Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The child vaccination programme is safe and necessary. Having worked in healthcare for 10+ years, the last five at the front lines in the ER, I've /never/ seen a child admitted with side effects from vaccinations. I have seen children with bilateral amputations, mental and physical disabilities, hearing loss, and blindness from diseases that vaccines would have protected them against. I'd vaccinate as early as possible, as much as possible, any day." -- Cecilie Larsen, 2015-02-12

[Yeah, I know, most of y'all don't need to hear this and a tired of hearing it.  But it turns out there are a few anti-vax folks close enough to see this.]

What's going on with me, after last night's excitement:

The urgently-scary things have been ruled out. Not asthma, not pneumonia, not a heart attack, not a clot. The enlarged mediastinum on the x-ray was proved by the CAT scan to be an artifact of imaging angle or something. So it's not any of a whole bunch of things I didn't want it to be.

I still feel like I can't draw a really deep breath, like what breathing I can do requires an awful lot of effort. Still dizzy. Still falling asleep unexpectedly at odd times. 

The discharge instructions say costochondritis -- inflammation of the cartilage joining ribs to breastbone (cause unknown but sometimes associated with stress?) ... leading to my not breathing right because each breath has to fight against the pain from the motion of breathing, I guess? Implying that the "muscles sore from working so hard to breathe" sensation there is really inflamed cartilage, cause instead of effect. (OT1H I don't remember the pain starting until the second day. OTOH fibromyalgia means I have such a steady diet of both background pains and up front distracting pains that maybe I could lose track of the timing of that. I dunno -- the diagnosis sounds plausible to me, but the ER doctor did not seem the least bit certain of it, and he'd said a few minutes earlier that (a) he was mystified but (b) I wasn't currently in the process of dying, and (c) I should follow up with a cardiologist and a pulmonologist in the next few weeks.

They sent me home with prescriptions for 800 mg ibuprofen 3x/day (but a verbal "no, don't take more" from the nurse when I pointed out that I already take 1g 2x/day) and 100 mg tramadol 1x/day (but I'm already taking 100 mg 2x/day, so I'll be asking my primary doctor whether taking it 3x/day is okay or I should just stick to 2x).

And then after Sheepie brought me home, I fell asleep before I could finish writing this followup post.

Anyhow, not immediately dying. I have more appointments to schedule (in addition to the house-repair estimates I need to schedule), I still feel crappy and insufficiently oxygenated, and I'm still not completely sure why. I'm currently feeling better than yesterday but worse than Monday.

Names omitted to protect the innocent^[*] (no sense trying to disguise the guilty, as y'all would just guess anyhow), and because the quotes-from-memory are probably not remembered quite right:

"If I have to resort to linoleum flooring, it'd be cool to have something other than a solid colour or geometric patterns or woodgrain. A custom image covering the floor instead."

"Oh yeah, I've seen something like that."

"So when a guest steps into the living room, suddenly they're standing on the edge of that pit on Tattooine with the monster in the bottom." [looked up later: the Great Pit of Carkoon, housing a Sarlacc]

"What?! No! Wrong! Bad! NO! Why would you DO that to your FRIENDS??"

"Or maybe molten lava with the most frequent path through the room done as stepping stones? Or a lake and stepping stones."

"Okay, that's better..."

---

I can describe and thus spoil this next idea, 'cause I'm never going to have the resources to pull it off ...

I'd like to build/remodel and decorate a house such that two rooms are exact mirror images of each other, down to replacing the outside windows with high-resolution video displays so the views from each room's windows match. And cut a hole in the wall between the rooms and frame it like you would a wall mirror. So that I could stand near the "mirror" and wait for guests to move to where they would be able to see my reflection if it were really a mirror, and see who notices that I don't have a reflection, and how they react.  Or maybe just wait to see who notices that they don't have a reflection.

(If I frame this as a psychology experiment instead of a practical joke, could I get grant money to build the rooms?)

[*] Never mind the gestured toward anonymity -- realinterrobang says I got the conversation close enough.