Posts Tagged ‘life’

That wasn’t as awkward as I thought it would be.

Since the medication that my pulmonologist prescribed for me during this pandemic (Symbicort, which comes in an actuated inhaler) gave me an actual gum infection, I had to make an appointment with my primary care doctor to… you know, sort that mess out. Without going into detail, the symptoms exacerbated themselves in a matter of days, and I knew that I needed to be seen by someone to get on medication for it. However, my primary care doctor is doing Telehealth consults for all consults that he can do this with, and mine fit the bill for that. It may have taken him an hour and a half longer than my appointment time to get to me because of the people that were “ahead of me in line”, or however you might want to word that, but because I have a smartphone I was able to be seen by him without actually having to come into his office. He prescribed me some medication to swish around in my mouth to get rid of the infection, which I am hoping actually gets rid of the infection, and went over my most recent bloodwork. Since corticosteroids have begun to do a number on my body, I’ve been prescribed some medication to ameliorate the effects that they have been having on me so that they continue to remain open to me to take as needed, which I do like.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a manuscript in the event that I ever do decide to self-publish — and if so, when, which is the second big thing that I would have to consider — to see how many words I am able to “crank out” when. It might be a bit hard to participate in NaNoWriMo given that so many people shoot for approximately 1,600 words per day to get to 50,000 by the month’s end, especially since I want to write on non-fiction topics, but I’ll continue to think about throwing my hat in the ring for participation this year to see if I can actually swing it and write about what I want to write about during that time span! I don’t want to “sell myself out” and not write about what I want to write about, but if it’s something that would involve biting off more than I can chew, it might be best for me to plan accordingly, not participate this year, and/or figure out what I want to write in coming years that would allow me to hit the “daily average” and still have a reasonable shot at making it to 50,000 words by month’s end. But seriously, I’m glad that I know this now!

Imagine being thankful for the bathroom fan.

So last month, our air conditioner actually began to go out, presumably from low Freon… that happens.

The only bad thing about that, even though we have plenty of fans in the house capable of circulating air, was that I was tapering down on a medication that impairs one’s ability to sweat (200mg Trokendi), meaning that I could more easily have gotten heat exhaustion or actual heatstroke from this if I did not pay careful attention to how warm I was getting. Needless to say, when I wasn’t spending time directly underneath a circulating fan in this house, I was spending time sitting underneath the bathroom fan because it was the most efficient at circulating cool air, and I could close the bathroom door, turn it on, sit underneath it and cool the entire room fairly rapidly, staying in there until I had completely cooled myself off if the temperature in the house had gotten a bit too warm for me. Further compounding matters was the fact that at the time, I did actually have to take prednisone out of necessity due to my spirometry… so much for “only taking prednisone if absolutely necessary during this pandemic”, eh? And prednisone is known for warming you up a bit, which doesn’t help matters out there either. I have spent plenty of summers intermittently on it thanking the god that I don’t even believe in — figuratively, of course, as I don’t actually believe in the existence of anything supernatural, so this is all me simply being thankful here — that the air conditioner actually worked, and so here I was without it working, having to actually sit underneath the bathroom fan.

This happened on a Friday, and the soonest we could get someone out to look at it was on a Monday, even though we called them as soon as we could tell that something was definitely starting to go amiss with the air conditioner (aside from cleaning it like we were instructed and changing the air filters). It wasn’t something that we could fix at home. And luckily the kids’ bedroom fan is one of the best fans in the house.

Summer checklist: have air conditioner actually start to go out living in one of the hottest states there is

Well, I did manage to find our gaming cards…

Apparently the old controller that I had that I could hook up to the computer, use, and play games with has grown legs and walked away… because for the life of me, I can not find it anywhere around this house that I know I would have put it. I went through the infamous “junk drawer” that I have in my room, although my intentions are to organize it a bit better, found some gaming walkthrough books that I am glad that I have (Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2 bundled together, Final Fantasy XIII-2, and Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns), and I finally found the kids’ Magic the Gathering and YuGiOh decks that I made them. To be honest, I’m perplexed that I even made them some of these decks. Bub actually has a Blue Eyes, White Dragon deck… or whatever you actually call that one since it’s been years since I’ve sat down and played that game with anyone, having formally “retired” from it myself as an actual player for a number of reasons.

I think it says a lot about YuGiOh that I looked at the cards for awhile and the rules didn’t immediately come to me, but given the reasons that I retired (or “retired”, if you want to continue to put quotation marks around it) from it, that isn’t an entirely bad thing. If the kids want to get into it, or even want to look through the cards — Bub thought it was Christmas when I found them — they are more than welcome to, but I don’t have any other reason to play the game myself any more and I am just fine with that. I’m not going to denigrate it as a child’s game since I have several adult friends who continue to play it, who are good at it, but I have my reasons for no longer actively playing it myself that I’ve already written about. And that’s okay.

Once I am able to walk a mile, Yes.Fit please.

I am not being paid to write about this. This is just something that I want to try at some point.

Once I am comfortably able to walk a mile without… there being any problems (and I mean any problems), the next step in the process for me will be to sign up for virtual marathons with Yes.Fit. I may decide to wait until we are out of a global pandemic, although I may do these on my treadmill at home. It all depends. Yes.Fit is a virtual marathon app — or website — that allows you to participate in virtual marathons no matter where in the world you may be at, and you are rewarded with things like medallions and T-shirts that you choose from before you sign up for the marathon as incentive and as a reward for you completing the marathon. You can log the miles that you do any number of ways, including “by hand” if you’re not into things like FitBit or their very own tracker. For someone like me, the medallion at the end of the marathon would be the most incentive. I’d love to collect those. And of course I’d also love to get into better shape!

For instance, there’s one called The Unicorn which is 121.1 miles. Obviously I’m not going to be ready to do that one for quite awhile, but I do aspire to do that one at… some point. The medallion for it is the most adorable, and at some point in my life I would like to say that I got into good enough health to be able to walk 121.1 miles, even if it took me an entire year to do, just to say that I actually completed that marathon.

I definitely have aspirations for improving my health, even though some of them — like that one — are lofty.

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