illness Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Operating on low energy

Not Detected

I’ve been operating on low energy.

After I went to the urgent care place on Sunday, June 14, and it appeared to be just allergies, it seemed to abate. But it, or something, came back with a near-constant variation.

And THEN, I got what I suspect was food poisoning; my wife, eating at the same venue, had some symptoms as well. (For a time, I thought I might have the parasite Cyclospora, except I never had a fever. When you are unwell, you look at all sorts of reasons.)

So I went back to the urgent care place on Wednesday, July 1, and got my nose swabbed. The next day, I got the results:

Streptococcus pyogenes – Not Detected

Mycoplasma pneumoniae – Not Detected

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) – Not Detected

Influenza A – Not Detected

Influenza B – Not Detected

RSV A/B – Not Detected

Rhinovirus – Not Detected

Enterovirus – Not Detected

Still, everything was an effort. We had severe weather that Wednesday night: driving rain and lightning so severe that I unplugged my laptop.

The next day, my wife was going to drive me to my podiatrist; usually, I would have just taken the bus, but it was 96F (35.5C), with a heat index of 107F (41.7C). According to the WRGB meteorologist Steve LaPointe, “the peak heat index matched yesterday’s peak, but the duration of heat indices in the 100s was twice as long.”

Power line?

We had left the house to get to the doctor’s office when we found a power line draped over not only our car but our daughter’s. It didn’t SEEM to be live, but we don’t trust our “expertise.” We gingerly got in the car. After my wife drove off, I called National Grid; of course I have their emergency number programmed on my cellphone.

When we got back, we found the loose wire rolled up in a tree. The message on my landline – my account is tied to that phone – indicated it wasn’t their wire, but Spectrum, the cable company.

This mean I needed to call Spectrum. Since their default menu is to try to fix a problem that I don’t have, I yell (or squawk) “Representative” so I can get a Real Person.

All of this is not really onerous, but in low energy mode, meh. I’ve been doing a BRAT diet, expanding it of late because it’s so damn boring.

I can’t sing more than an octave. Someone asked if I would participate in a brief 4th of July musical bit. I would have loved to, but I simply could not, which made me sad.

Okay, I’m done whining for now, mostly because I’m too tired to zzzz…

The family that COVIDs together…

Also, four hours in the hospital

What IS that old saying? “The family that COVIDS together…” I’m not remembering the rest of it.

As noted, my daughter developed COVID c. Wednesday, August 24, just as we were about to head off to college.

Friday, August 26, we were all going to get more substantial COVID tests at the urgent care place. But my wife opted out, deciding she had no symptoms. I chose to get one because I had a bit of a sore throat. Truth is, I often have a bit of irritation from allergies or whatever. My daughter was still positive, but I was negative.

My doc asked a bunch of questions, such as if I had chest pain. I had more pain in my right shoulder than in my chest, but she ordered an EKG. She discovered a variation from what she was expecting. Now, I was born with heart arrhythmia. My primary care physician calls it a regular irregularity.

A change in plans

The urgent care doc suggested that I go to an emergency room to get further tests. I called my wife to pick me up – taking the bus after I’d taken a COVID test didn’t seem sage – and got some lunch. Then she drove me to Memorial Hospital because it would likely be less crowded than Albany Med or St. Peter’s.

Everyone was very nice, a couple of doctors, a physician’s assistant, and the nurse. The nurse was great, actually, and I was distressed to discover that one of her other patients had tried to assault her while I was there. The hospital ran a bunch of tests and found me A-OK. My calcium was low, and some other minor things were discovered.

By Monday, August 29, I was feeling achy, and I was coughing, sometimes uncontrollably. More rapid tests. I was positive for COVID, and my wife was likewise, even though we were fully vaxxed and doubly boosted.

I can say that I have felt worse, such as when I had the flu a dozen or more years ago. But it is difficult to focus on much of anything. (This blog post of 420 words I had to do in two shifts.) I feel addled. I bollocked my Wordle on Tuesday – I got it in six – because I couldn’t focus. The word, coincidentally, was ONSET, some cosmic joke. My wife, from her activity level, seems to be feeling better than I am.

My daughter won’t get to college until Sunday, three days after classes begin. Whatcha gonna do?

So it’s NOT allergies?

rhinitis

This spring has been terrible for my nose and throat. I assumed the cause. But it’s NOT allergies?

I would have coughing jags. One at church on May 8 was so severe that I had to leave the choir loft, lest I hack through the sermon. I seemed OK enough the following Wednesday to ride my bike a few days later to a memorial service for a choir member, then onto my Dad’s group at church. But by the time I rode home, I couldn’t get enough air. This wasn’t the not-fit-enough response, but the my-lungs-feel-awful scenario.

The next morning, I had another coughing event WHILE I was taking my blood pressure. That 168 systolic reading WAS an aberration. Later, I went to my allergist. To test whether the allergy shots I took for about five years, but hadn’t taken in for just as long, I had to stop taking Zyrtec for three days. So I was pretty miserable when I once again became a human pincushion.

It’s all in my nose

But surprise! I have rhinitis, which “is moderate to severe and not well controlled.” But I have “no evidence of remaining sensitivity to tree or grass pollens based upon negative skin tests to these allergens.” I AM still allergic to ragweed, but that’s a late summer thing. “A second course of immunotherapy is not recommended.” So I’m still using nasal sprays in the morning and evening.

Then am I ill? I went to the local urgent care place as a walk-in the following Saturday. The hour-long wait turned out to be 210 minutes. Did I want a COVID test? Sure, why not? And just as the rapid tests have shown, I still don’t have it.

It’s a strange thing having symptoms that COULD be COVID. Almost any bodily reaction COULD be COVID. And with the recent spread into the Mid-Atlantic and upper Midwest, I suppose I need to continue mask indoors. So far, so good.

Monkeypox

Oh, and it’s not monkeypox, people. Some people I know IRL are fretting, “First COVID, now this.” Not yet. Another person I know IRL believes that it’s a WHO plot to inject us again.

Family health report, March 2017

Oh, my spouse made orange JELL-O with chunks of pineapple!

Anyone get the license plate of the truck than ran me over? Not literally, but…

Let’s back up.

Friday, March 10 – The Daughter was having some muscle pain, and I stayed with her, figuring she was dehydrated or something. But then she developed a fever, and felt lousy, as we tended to her with cold compresses and OTC medicine.

Saturday, March 11 – She seems better. Her fever is gone. She was helping the cleaning for my annual hearts party, which was a lovely event. But beware the two of diamonds! I theorized that she willed herself to be well, because she knew it was important to me.

Sunday, March 12- She’s feeling worse again, and her fever returned. The Wife stayed home with her, while I went to church.

Monday, March 13 – the Wife took the Daughter to the MD, who diagnosed her with strep throat AND either a cold or the flu.

Tuesday, March 14- you may have read how the snow forecast was overblown in the big cities such as Philadelphia and NYC. Well, it wasn’t overblown in much of upstate NY. My hometown of Binghamton got over 30 inches, about 3/4 of a meter, and Albany got a total of 20.5 inches, over half a meter. It was the first time in 36 years, I’m told, that the state closed down, allowing “non-essential” personnel to stay home without having to use a vacation day.

I shoveled the first six inches, no problem. But attacking the next nine was much harder than it should have been. It WAS windy and a near blizzard, but still, I should have been able to handle it. I was grateful for The Wife’s assistance to finish the job. I went to bed early, around 8:30 p.m.

Wednesday, March 15 – I was going to drag myself to work, which, in retrospect, would have been a mistake. But since the Daughter was still recovering, I tended to her. By the afternoon, though, I asked The Wife to take me to the urgent care place. After about three hours there, which included various tests and a chest x-ray, it was determined that I had BOTH pneumonia AND influenza, despite having gotten a flu shot back in November. My wife decided to sleep in the spare room, which I thought was wise.

Thursday, March 16 – Did not sleep well. I was so congested I thought I was suffocating. My attention for anything – the computer, TV – is about 15 minutes. I can’t read a book or anything that requires focus. Oh, my spouse made orange JELL-O with chunks of pineapple! You’d be amazed how for that 10 minutes, how almost happy I was. Being sick will do that.

Friday, March 17 – Tried to write a blog post, but I kept writing the wrong word – “committed” when I mean “commented,”, e.g. I DO know the difference MOST of the time. And it’s exhausting to sit up. We have seven movies (DVDs) we got in anticipation of the snowstorm, but can’t focus enough to watch any of them, but for one we all saw back on Tuesday.

Saturday, March 18 – Lots of strange dreams about aliens, Burger King, the Berman family (my great-aunt Charlotte’s people). The one thing I remember in a dream was that the dreams you have do represent a memory of your life, but it may be an event that has not yet taken place. I think the dreams are a direct result of being dehydrated, probably from some medicine finally kicking in.

This feels like drunk blogging. I’ve started about six posts this week, and, including this one, the number completed so far: one.

Tuesday, I see my primary care physician. Until then, I’m not operating any heavy machinery.

The rambling, largely unfocused, sanity report

I have noted that this past winter was tough. The cold. Attending four funerals in the first ten weeks of 2015. One of my library buds leaving work at the end of January. Black History Month stuff. Friends of the Library stuff.

Plus the family sickness chain. The last week in February – the Daughter, the week before her church play. By March 1, she was better, but I felt awful. Yet I had an adult education class to teach, scripture to read during the service, and needed to attend that aforementioned play.

I said, OUT LOUD, that day, “If I didn’t have all these things to do, I would have stayed home.”

So you would think I’d have listened to myself and stayed home the next day; I did not. But I felt so miserable, I left as soon as I could, which was two hours later because the buses out of Corporate frickin’ Woods run infrequently in the middle of the day, then I stayed in bed the next couple days.

Why on earth did I go to work? Because we were shorthanded at work. One of the librarians was on maternity leave for December, January, and most of February, which, I rush to note, is a good thing.

The weekend of my birthday, March 7, I was better, but my Wife was definitely becoming ill. Then the next week, the Daughter.

The week after that, my lungs felt as though they were underwater. I went to the doctor’s and got some meds, but the situation was slow to clear.

I went for a massage several days later, and she pressed my back; the noise from my lungs sounded like the special effects sounds of a horror movie. It was actually quite entertaining to listen to – I wish I had recorded it! – aside from the fact that it was emanating from me. I missed choir for three weeks during Lent – my favorite time of the church year – during which both the Wife and the Daughter got sick AGAIN.

I missed seven workdays in March, five of them sick days, two vacation (one of which involved going to the fourth funeral). Plus, in April, some weird thing was wrong with the Daughter’s foot.

But now it’s May. It’s warm (or hot, or occasionally a bit cool.) We can ride our bikes. Everything is both hunk AND dory. Well, almost. There’s the live bat we found in the house, the first in several years. And the noisy neighbors: after telling them to keep it quiet at 11:30 Sunday nights, I called the cops on them a few hours later when their volume returned.

Work still is a slog. Trying to get done with four librarians what we did with five is difficult.

Almost the whole staff statewide attended the annual training meeting in mid-April, where the librarians talk about things we can do for our colleagues. Every year, this has inevitably meant a spike in the number of questions that come into the library, and it was true again, especially the last three days of April. We had traditionally offered a week’s turnaround time, but we didn’t finish the April questions until May 13.

There’s a part of me that says that I oughtn’t to take time off. But a greater part says that I NEED to. I have a couple of weeks of vacation, and close to six months of unused sick time.

Here’s something that is more than a rumor: we may be moving out of Corporate (frickin’) Woods by the end of the year. One unit on our floor, affiliated with SUNY Albany, is moving in September to a building near Stuyvesant Plaza, which is also close to the campus.

A woman from another unit on our floor, affiliated with SUNY Central, as are we, says that her group is moving somewhere downtown, once parking issues are resolved. I assume the same will be true for us as well, though we’ve heard nothing official.

If we were in downtown Albany again, which we left in May 2006, I would be SO thrilled. Access to restaurants, stores, the post office, my bank. I could attend events, such as the weekly talks of the Friends of the APL. Plus, there’s a Farmers Market every Thursday for at least half the year. In other words, there’s a THERE there.

In the winter, I could take one bus to work, and one bus home, rather than two each way. I’d have the flexibility to take one of at least three buses that would get me home, and I’d get there sooner. Plus both my dentist and my eye doctor are downtown, so when I need an appointment, it’d be a quarter day off, rather than a half-day.

In fact, the ONLY downside is that I’d have to go to Corporate (frickin’) Woods every 28 days for my allergy shots, but I could still get to work by 10:15 if I take the usual two buses to CfW that I take now.

Well, there IS one thing I’d miss if we move downtown. There is always a cadre of new folks coming out to CfW , having difficulty navigating the buses. Having the need to be useful, I’ve helped more than a few people out.

Recently, one of these twentysomethings was texting his 10-year-old nephew and was puzzled by a question he received: “When is a door not a door?” Heck, I knew that, straight off. My daughter would know it. I was glad to help.

You do know the answer, right? “What is ajar?”