying to kill your own kidneys. So that means I’m in remission now, yay!

But also… with all that going on, in February, my father died. That… is something I will maybe talk about later, but there’s a lot I’m still working through in my own head before there’s much I’d want to say out loud. Other than it fucking sucks. Grief is hard, and you have to just keep feeling all the feelings until you’re done with them or they’re done with you. I miss my dad. And I love him.

So yeah.

If you tl;dr’ed this post, here are the two things I want you to know, the absolute most important take-homes:

  1. If your pee is repeatedly foamy like a beer, GO TO THE DOCTOR. There are a lot of things that can cause it that aren’t super rare autoimmune diseases, and most of them suck. Don’t wait to feel sick.
  2. 2023 can eat my entire queer ass. Fuck this year.
Categories
health the human body is made of bullshit thinking out loud

“Normal”

On advice of the workers comp doctor, I’ve been going to the pool, to try to do some walking without my full weight on my foot. My rec center has a little lazy river thing, and I walked with the current of it today.

It felt almost normal.

Except as soon as I thought that, I realized that normal was the wrong word to use. What I really meant was that it felt something in the neighborhood of how I used to be able to walk, before the surgery, before the injury. Normal back then was a moderate gait with a slight limp that I’d developed over 35 years of walking on my terrible arches and chronically spraining my left ankle. That normal wasn’t the best gait in the world, but it got me around at a decent clip and meant I could average 5 miles of walking a day between work and playing Ingress or Pokemon and feel pretty good about it.

Normal is normal for you. It’s the place you settle after the healing and the physical therapy and the retraining to about as good as it’s going to be. Normal is made of hopefully good habits, but some bad. And normal changes. That’s the thing that trips me up. Normal isn’t a static value. It shifts with the circumstances, gets modified by the sling and arrows of outrageous fortune.

After you get injured, or sick, or anything else, on the other side you find a new normal. Sometimes it’s the same or close to the old normal. Sometimes it’s going to be really different. The hardest thing to accept is that it is what it is. Your normal is going to be your normal. You can push it this way or that with physical therapy, with dedicated time and practice and good technique and mindfulness. But at some point, you hit the border where you can go no further. The normal doesn’t move that far from its center unless it’s traumatically shifted again.

We like to pretend that mind over matter is a thing. But eventually, the matter wins. It’s what we’re made of, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I’m mostly thinking about this now because the workers comp doctor told me something else: I’m not progressing as fast as they would expect for someone my age and relative level of health. That could mean nothing, or it could mean everything. You can’t dictate the way your body heals. But it’s making me wonder if I’ve already arrived at my new normal and now I’m just trying to push the center of it as far as I can. Is my new normal always walking with a cane? Is my new normal chronic pain in the arch of my foot? Is my new normal a much more pronounced limp than I used to have, one that everyone can see and not just trained professionals? Or is this not my normal, and instead a symptom that something else has gone wrong, a nick in a ligament or a bruise on a bone?

There’s no way of knowing right now. Time will tell.

Which as you can imagine, I’m just overjoyed about. I’ve always been such a patient soul, right? I want a set reward and a guarantee, and I get none of those things. All I can do is put in the work and keep hoping. And while I work on my matter to try to build its normal, I also need to work on my mind. I have to be able to accept wherever I end up.

That’s the part that’s harder than fighting my nemesis, the two-inch-high step, or attempting calf stretches, or the other things that only just hurt. I have to reshape my expectations of myself, my habits, my life. Because I have to keep going on the other side of it. I have to find a new normal for my life, just like I have to find a new normal for my gait, and that’s the scariest part of all.

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the human body is made of bullshit

Adventures in Anesthesia

I had surgery again today. Yay me. To get a bone spur shaved off of my left big toe and get the joint cleaned up. (Old kung fu injury, blah blah.) I’m looking forward to being able to run again once I’m done with the PT.

Though for now I’m sitting on the couch, wishing I could take this damn dressing off because I swear it’s making things hurt worse. I’ve got my foot propped up on a mound of pillows. I also only really woke up at 2130 even though my surgery was at 0800. If you follow me on Twitter you know I was all over the place this morning before crapping out. And incoherent.

Basically, fun with anesthesia.

I didn’t do the greatest with the anesthesia when I had my shoulder scoped. But it wasn’t too bad. I had (I think) something like a panic attack when I first came out, so they put me under again. After that I was fine. But I also had a nerve block done that time, so I think they didn’t put me on so many painkillers. Once I was out of the hospital if I remember right I went to Jack’n’Grill and had something both greasy and spicy and was fine.

Well, this time I elected to not go for the nerve block. I wasn’t offered one originally, so I assumed it wasn’t needed. Then the anesthesiologist came back and told me another anesthesiologist had texted her to suggest she do a nerve block. But hey, it was only a toe. She didn’t seem to think I needed one before, right? Just more pain medication during anesthesia, with pepcid so I wouldn’t get so sick.

Next time someone offers me a nerve block, I’m saying yes. Hell, I’m asking for one.

It’s not a pain issue. It’s a being incoherent and vomiting every time I stood up issue. Finally after 12 hours I seem to have gotten out of that, thank goodness. I’ve had two bagels and they’re sitting okay. In a bit of pain but not too bad. Have to use crutches to get around right now though.

I don’t think I had a panic attack this time. But instead when I woke up, I was paranoid. I kept telling the nurse that I needed to leave and go for a walk. My legs wanted to move and I couldn’t hold still. Then I realized that the surgeon put a tracking device in my big toe and I needed to get out now or they wouldn’t let me. Good thing the nurse and Mike wouldn’t allow me to get up And then even worse, I knew that the doctors were reptoids and I needed to escape.

I’m not even joking. It’s weird and hilarious now, but at the time I was convinced that my doctors were aliens and they were going to do terrible things to me.

It wore off quickly, though. Then it was just fatigue, dizziness, and vomiting. So if I was tweeting/texting with you and I suddenly disappeared, sorry. I kept falling asleep. They’ve got me on vicodin this time instead of oxycodone so hopefully that will not make me randomly throw up as well. Just makes me sleepy. I think I’ll jut be sleepy all weekend. Loki was a sweet boy and kept me company all day in bed, and now Tengu has figured out how to dock on my lip even though I’m laying out across the couch instead of sitting properly. The kitties are being such helpers. And Mike and Kathy have been great, too. I feel super guilty having to ask them to carry everything for me and making me sandwiches and stuff. (I made my own sandwich around 2200, to prove I could, but now I’ll let them feel useful. That’s totally why.

I have to call in the morning to set up my followup with the doctor (I have to keep the dressing on until then god I think it’s crushing my foot) and I think I’ll ask what I got put on for the anesthesia. I really don’t want to ever go back to a drug planet where I believe in reptoids.

Categories
the human body is made of bullshit things that are hard to write

The hardest part of discipline

So last week, I let a doctor jam a needle into the proximal joint of my big toe. Then pump cortisone into it. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt pain like that. The only reason I didn’t haul off and punch him in the arm was because he was holding a needle. Stuck into my fucking toe.

Today, it actually feels pretty good. I can wiggle the big toe on my left foot. Which is more than I could say this time last week. I’m doing physical therapy exercises now, which means picking up marbles with my toes, after first retrieving those marbles from the far-flung corners where Tengu has put them when I wasn’t looking. That cat loves marbles.

So I guess this another installment in my ongoing series on how the human body is made of flimsy bullshit.

I ended up at the doctor’s office last week because my back has been bothering me off and on since August. The big toe on my left foot has been almost immobile far longer, and I thought I’d have the doctor look at it while I was there. The x-rays on my back came out fine, thanks for asking. My toe, not so much. The joint is badly narrowed and I have extra bone growth, which is a bad thing. This lead to the cortisone shot and the exercises, and hopefully that will work because otherwise I get to look forward to foot surgery in the near future.

Though I guess, having made it through shoulder surgery, foot surgery can’t possibly suck that much.

But it’s also incredibly upsetting. Because I feel like I did this to myself. Over a year ago, I hyperextended my toe pretty badly while I was practicing kung fu. (Which means, by the way, I screwed up when I was practicing, since that isn’t something that should normally happen.) It hurt like a bitch, so I went to the doctor after a week and got told it was a sprain. I just needed to wear one of those immobilizing shoes for three weeks and give it time to heal. But it didn’t heal.

I should have gone back to the doctor when it didn’t stop hurting. But I figured I’d just work through it. The pain steadily got worse, but just a little at a time so I didn’t really notice. Until I started tap lessons.

I should have figured out already that working through the pain when it’s that kind of pain is a stupid move. Look how it turned out with my shoulder, after all. Maybe some day I’ll figure out that these aren’t the kind of problems that can be cured with tenacity.

I’m big into discipline, into making things a habit so you feel weird if you don’t do them. For me, it’s worked for writing, and it’s worked even better with exercise. But with writing, there’s yet to be a time when doing daily wordcount could hurt me. Maybe that day will come. With exercise, though, there are times when exercising can and will hurt you. Exercising injured may sound like a badass thing to do (keep going on your broken leg! win the game!), but it’s not. It’ll likely just get you more hurt. And while I don’t think you get any prizes if you get buried with all of your original parts, you also don’t get any prizes for breaking yourself into non-functioning pieces because you were too damn obstinate to just pause.

One of the hardest emails I’ve sent in recent memory was the one to my tap instructor, when I told her I wouldn’t be able to continue with lessons until my foot was better. Just like when my shoulder blew out, one of the most upsetting conversations I’ve ever had was telling Shifu that I had to drop out of class for a while. Good teachers, good coaches, are always understanding about these things. Good teachers don’t want you to hurt yourself. They understand.

It’s a lot harder to give yourself that kind of understanding. First off, there’s the disappointment of it, but I’ve had my fajitas (and a margarita) now, and I’m over it. It’s more that I’ve never been any kind of fucking athlete. After fighting so hard to be able to run or do kung fu or dance when once upon a time I could barely climb a couple flights of stairs, I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose it. After going so many places and doing so many things powered by sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness, maybe I don’t know how to deal with a problem that I can’t just wear down. I’m lucky I have friends who are willing to tell me over and over again to stop being stupid and rest.

I have to believe in myself, that when I get injured it isn’t the end of the world if I have to stop and rest. That I will recover whatever ground I might lose, or that I’ll be able to find new ground to cover. But that’s the hard part. The scary part. It’s easier to do something than not do something. It’s easier to stay in motion when you’ve been in motion.

And that’s why this is another part of discipline that I have to learn.

Categories
my exciting life the human body is made of bullshit

Tattoo Rash (The Human Body Is Made of Bullshit)

I’m normally not one to talk about my various biological issues on my blog, but I kind of feel like I should mention this one. When it happened to me and I was frantically googling to find out if my skin was about to explode and cause me to die, I had a hell of a time finding anything and I was scared half to death.

So this is what happened:

While I was in London–the day we interviewed Elliot Grove, actually–I got hit by sudden, painful, oh sweet Aphrodite let me scrub it with a wire brush why god why itching on my right arm. Specifically on my new-ish tattoo, which at that point I’d had for nearly a month with no adverse effects. And even stranger, it wasn’t even the entire tattoo–it was just under one particular circular area, the stylized galaxy on my right forearm.

It was weird, and sudden, and I had a minor freak out because I though it might be some kind of insect bite, and oh shit what if it was bed bugs. Though I quickly realized that made no sense at all, because why the hell would bug just bite me on that one spot, and only where I had ink?

The itching got continuously worse, and the skin in that area got very inflamed. I actually stopped wanting to scratch it pretty quickly just because it was so damn painful, to the point that wearing my shirtsleeves down felt like scrubbing that bit of my skin with sandpaper.

What little I could find with google indicated that it was likely I’d developed a random allergic reaction to something that was in the ink from the tattoo. Which did make sense, considering the rash was limited to one area, and that was the only area in any of the tattoos where I had gray ink. What I managed to glean from some random forums where other people had this issue was that it would probably go away in a few weeks on its own (argh), but if not I might have to have the tattoo removed(!!!!).

I’m happy to report I haven’t had to get the tattoo removed. And the rash has now officially gone away. I don’t know if it was environmental or what, since it felt like it got a little bit better as soon as I left London. Guess I’ll find out on that one when I go back to the UK for Christmas.

Mostly, I just want to tell you, if you get a random tattoo-related rash, it will most likely be okay. Here’s what you do:

  1. Do not freak out.
  2. DO NOT ITCH.
  3. Take some kind of allergy medication. I used Claritin (generic: Loratadine) which didn’t make the rash go away, but made it significantly less itchy to the point that I lasted the next two weeks without losing my goddamn mind. If you can take Benadryl (generic: Diphenhydramine) without being completely fucked up by it, you might want to give that a whirl.
  4. I had some limited success with using hydrocortisone cream on the rash. However, what really seemed to make a difference was when I got home and had access to a different (stronger) steroid ointment that I have via prescription (I normally use it to treat eczema I occasionally get on my hands and feet). Which brings us to:
  5. If you can do so easily and cheaply, just go to a dermatologist and get something prescribed to treat the itching.
  6. Wait for the rash to go away.
  7. If it hasn’t gone away in three weeks, definitely go to the dermatologist.

My rash started getting less awful after about a week, which just so happened to coincide with when I got home and had access to my better steroid ointment. (We have a slight and unanswerable correlation/causation issue here, I’m afraid.) After a week of self-treating with the ointment and claritin, I’m off both and just fine. Though the skin on that portion of the tattoo is a little dry and scaly, which I expect to correct on its own in a little more time.

And hopefully that’s the end of it. Random allergic reaction go go go!

Categories
the human body is made of bullshit

My Arm Is an Alien

There is an alien clamped on to my right shoulder, bonelessly flowing down to my fingertips. It’s heavy like lead and limp. I poke and prod and feel nothing but gelatinous flesh over toneless muscle, skin strangely warm. Poke and prod and there’s no sensation, just the vague, uncomfortable notion that it should feel like something but it belongs to someone else. When I stand, my arm swings in its sling like a dead weight dangling from a crane. It bounces off the edge of a sink, a dull thud the only indication anything has happened.

I stare at my half curled fingers and tell them to move. Sometimes there’s a vague twitch, sometimes nothing, and every now and then a movement, a real movement masked with the feeling of pins and needles.

This is what a nerve block feels like.

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My skin is sketched with purple marker lines and stained with betadine. I thought it was dried blood, collected on the back of my shoulder and in my armpit, but when Mike wiped it away the paper towel turned the color of orange crush.

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I have pictures of the inside of my shoulder now. They are an alien landscape, clean and very pale. We have a strange notion that the inside of our bodies should be slick and red, too much TV I suppose. When we haven’t been cut or perforated, our blood stays neatly hidden away.

My bicep tendon is pristine, smooth and the color of a hard boiled egg in the pictures. This is a relief; the doctor had been worried, thought he might have to trim it or cut it entirely, though counter to intuition he told me such an eventuality would not interfere with the functioning of my arm.

The pictures of my AC joint are the only thing not pristine. The surface looks like road rash has snuck inside my body, red and ragged. I look at the picture and think, this is what pain looks like. Since November there has been grinding, popping, crunching, like my joint is a breakfast cereal instead of bone with an important function.

When the anesthesiologist, a  cheerful man named Kevin who joked about getting me stoned for 4/20, poked my shoulder, he felt the crackle of that damage. Caught between revulsion and fascination, he poked it again. He’d already put drugs in my IV. I didn’t care.

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I was drunk and giggling when they wheeled me into the OR. They had to strap my arm down as I flopped it around with giggling abandon, still not fully in the grips of the nerve block.

I woke up in panic after the surgery. I cried and hyperventilated, shaking and shivering uncontrollably.  They asked me what was wrong and I couldn’t articulate anything beyond more gasps. I didn’t know what was wrong, only that my chest was tight with panic.

The anesthesiologist, not nearly as cheerful, ordered demerol and versed. I went back to sleep in the large, open recovery room.

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I’m typing this, one pecked letter at a time with my left hand, sitting on my couch, Mac airbook across my lap.

Even slow and frustrating, I can’t manage to not write.

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The second time I woke up, it was like coming out of a pleasant nap. I wanted to sleep more but was too warm. I kicked off the blankets, making a tangled mess like a toddler. The nurse gave me a cup of water. When I drank it down and asked for more, she gave me a choice for more. Apple juice, apple sauce, graham crackers, to continue the theme.

After they let me out, I had tacos at Jack-n-Grill. You can eat those one handed.

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I don’t get to take a shower for three days, when I’m allowed to change my dressing. I wonder if I will be desperate enough to ask Mike to wash my hair in the sink.

For now my head is surprisingly clear. The painkillers are supposed to wait until the nerve block wears off. Until then, they would be wasted. I’m to start taking them as the numbness begins to fade, so I won’t just be hit with pain like a truck.

I don’t want to be in pain. But I’m almost looking forward to it because my arm will belong to me again.