Yet another update thingy

On April 11, 1890, Joseph Carey Merrick (better known to the world as the Elephant Man) was found dead in his room at London Hospital. Merrick had ben forced by his deformities to sleep sitting up. It is theorized that in an attempt to be like other people, he had gone sleep laying down, resulting and a dislocated neck and asphyxia.

I know how he feels. Right now my biggest problem isn't so much my breathing, it's that I am constantly producing amazing amounts of phlegm. Being constantly stuffed up when you are dependent on an oxygen feed running into your nose is annoying, and the last time I tried to sleep lying down? I had to call Kirsten out to help me. I was literally on the verge of choking on this crap. Doctor has cleared me to use anti-histamines to try to improve things. They help... some.

On the good side I now have Kaiser Home Care. The clinic that monitors blood-thinner patients requires frequent blood draws to track levels, and it's such a hassle to get me out the door on the portable tank, put me in a travel chair, yadda, yadda, yadda. waste of time for a blood draw that takes about three minutes to do. So now I have a nurse that comes to Offhand Manor whenever I need a draw.

We may finally see some movement from EDD. I now have my very own social worker (Jim the Biped) and a person in the medical secretary's office pounding away at them. I will be applying for SSDI. Because even the most optimistic recovery scenarios leave me unable to do the sort of work I've been doing for the last 20 years, and the more reasonable scenarios have me on O₂ for the rest of my life with varying levels of activity.

Other than that, not much going on. I'm napping a lot, trying to move as much as I can, and doing my damnedest to remain optimistic. Spring Training has begun, which makes life better. But just about everything tires me out easily, so whatever I do during the day, I need to do it moderation.

There is one horrific note... I'm now required to avoid garlic until I'm down with the blood thinners. No garlic? Oh, the pain.... I've also been told to not shave unless I really have to. The results are scary:

Well, THAT was special!

A little after 2000hrs, kshandra came home from Woo-Con to give me my evening shot (yeah, back on that, but only three doses) and decide if she was staying home or going back out. Not five minutes after she walked in the door, our power went out.

Not good on a couple of levels. While we do have a really nice Maglite (one of the big six cell monsters) the batteries haven't been changed in some time. Then there's my oxygen. While I'm at home, I'm hooked to a condenser that runs 24/7. That died. We needed to hook me up to the big-ass emergency tank. Finally, we don't yet have an operational furnace. I've been getting by with a space heater and many blankets. I lost my space heater.

Had she not been home, I would have been stumbling around in pitch blackness trying to find the flashlight, then trying to unhook and rehook my airline, all while coughing, gasping, and shivering to quite literal death.

As it was, she was here, and everything went well. She even managed to give me my shot by the flashlight's fading glow. Power just came back on, total time off was a little under 90 minutes.

Let's not do that again, OK?