Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"They crowded around and curled up, arguing physics and logic in the way of cats (Kemuri and Jessie trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and Jaime trying to increase her mass out of sheer stubborn will so Mia couldn't make her move away)." -- tamnonlinear, December 2009 (locked entry)

Whoops! I only just now noticed that I never got around to posting the entry from a week ago that I had so carefully composed in my head! I guess I'd better fill y'all in. I tweeted snippets, but then was too exhausted to blog.

The subject header stretches things a little, in that although I did have to go to two emergency rooms, the first was the ER-with-no-hospital-attached in Bowie. So technically not two hospitals, just two ERs ...

Last week, Mom got worried that I kept looking and acting sick, even with central heat and mom-cooked meals, and insisted on taking me to the ER. That was a long day, and once again I showed up with symptoms that had doctors thinking, "Oh crap, this could be bad, we'd better get brain pictures." (And once again they didn't find anything, suggesting that like other [Marklanders | SCAdians | folk musicians | pick something that amuses you], I have no brain. Or that I keep it somewhere less vulnerable.)

First ER: I arrived walking but feeling really, really, really tired. Mom dropped me off and went shopping (after getting a ballpark estimate from the check-in desk as to how long it would probably take). I started editing an arrangement of a tune I was working on, and waited for my name to be called. When I got to a bed and was seen by a doctor, the doctor said she didn't like the fact that so many of my symptoms lacked bilateral symmetry ... got nurses to draw blood, get an EKG, get blood pressure lying, sitting, and standing, and give me a nebulizer (albuterol, AFAICT) treatment, then went and found the cardiologist.

I hate the nebulizer. When I use my albuterol inhaler normally, I don't notice any side effects. When I put my inhaler in a plastic bag so that I could rebreathe any of the drug that I coughed out before it could help me when I was in the worst part of The Flu Experience, I noticed a little shakiness, a little speediness, but it was just a "good thing I'm already in bed" deal. But the nebulizer ... *sigh* I'm pretty sure it's the same drug, just a much larger dose, and it feels like terror, like panic. That is, my brain -- okay, my mind -- knows damned well that where I am is safe, that the drug is going to make me feel better later, not kill me, etc. -- but my body is telling my brain, "SCARED! SCARED! what are we scared of, boss? SCARED! SCARED!" Because the physiological reactions to the drug, at least in me, feel just like physiological reactions to absolute terrror.

But I do like being able to take deeper breaths after the trembling and the racing pulse abate.

I spent a lot of time alone, just waiting for a nurse or the doctor to check in again with the next test or questions, and I noticed that the pulse oximeter they hooked me up to, which beeped for almost every heartbeat, sometimes changed pitch. Watching it, I discovered that as my O₂ saturation level dropped, so did the pitch. And of course, given something that can be made to produce different pitches, from then on I preceived it as a potential musical instrument, and wondered how long it would take me to learn enough control to play "Jingle Bells" on it, or "Silent Night".

I resisted the urge. But the fact that I was feeling crashy may have added to my ability to resist. (I did find the volume control, which seemed rather important at the timce, since my ears started acting up -- hyperacusis -- as I started feeling worse.)

(I don't remember whether the other pulse oximeters I've been hooked to in the past did the variable pitch thing. Generally, I see one unchanging number when one is attached, either 90% or 100%, depending on whether I'm having difficulty breathing at the time. During last week's ER visit, the number was fluctuating a lot, between 78% and 100%, which struck me as a sign that something was Not Usual. It also skipped a pulse every so often, making me wonder whether there was a problem with my heartbeat, but I managed to track that to a fault in one of the cables. (Specifically, the lead from the oximeter fingertip sensor was plugged into an extension cable that was then plugged into the monitor, and the extension cable was where the fault was.))

Cardiologist showed up, asked a few questions, and left. Mom showed up and was allowed in to sit with me. Main doctor showed up again, explained that she wanted a CT scan but they didn't have a CT machine, so she was sending me to another ER, offering a choice of PG or Laurel. Now at this point I thought she meant phoning ahead to say I was coming, and giving Mom directions, but she went on to explain that because of the symptoms that had her wanting a CT, I had to go by ambulance in case Something Very Bad happened en route. We figured out that I'd be getting home sometime well after dark, and Mom isn't comfortable driving at night, so Mom went home and said she'd call my middle brother to pick me up from Laurel. I settled in to wait ...

And I started feeling really crashy, and like I was freezing. An orderly or a nurse (I was pretty out of it by then, and am not sure who it was) brought me a thin sheet, which helped surprisingly well -- between that, and my body temperature being 99.4 °F when I arrived and 97.4 °F later on, I'm pretty sure it was my body having trouble with its own temperature, rather than the room actually getting colder.

A long time later, an ambulance crew arrived, strapped me to a gurney, piled my belongings around me, and wheeled me out into the night. I gradually started to wake up a bit and feel (and probably sound) more coherent during the ride to Laurel -- "Tek" ("Tech"?), the guy who rode in the back with me, wanted my opinion on various famous jazz and rock drummers. I told him about Evelyn Glennie, but was unable to remember her name at the time. By the time we reached Laurel I was pretty much awake and my speech no longer sounded drunk to me, though I still felt crappy.

The doctor who saw me at Laurel repeated a bunch of the things the doctor at Bowie had done, mostly the "follow my finger" stuff, strength tests, and asking lots of pertinent questions about my symptoms. I don't know whether he added the chest X-ray to the list, or if the first doctor had asked for that. The CT tech wheeled me off to radiology, answered a bunch of my questions, seemed pleased to get a chance to rattle off some of the features and specification of the machine (I didn't know it took multiple slices in parallel -- the carriage moved eight times, but that was either 32 or 64 slices, and he said it could be set to do even more per pass depending on what they were looking for). Then the conventional-X-ray tech found me in the CT room and wheeled me around the corner, and was similarly willing to chat about the hardware when prompted.

Eventually, the doctor came back from talking to the radiologist. He explained that the reason I'd been so very tired all the time was that a new life was growing inside my body!

Okay, he didn't phrase it quite like that; that's just my spin that amuses me. What he said was that (in addition to not finding anything on the brain CT), the head-on chest X-ray looked clear, but the side view showed an indistinct shadow in one lung that could possibly be pneumonia, and pneumonia fit enough of my symptoms (well, at least the ones that migraine/fibromyalgia didn't) that pneumonia was what he thought it was, and he was going to give me poison to kill the new life growing inside of me and making it hard for me to breathe ... er, that is, he was prescribing an antibiotic. (Well come on, it is a poison, one intended to make my body toxic to the bacteria trying to kill me *cough* using me as a host and doing me great harm by accident. It's not going to poison me, but that's still how it works, isn't it?).

I called Mom and told her to call my brother, since I expected to be nearly finished with my double-ER adventure. Some time after that, someone showed up with a cup of water, some Zithromax, and my discharge paperwork. I asked, "Is this a one-shot, or are you sending me home with a prescription to fill?"

"I've got a prescription for you. Now, about this medecine ..."

I jumped in, "Keep taking it until it's gone even if I feel better, because I don't want to breed super-bugs, right?"

"No," he started, then what I had said registered and he grinned and said, "Yeah, you got it."

Then my brother showed up and drove me back to Mom's house; Mom picked up the prescription the next day (five pills, generic, at about six bucks apiece), and I spent the next three and a half days so out of it that I kept forgetting to type and post this -- or rather, forgetting that I had not already done so -- and was breathing noticeably better by the last day of the antibiotic, though I'm still coughing some (feels more like allergy/athsma tickle than anything else -- at least I really hope the pneumonia is all gone!) and the muscles over my ribs are sore enough that even a little cough hurts. I've got more energy, though I'm still weak ... and a migraine hit the day after the last antibiotic pill.

Between the emergency rooms and the ambulance, five people commented on the PowerBook that I was working on when I was awake and not interacting with someone else. (It's a hand-me-down from a bandmate who upgraded, and I love having this tool at my fingertips.) Four said, "Hey, that's a Really Nice Machine -- I've been thinking about getting one," and one said, "I've heard those are good -- do you like it?"

Okay, now I can go back to editing the journal entry I started before I realized I'd never gotten around to writing this one.

Still at Mom's house. Breathing much better, feeling rather more energetic when I have any energy at all, and staying awake longer at a stretch, but still don't have my strength quite back and still peter out quickly -- though at this point my tiring so early may have more to do with my still absolutely screwed up sleep patterns than anything else. (For example: crashed yesterday afternoon around 15:00, was up again at 18:00, crashed again around 20:00 trying to escape a migraine, woke briefly at midnight, was up again at 03:00, thought I was going to fall asleep again around 19:00, but didn't (after failing to fall asleep when I started feeling worn-out, around 10:00).) A bit migrainey today but not as bad as yesterday. The fibromyalgia pain has been pretty bad. Between feeling a bit unsteady some of the time, and my legs and hips hurting often, I should probably still be using the cane; but my arms and hands and shoulders hurt so badly that I've just been lurching & limping because that's less painful than propping myself up. Feh.

OT1H, I do want to get home, pick up nearly two weeks worth of mail, be able to work on stuff I didn't bring with me, have access to video recording devices¹, let Perrine roam a larger area², etc. -- feel a little more independent. And there are some things I've been trying to set up on a couple of computers that I just can't seem to manage by shoving X through a reverse ssh tunnel (to get through NAT at both ends). OTOH, Mom has heat in her house, it's ever so much quieter here than in Baltimore, and there's food here. [Whoops, about to be a lot less food here, since we finally noticed that the refrigerator has stopped refrigerating. Eep!] I might head back tomorrow or Saturday³, migraine-and-weather-permitting.

Over the past few days I have managed to get a few cute photos, work on a couple of new compositions (until I got sidetracked into enhancing the notation software I'm using), repair a vacuum cleaner (shouldn't vacuums be naturally clean?), and verify that my mother's inkjet printer really is out of ink. And fall way, way behind on my blog-reading (though if LJ keeps showing me that stupid ad that obscures the text of the entries it appears on, I may find it easier to catch up because I'll just stop reading comments on LJ or peeking behind cut-tags there -- easier than trying to remember who has a paid account and who has a "plus" one). A few days ago I hit the point of really wishing I'd brought my bass guitar. (I brought my electric 6-string guitar, bass recorder, and mandolin. And a pair of drumsticks, which reminds me that I've got some audio editing to do in Audacity so I can share some sounds with y'all.)

And no, I neither put fuschia eyeliner on the cat, nor added funky colours in GIMP -- those colours were really there in my viewfinder, and I didn't put them on her.⁴ :-) And, uh, yeah, those are my fingers (and if you can make it out, my camera) reflected in her eye.

Perrine seems healthier, after a few days of scaring me by not seeming to eat anything at all. (The first night she was here, she came out of her hidey-hole for tuna, but then wouldn't eat anything, not even more tuna, for the next few days.) She's still noticeably smaller and lighter than she was in October, but is eating various kinds of wet food and kibble, and asking for food a few times a day. *whew* I really do think she had a cold or something interfering with her sense of smell, but I guess I'll never know for sure. (High on my to-do list for early next year: get her to a vet for a checkup & shots, after raising money to pay for that.) I was worried I'd need to rush her to a vet last week -- when I was barely capable of going anywhere myself. It's such a relief to see her eating again.

She's not especially happy here, not feeling free to follow me to other parts of the house lest the dog go after her (the dog just wants to play, and won't take "no" for an answer; but Perrine is not keen on this idea, runs away, and let herself get cornered once in the front-door closet). She's been out a couple of times, when Pepper has been shut in Mom's room -- even came to join me at the other end of the house while I watched television one night ... but then Pepper let herself out and came looking for Perrine. *sigh* But she did start looking a lot less unhappy after the first morning that I noticed birds in the bush outside the bedroom window, and told her they were there. (The word Perrine knows best is, "Bird!") She's spent a few hours quite happily entertained thus, and yesterday she spotted the birds first and told me about them. (After hearing her leap up on the dresser, I heard her chirrup, then chatter her teeth. So okay, she probably wasn't specifically trying to tell me, but the effect was the same.)

Mom bought some cat toys for Perrine, which she has ignored. But she found a ball in the bedroom that apparently got left here by mistake, having come from a toy my niece and nephews play with, and she has played with that a bit.

Is it just me, or does the dog look a little bit like Stewie from Family Guy? She looks vaguely cartoonish to me, anyhow, and if she's a Toon, that would explain quite a bit. Now if I could just convince her to stop trying to lick my feet and calves while I'm walking. And not to aim herself at my knees when I'm standing. Having an itty bitty dog jump up and hit my waist is disconcerting, but less likely to tip me over than a blow to my knees. (She can also jump up onto a dresser from the floor, which seems like more of a cat maneuver than a doggie one. This means that even though I put Perrine's food up there, Pepper can still reach it when she manages to get into the bedroom, and oh my goodness can that dog consume food quickly when she knows she's stealing somebody else's! *Fwoosh*, and the food vanishes. I suppose chewing must be optional.)

I should work on photographing a couple of antiques that Mom wants to sell (she won't have room for them when she moves). One is the old sewing machine that I want. We haven't nailed down the model number yet, but it's a White, most likely from 1929. Prices for similar ones that we ran across while trying to figure out exactly what it is, ranged from $40 to $400. The cabinet was refinished at some point, which probably reduces its value, but it has the cabinet (a false-front that looks like it has drawers, which folds up out of the way when the sewing machine is raised), while most of the late-1920s White machines I saw on the web either had an open stand or had been removed from their stand. This is the machine I learned to use and understand how to thread. (I had thought the electric motor was a late retrofit, being bolted on the back and driving the flywheel with a rubber wheel on the motor shaft, and there being a disconnected knee-treadle in the cabinet -- but after looking it up, it appears that the electric motor was original and the knee-thingie a mystery. Maybe White dropped some newfangled Rotary Electric sewing machines into completed cabinets left over from a run of human-powered machines??) The other piece is a table that we couldn't find anything close to on the web. (The closest we found was an Old Ironsides table, which is topologically equivalent, but has different proportions and is of a different wood.)

And I need to keep an eye out for K-mount extension tubes. For macro, I can use an M42->K adaptor, the screwmount bellows, and a screwmount 50mm lens (I love the fact that with one adaptor I can use early 1960s lenses on my digital camera (and with two adaptors, even older lenses work), but I wanted to shoot very small birds with the 400mm f/5.6 lens I brought with me, and the bush outside the window is closer than the minimum focussing distance of that lens.

I could carry a screwmount 300mm or 400mm lens and the adaptor, when I expect to be in this situation, but I didn't expect to be. A medium-length K-mount extension tube ought to fit in my small "three lenses and a flash" bag that I keep ready to grab in a hurry, right next to the 400mm K-mount lens that lives there.

Uh oh. I just came back from the kitchen and found the dog in the bedroom. She'd already eaten all of Perrine's food that was out. I chased her out, and she stopped at the baby-gate as if to say, "What? I can't cross that," but after I growled a bit she demonstrated how she gets over. *sigh* (Perrine just hurdles it looking like she's running a steeplechase. Pepper sort of lands on top for an instant, then tumbles down the other side.) Perrine was on the bed, not wedged in the corner underneath it, so either Pepper snuck in while she was sleeping, or she didn't bother to do the whole "I'm so scared of the dog!" thing because I wasn't here to watch. I'm not sure which."

[1] For all the time Mom and my brother have televisions going, they don't have any DVD recorder, VCR, or PVR hooked up. I'm not at all used to being so tied to (a) the broadcast schedule or (b) Hulu (which I can watch here, sometimes, though it's a major PITA), nor am I used to having television as background much of the time, nor the idea of watching some show I don't really like because there's nothing better on. I've always got plenty of recorded television to catch up on when I feel like watching something and nothing I really want to see is being broadcast ... and I'm not used to missing shows I wanted to watch just because I fell asleep at the wrong time or was in the middle of doing something else. It's just a different approach to television, I guess, and not one I've used since I was a child, back when only rich people had VCRs. Also: for all the hundreds of channels on cable, there's only a smidgen more that I want to see here than at home where I have only an antenna. I keep turning televisions off when I notice I'm the only person in the room, because I don't like the television-as-background thing. Is even Mythbusters worth being annoyed by CNN and Fox for? (Though I suppose if I had cable at my house -- living alone -- I could just never tune to either of those two conservative networks.)

[2] Perrine leaves the bedroom and jumps the baby-gate in the hall occasionally, but jumps right back as soon as she finds out where Pepper, my mother's tiny, very exuberant, terribly persistant dog, happens to be ... and Pepper spends a fair bit of time at the other end of the hallway, looking into the bedroom and waiting for Perrine to come out and play. Then again, there's a much bigger window here for her to watch birds from, and a dresser right under it for her to sit on ...

[3] There's a bit of holiday family-weirdness going on that bothers me a lot less than it seems it ought to -- not enough to warrant full-size type, but worth sticking in a footnote: I missed family Thaksgiving due to illness, the extended family (on my father's side) pre-Christmas party was cancelled due to the snowpocalypse (for the first time in 55 years -- but I wasn't really well enough to go by then anyhow), and close-family Christmas is apparently being held on Saturday at my sister's house on the Eastern Shore, to get around her (and her kids and husband) having too many places to visit for one day. Mom is invited, as is my married brother (& wife & offspring, of course). Apparently my youngest brother -- the one who lives with Mom and whom my sister is, last I heard, extremely judgemental about -- and myself, are not invited. I haven't heard one way or the other about there being a Christmas party tomorrow at the home of my brother's in-laws (where he's currently living) -- for a few years that was where we all met up for Christmas. So at the moment it looks like I'm doing nothing special at all for "The Holidays" (I didn't even go out on Hallowe'en) unless I wind up doing something big for New Year's Eve. Not that I'm really ready for Christmas, what with having spent so much' of November and December ill.

[4] Perrine was lying on a Very Pink blanket that sunlight was bouncing off of, casting her white bits pink and doing stranger things to other shades in her coat. All the pink and some of the orange in all three photos of her here comes from sunlight bouncing off the pink blanket.