Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Faith is daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see." -- J.R.R. Tolkien ( thanks to blueeowyn]

[And happy birthday to my cousin Maria in England, if she's reading this! (Well, even if not. (But if you are: the email address I have for you is bouncing.))]

"Faith is daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see." -- J.R.R. Tolkien ( thanks to blueeowyn]

[And happy birthday to my cousin Maria in England, if she's reading this! (Well, even if not. (But if you are: the email address I have for you is bouncing.))]

On Friday I have an appointment with my doctor. The last time I saw her she mentioned that the next time would include a fasting blood test (it's time to check my A1C and cholesterol). I remembered some folks having talked about fibromyalgia-related topics, including blood work, that I'd meant to ask her about, but could not remember everything. Since then I've been meaning to ask y'all for stuff to write down before the next appointment, and, well, forgetting to do that.

So, apart from the obvious ("What should I know about Lyrica, is it likely to work for me despite the categories of drugs I have adverse reactions to, and is it covered by the state insurance?"), what should I write down in my PDA for Friday? What tests for factors that make fibromyalgia worse, what tests for things that can be misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia? (I'm pretty sure what I've got is really fibromyalgia -- a couple of the rheumatologists I saw early on (wow, has it really been fourteen years already?) were very highly spoken of by other rheumatologists -- but hey, if by some miracle it should turn out that I really have something curable instead, who am I to turn down the fairy-tale ending, eh?) I know to ask her to check my vitamin D level ... and, uh, thyroid?? She said they already check potassium pretty much every time they draw blood (I was going to ask for that to try to figure out why the muscles in my legs are giving me so much grief).

Of course, this is a message that I want to have make sense, and I'm quite the other end of the scale from being optimally awake right now, because my sleep pattern lately doesn't seem to have much pattern in it (I did get a longish chunk of sleep Monday evening -- I fell asleep in the middle of composing email to find out whether I had a ride to rehearsal, and woke in the wee hours, mail not yet sent -- but then I was up for a really long time and only managed to stay asleep for ninety minutes when I finally managed to crash again). And yes, I'll sift through alt.med.fibromyalgia later as well, as much of it as I have the attention span for when I get to it.

Anyhow, my memory being even more fragmented than usual (are there Norton Utilities for wetware?), please help me remember what I'd been planning to ask my doctor about now that she's finally acting like she's willing to work with me on this instead of just pushing me through the standard patient checklist.

Next week I need to get my wrist X-rayed -- I have to ask my doctor for the radiology referral -- for the orthopedist appointment on the first.

The other thing on today's agenda is to try to convince myself I have the spoons to make it to the grocery store and back, and count up the contents of the bag o' quarters to see how much of the urgent-list I can afford to pick up. It's that kind of month. (Running out of cheese, bread, coffee, and toilet paper does not sound like a winning option.) Oh, and I need to get around to putting a copy of Wolgemut Live In Concert Pennsic XXXV up on eBay. I need to put the opened copy into a computer or a CD player to check how long it is first, because that's something that probably ought to go in the eBay listing.

I hope I've got the paragraphs in a sensible order. While I'm glad that some people at least find my addled-by-non-sleep writing entertaining, it does feel like more work keeping things more-or-less linear when I've been awake too long. Things start rearranging themselves (paragraphs, words, keys, furniture, buldings) somewhere between eyes and brain, or between perception and short-term storage, or between something and so-... waitaminute, maybe it's the things that other things get lost between that are getting shuffled. No, no, that would mean storing memories in my corneas, thinking with my eyelids, and having a photosensitive cerebral cortex doing the raw image-capture, so that can't be right.

Might have to postpone hiking to the store and just hope I can stretch what I've got (am already out of coffee but do have a few decaf Earl Grey teabags left) until a better time to trek. Probably wind up tromping through tomorrow's predicted "wintry mix" though. But I don't need the sidewalk and a car trading places when I blink. Or to have the streets change direction and accidentally walk off into a parallel universe. (All roads lead to Amber, right? The description of the shifting landscape in the first walk described in that series did make me think of how this brainstate feels.)

Oh. I'm digressing again, huh?

On Friday I have an appointment with my doctor. The last time I saw her she mentioned that the next time would include a fasting blood test (it's time to check my A1C and cholesterol). I remembered some folks having talked about fibromyalgia-related topics, including blood work, that I'd meant to ask her about, but could not remember everything. Since then I've been meaning to ask y'all for stuff to write down before the next appointment, and, well, forgetting to do that.

So, apart from the obvious ("What should I know about Lyrica, is it likely to work for me despite the categories of drugs I have adverse reactions to, and is it covered by the state insurance?"), what should I write down in my PDA for Friday? What tests for factors that make fibromyalgia worse, what tests for things that can be misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia? (I'm pretty sure what I've got is really fibromyalgia -- a couple of the rheumatologists I saw early on (wow, has it really been fourteen years already?) were very highly spoken of by other rheumatologists -- but hey, if by some miracle it should turn out that I really have something curable instead, who am I to turn down the fairy-tale ending, eh?) I know to ask her to check my vitamin D level ... and, uh, thyroid?? She said they already check potassium pretty much every time they draw blood (I was going to ask for that to try to figure out why the muscles in my legs are giving me so much grief).

Of course, this is a message that I want to have make sense, and I'm quite the other end of the scale from being optimally awake right now, because my sleep pattern lately doesn't seem to have much pattern in it (I did get a longish chunk of sleep Monday evening -- I fell asleep in the middle of composing email to find out whether I had a ride to rehearsal, and woke in the wee hours, mail not yet sent -- but then I was up for a really long time and only managed to stay asleep for ninety minutes when I finally managed to crash again). And yes, I'll sift through alt.med.fibromyalgia later as well, as much of it as I have the attention span for when I get to it.

Anyhow, my memory being even more fragmented than usual (are there Norton Utilities for wetware?), please help me remember what I'd been planning to ask my doctor about now that she's finally acting like she's willing to work with me on this instead of just pushing me through the standard patient checklist.

Next week I need to get my wrist X-rayed -- I have to ask my doctor for the radiology referral -- for the orthopedist appointment on the first.

The other thing on today's agenda is to try to convince myself I have the spoons to make it to the grocery store and back, and count up the contents of the bag o' quarters to see how much of the urgent-list I can afford to pick up. It's that kind of month. (Running out of cheese, bread, coffee, and toilet paper does not sound like a winning option.) Oh, and I need to get around to putting a copy of Wolgemut Live In Concert Pennsic XXXV up on eBay. I need to put the opened copy into a computer or a CD player to check how long it is first, because that's something that probably ought to go in the eBay listing.

I hope I've got the paragraphs in a sensible order. While I'm glad that some people at least find my addled-by-non-sleep writing entertaining, it does feel like more work keeping things more-or-less linear when I've been awake too long. Things start rearranging themselves (paragraphs, words, keys, furniture, buldings) somewhere between eyes and brain, or between perception and short-term storage, or between something and so-... waitaminute, maybe it's the things that other things get lost between that are getting shuffled. No, no, that would mean storing memories in my corneas, thinking with my eyelids, and having a photosensitive cerebral cortex doing the raw image-capture, so that can't be right.

Might have to postpone hiking to the store and just hope I can stretch what I've got (am already out of coffee but do have a few decaf Earl Grey teabags left) until a better time to trek. Probably wind up tromping through tomorrow's predicted "wintry mix" though. But I don't need the sidewalk and a car trading places when I blink. Or to have the streets change direction and accidentally walk off into a parallel universe. (All roads lead to Amber, right? The description of the shifting landscape in the first walk described in that series did make me think of how this brainstate feels.)

Oh. I'm digressing again, huh?