Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This was posted to Elbows recently. I'd seen it before but don't recall where:

Live long and prosper.       - Vulcan proverb
And eat well.                - Jewish addendum to Vulcan proverb
Feast on your enemies!       - Klingon interpertation of Jewish
                                addendum to Vulcan proverb

One of the people I met in Peoria sent me a PDF of a patent he'd been awarded, because he correctly figured I'd be interested in it. I am impressed and amused. It's a clever use of the Earth's magnetic field.

Goodness, this Universe is nifty. I'm glad I came here. Uh, I mean, it's so much fun to learn about how it works, that's what I meant to say.

One of the things I did overnight was to put aluminum foil over one of the windows to keep out the evil mind-control rays evil make-the-house-too-warm rays that come from the nearest star. (Okay, so those same rays aren't evil when they're making it possible for me to see, nourishing plants, warming up my house in the winter, etc., but between the incoming solar radiation through the windows, and the stuff absorbed by the black-tar, direct-thermal-transfer solar collector I'm using for a roof, those rays are making the office in my house pretty darned uncomfortable.) I'm going to need a lot more foil.

I also tried to balance the ceiling fan. I wasn't quite as successful with that. (Brian balanced it a while back, but one of the coins he taped on escaped its duct tape. I haven't quite duplicated the balance he'd managed to get.)

So I went to see my rheumatologist today. Spent about a half hour, minus the time he left the examination room to use the computer. He actually looked at the spreadsheets I'd brought him on a floppy -- one being a sleep log, the other being a log of what drugs I've taken when, so that he can look for patterns possibly more meaningful than what I can remember off the top of my head. Actually, I was able to give him most of the info he needed about my sleep off the top of my head, but only because I'd keyed it into a spreadsheet and told Excel to do the math already. He wants me to try a drug I tried a few years ago, in case it works any better now than it did then. (I'm not optimistic, but hey, bodies change. It could work...) The big thing we're trying to do is make it so I sleep more than four hours, and maybe get the overall pain levels down to where I don't need to use narcotics so often. (Oh, the face he made when I told him about my difficult week in Peoria, where I took a month's worth of pain meds -- based on my usual usage pattern -- in a week.) He touched me in a few places to assess my current state (checking fibromyalgia tender points, seeing how tense the muscles were and how much I flinched, checking my grip strength), and said to come back in three months.

I hadn't really expected him to look at those spreadsheets. I wanted to have the information right there to give him if it might be useful, 'cause I'd already gathered it and all, but this is an HMO. I didn't expect him to have time to look at it. Specialists do get more time per patient-visit than the primary physicians, but I was still surprised that he had time to properly discuss my case with me and take note of the information I had for him. (Gee, have HMOs succeeded in getting me to set my expectations lower, or what?) The visit still felt a little rushed, a little short, but it was six times as long as a primary-physician visit.

So the good news is that I seem to have a doctor who's doing the right stuff and taking the time to figure out what the right stuff is. The bad news is that there really isn't much he can do for my problem. Well, if this drug works this time, that'll be something. And he did suggest massage. (Uh, yeah, I know that. The single most effective treatment for fibromyalgia is massage on a regular basis (especially if the type of massage is myofascial release therapy). Guess what my HMO doesn't cover and I can't afford? Feh. Feels good and is good for me, but I can't pay for it.)

Traffic was both bad and strange on the way to the appointment. I kept getting boxed in by people doing the speed limit or a few MPH under, most of the way; then I95S slowed to 20MPH in a 65MPH zone a bit before the exit before mine; then the street that I turned off onto had a Nasty Accident at the next intersection I needed to turn at, and was slow until then.

Current music I'm listening to is by a Canadian friend of one of my bandmates. (She keeps saying she thinks he and I should play together. She's probably right. Sooner or later it's gotta happen.)

While I was waiting for my prescription at my HMO, I got to thinking about "steel box" buildings (which that building is), and how they screw with cell phone reception by being (more or less) big, partially-effective Faraday cages. (I was standing by the window with my cell phone's antenna pointed outside, and I could establish a connection to read my email only intermittently. When I went further into the building to see the doctor, my phone's signal strength indicater went sharply down and it switched to analog mode, indicating that it was unable to connect to a digital tower. These effects were expected.)

I started wondering what happens to the waves/fields excluded from a Faraday cage. Does the cage act as a big antenna piping all signals to ground, the way I think it does? If I'm wrong about it being a Faraday cage (which I might be, considering that the openings between the girders are WAY larger than the wavelength my cell phone uses), is it just a "shadow" effect, where deep inside the building you're just in the shadows of too many girders? In either case, I figure (in my naive, non-physiscist, non-EE way) that there's got to be some induced current in the steel of the building, right? I wonder whether there's anything we could do with that current, even if it's only in the "Stupid Planet Tricks" class of application.

Earlier I told my doctor I'd tried Neurontin before, and the previous doctor and I had decided it didn't really work for me, but I couldn't remember why. It's coming back to me.

I was feeling too tired to get much else done, and I certainly didn't get anywhere near enough sleep this morning, so I figured I'd try to crash early. So I took 300mg of Neurontin and waited an hour, then went to bed. For another half hour it didn't seem to do much, so I moved all the things I didn't get done today to tomorrow's to-do list in my DayRunner. Then I started to feel it ... my shoulders unclenched a little bit. The feeling from my neck down was somewhat like being drunk, but with none of the effects alcohol produces from the neck up. So I lay down and turned off the light, and figured it was time to try to let the drug do its thing and put me to sleep.

Soon I started feeling drugged, in a sortakinda Xanax-ish way; then sleep paralysis kicked in (it sometimes does that out-of-synch with my actually sleeping, in the past few years) and I slowly drifted off.

My legs woke me, doing the "gotta move; gonna cramp; not cramping; gonna pretend to be about to cramp; gotta move" thing ([expletive], I hate that), and I slowly drifted back into consciousness, feeling as though I'd been asleep for about two hours. Long enough to have slept a little, not enough to have slept long enough to count. Sleep paralysis took a long time to let go, and I still felt drugged (differently than before, but drugged -- like a tranquilizer??), so I tried to go back to sleep. Eventually, I realized going back to sleep Just Wasn't Going To Happen, so I rolled over to check the time.

It was less than half an hour after I'd gone to sleep.

So now I'm awake but feeling drugged; my head's a little foggy and my coordination is a little off, but at least my shoulders and the upper third of my back feel less tight than they did before (and maybe my thighs, but everything else hurts the same). The druggedness is rather distracting and annoying. (Hmm. It feels like an anti-siezure drug, which I'm told is one of its uses. Why doesn't that aspect help with restless legs?) So I didn't get enough sleep, and now I'm not sure how easy it'll be to work now that I'm awake again. (And, ironically, my forearms are cramping up from typing more quickly than they usually do.) All in all, tonight's experiment is a lose.

Now, knowing my body, I can expect that tomorrow will either show a greater reaction to the drug or a lesser one. Lesser is more likely, but hey, I could be wrong and it could actually make me sleep. The before-I-fall-asleep sensations are kind of interesting and almost pleasant (they'd be annoying if I weren't trying to get to sleep); sort of a bit of an "unclenching" and later a bit of a float-off-to-sleep feeling. The later sensations are distinctly Not To My Liking. I don't like feeling drugged. (Yes, I take narcotics for pain. They DON'T do this to me; all they do is take the pain down one small notch and interfere a little with my sense of rythym. None of the floaty/loopy/zoned/drowsy/etc. effects others have described. This feels like I've been tranqed and includes half of the aspects of alcohol intoxication that I don't like.)

I guess I should do a web search to find out more about this drug. If it's a short-acting thing like Xanax is, intended to let me get to sleep but not keep me asleep, I can predict with some confidence how the next week will go: the duration will get shorter and shorter with each dose, until my body finally starts ignoring it. With Xanax that took only three doses, back in the 1980s. If it's supposed to do its thing all night and keep me from waking up prematurely, the week will be a little harder to predict.

It's now an hour after I woke up (the CD is nearing the end of the fourth movement now), and the drugged feeling is significantly diminished from when I started writing this. It's down to the feeling that my field of view has narrowed (it hasn't, but it feels as though I'm not seeing the stuff in my peripheral vision even though I can detect it when I test it), being dizzy on the stairs, and feeling like my head is full of mud (though less so than an hour ago) and my eyes have to work twice as hard to see. I'm betting that it's not a Xanax-like short-acting drug, but my body is trying very hard to turn it into one.

Oh, the number of drugs my body either eliminates extremely quickly or requires such a high level of that I only feel the effects at absolute peak blood levels ... It certainly makes drugging me quite a challenge. Inconvenient, that. (Most of the time anyhow. Sometimes it's kind of nice to know, "This feeling will go away very soon." But when what's about to go away is, for example, pain relief, that's not so good.) As much as I hate having blood drawn, it'd be worth it (once) to get stuck as many times as it'd take to find out just how quickly my liver and kidneys are clearing all these things out of my blood.

I wonder if my druggedness shows in my writing. I'm a little too close to it to tell.