yam

JUST CALL ME BROOKE LAUNDERVILLE I mean actually don't, I like the Lundervilles a whole lot, even the ones that aren't my darling son, but I did get divorced, I'm Brooke Abbey now but what I'm trying to say is YAY I CAN DO LAUNDRY

So the GoFundMe thing worked out for me! It funded the purchase of both a fancy washer/dryer combo that is at a height I can access without pain, and a fancy (but tiny) drawer dishwasher that I can use either standing or sitting without bending and thus also without pain. There were some delivery hiccoughs, like, the washer got here two months late, but at this point that's a sorrow for Past Brooke and I have moved on to the phase where I wash SO MANY THINGS.

Hiccoughs is absolutely not how Canadians spell hiccups, but I picked up the affectation from god knows where and it's been long enough that I can't bring myself to spell it the normal way. Likewise with liquorice. Okay back to laundry.

Even on shitty, shitty pain days it's not too hard to start a load of laundry, and I don't have to do the math on whether I will have the energy to change the laundry - in the past when I wasn't sure, I would err on the side of not doing laundry, because playing Mildew Or Pain is a terrible party game. But with the combo machine, I load it, press a button, and boop, that's it, I don't have to think about it again until I unload it at my leisure when I have the energy again. (Or more likely don't; Greg loves sorting laundry and does it to wind down while I read the bedtime story.) Meanwhile it turns out that when it doesn't hurt to do the dishes, I'm the kind of person who does the dishes every single day. Or I am now, anyway. I mean it didn't hurt to do the dishes in my 20s and hahaha no, I absolutely did not keep on top of them anyway. But either I've matured or being grateful to be able to do them at all is motivating, or possibly just I'm avoiding the disappointed pronouncement of "Mama, you should really do the dishes" from Greg? Anyway, I see the bottom of the sink on the regular now and it's weird but good.

Health has been... complicated?

Still on the keto diet. I feel like I'm going to crack within the year and go back to my normal diet, 50% candy and 50% cucumber, because WOW do I miss desserts and restaurants and life is short, but carrying on for now in the face of my annoyingly fantastic liver lab results. Siiiigh. T&T had a sale on frozen precooked duck last week and that's helping stretch out my willpower.

Migraine is the same as ever, but I'm going to be trying a new procedure that might help with fatigue, stellate ganglion block. Which is kind of scary and invasive, it involves an injection deep into my neck, dodging the jugular and carotid and the thyroid and my lungs, so uh, hold still please? (Also they use ultrasound to see what they are doing, so it's a little less dicy than that makes it sound.) It's had great results in long covid and chronic fatigue, which overlap significantly with what migraine does to me. Actually I think I qualify for both those diagnoses, I just haven't bothered to formally get diagnosed because what would it change about my treatment: nothing, that's what. ANYWAY. First one is on Monday, then repeat in two weeks on the other side of the neck, then decide if it's doing anything or not, and see how long it lasts if so. (Despite the local anaesthetic they use wearing off in a few hours, it has lasting effects of weeks to months. Other kinds of nerve block work like that too, nerves are wacky.) So why would a nerve block in your neck do anything about fatigue, you ask? Aren't nerve blocks usually used for pain directly caused by that nerve? GREAT QUESTION, THEY USUALLY ARE! No one knows why this would affect non-pain symptoms. But it seems to in a lot of people. Something something sympathetic nervous system something something fight or flight something something. I mean the papers say "putative mechanism" and "it is generally hypothesized that" instead of the something-somethings, but lol they dunno. The doctor who is going to repeatedly stab my neck is suspiciously handsome AND quite pale AND has a strong romance-language accent, so... probably a vampire. Well, there's a doctor shortage, what are you gonna do.

My eyes have decided to join my liver and my head in the squeaky wheel department, and thus one of my retinas is bleeding. Not enough to affect my eyesight much so far, just an artful spray of blood around a blocked side vein (the picture was quite pretty!) so it's in the "we'll just keep checking every few months" bucket for now. My pupils have had dilating drops 3 times in the last month and it's a guaranteed ticket to migraine jail for days afterwards, which is better than sudden blindness but that's about all I can say for it. I did get to have a eye angiogram, though, which involves getting fluorescent yellow dye by IV, which meant days of NEON YELLOW PEE, and that was pretty amazing. You never saw such a cheerful toilet in your life, it was genuinely uplifting. Next up are some less colourful tests (I mean, I assume the MRI machine is still off-white; I know my regular ophthalmologist's diagnostic machines definitely are, and I have to specify regular because I have multiple ophthalmologists now, although actually my retinal specialist also only has beige and off-white machines, so I guess I didn't need to specify after all) to see if this is caused by glaucoma or caused by oops you had a stroke or just caused by We Don't Know And It's Weird Because You're Young-ish So It Could Happen Again Any Ol' Time, Call Us If You Go Blind. Very conflicted on which of those to hope for, so I'm lucky that I don't actually have any control over which one it is.

Okay that last sentence taxed my RELENTLESS CHEER powers quite a bit, but I'm going with it. I am excited I get a head MRI out of it! It's pretty clear my migraine is, y'know, migraine, but when your head has been hurting as badly and as long as mine has, it's reassuring if someone can take a look from time to time to make sure that your head isn't full of demons or crabs or a tumour the size of a grapefruit or an actual grapefruit that took a serious wrong turn. It's getting on to ten years since my migraine went chronic, so it's about that long since the last sets of imaging. There could be crabs now! But probably not because that's not a thing. Unless...?

My final health woe is I hurt my thumb playing too much Katamari Damacy. I regret nothing. Plus kind of refreshing to have a health problem I can just solve with an ice pack.

Chubblies are out and all my recent medical appointments have meant I have gotten to see a LOT of blossoms this year, which is pretty great. Greg and I even went to the aquarium this week for a combined chubblies + EELS day out, and it was splendid. I should pick a different word because the aquarium now no longer has Splendid Garden Eels, splendid is the one eel we did not see, but it was pretty splendid anyway. The octopus was plastered to the glass! Next to a sign saying "you might need to be a detective to find the octopus!" Not today, sign, not today. The sloth was active and hanging out at eye level! It looked at me! I got a photo, because when a sloth looks at you, you have plennnnnty of time to get out your phone. (Why does an aquarium have sloths? I don't know, but it does, and sloths are great.)

Oops, that was sure a year without posting. Let's see, what all went down in 2024!

- I had surgery and then got an infected wound that needed daily visits to a wound care clinic for monnnnnths. (Surgery was a medical side-quest to improve a boring and very not-life-threatening issue, I'm fine.) That was tedious but also like, was possible, thanks to my wheelchair. It still sucked up all my spoons for like 4 solid months, but didn't leave me in agonizing bonus head pain, which would have been the case a year before. *SMOOCH* ILU WHEELCHAIR

- Despite adoring my wheelchair, I am getting a new one! I was hoping when I got my chair that it would make my leaving-the-house-once-a-week less physically punishing. And it does. But it does it SO WELL that I have been leaving the house almost every day. WHICH IS AWESOME but means that I would really benefit from a sturdier non-folding chair. My foldy one is very light-weight, which means it can go in cars and I can visit people in areas with inaccessible transit, etc, which are important things to me to be able to access, but for day-to-day stuff, the super light weight means it does not have a lot of traction, so it is hard/dangerous to handle on steep hills, wet sidewalks, cambered sidewalks, boarding buses parked on a cambered road, blah blah blah. BUT WAIT, DIDN'T THE MINISTRY TURN DOWN YOUR WHEELCHAIR ASK, THAT'S WHY YOU GOT THIS ONE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Correct! But lololol it turns out once you have bought a wheelchair with your own money, it's then much, much easier to qualify for another wheelchair, since now you have proved that you need one. I want to say this is bizarre but nah, it's pretty on-brand for the byzantine catch-22 paperwork labyrinth that is dealing with the ministry. Also I had covid, again, and now my resting heart rate is a three-digit number and migraine pounces on me with even less physical exertion than before, which is annoying, but also is a physical symptom with numbers and stuff, which helps with the application.

- ANYHOO. In October I hooked up with an occupational therapist again, we submitted a new application, and I just found out the new chair was approved, and should arrive in a week or two! I AM VERY EXCITED. It's a mid-wheel drive chair with really nice suspension, and it weighs about 300 pounds, so when you stop on a hill it just... stays there. The casters don't swing over to try to steer you into the street. Is the pavement wet? Gosh, I just didn't notice. IT'S PRETTY GREAT. Adjusting to a mid-wheel from a rear-wheel drive is going to take some practice - I kept fish-tailing around on the try-out day, although partly because the demo chair was set to go from 0 to full speed instantly, no acceleration, and we can set up my personal chair to um, not do that. But it turns on a dime and should be a lot better at boarding the skytrain. Currently I have been boarding the skytrain backwards every time because my casters keep getting stuck sideways in the crack between the platform and the train. Sometimes I can get out of this by popping a wheelie, which is not really a recommended move in a power chair. (Totally standard move in a manual chair, but you can flip yourself over doing it on a power chair since you can't just grab the wheels to arrest your momentum.) The new chair has a fancy suspension system that shifts the weight around when you are popping over an obstacle. Well anyway I'll see how it does, but there's video of people cheerfully crossing over railway ties at low speed with no problem, so I'm very hopeful. (Doing that at low speed is much dicier than at high speed because your casters don't have as much momentum keeping them aligned.)

- That was a lot of word salad about wheelchair handling! The TL;DR or TL;R but still confused is that I'm getting a new chair soon that will be FANTASTIC for getting around town on transit or on the sidewalk and I'm SO EXCITED. Also the fairing is metallic orange, hell yeah. I will not be retiring my current chair, it gets to be my travel chair, going in cars chair, and visiting the gulf islands chair. I am actually really glad I got it first, because the ministry considers all those things a luxury, so if they had just approved a normal chair from the get-go, I wouldn't be able to do those things. Right now having the folding wheelchair is pretty handy while I'm house-hunting because my realtor can drive us around town looking at places. And this way I have a back-up chair, another thing the ministry considers a luxury - so if my chair needs repairs, I still have a power chair to use in the meantime instead of being stuck at home for days or weeks.

- Wait, your realtor? What? SPROING SURPRISE I have sold my apartment and am currently house-hunting. I'm hoping to move somewhere less inconvenient to Greg's school, but the primary goal is to move somewhere either on the ground floor or which has two elevators so I'm not stranded every time someone moves in or out or when the aging elevator in my building is on the fritz, which has been happening more and more often. I can technically take the stairs, but that alone puts me in bed in pain for days afterward, plus whatever punishment migraine I get from then going on to do an errand on foot/cane instead of letting my chair do the walking. Meanwhile my strata council has taken 5 months so far to consider my request for a door opener for the building and has gotten... a quote? Maybe? This is something they would clearly be required to provide under the human rights code of BC, but if I have to enforce that with the human rights tribunal, it would (a) take many years and (b) be kind of an indicator that I would not be a priority if the elevator broke down more seriously. Yeah nope time to move.

- While this is going on, the cats and I are staying with my mother-in-law, which is also where Greg's dad lives right now, so Greg is enjoying having access to cats and bedtime stories 7 days a week instead of just on my custody days. Also I'm pretty sure I got a better price on my place for not having all my stuff + the cat litter box there for open houses. (Okay definitely sure I did. My parents staged the place and they are WIZARDS, so it looked like something out of a magazine instead of like, a place where a human and cats had ever lived.) Ladybug is absolutely LOVING having all the people who live here petting her constantly. Sammy was less excited - he is smart enough to have anxiety and object permanence, unlike Ladybug - but I just got him a heated blanket so he's coming around. I am eager to move out and have my own space again - and I'm sure my ex-husband will be happy to have his own space again too; the divorce was amicable but y'know, we did get divorced for a reason. (Although I think he'll miss the cats! He's making them a cat tree for christmas.) But it's been nice to catch up with my MIL and get more Greg time, and to see my niece and nephews more over the holidays. (They are very boisterous, so usually when they visit their gramma, Greg wants to flee the premises and come stay at my place, so we tend to miss seeing each other.)

- My head has been pretty well-behaved. The underlying chronic migraine hasn't improved, but the wheelchair means I push it into pain overdrive a LOT less. My worst-pain-day rescue meds have been lasting me twice as long, which is actually more than a two-fold improvement on number of worst days, since there's a hard cap of two days a week that I can use them without risking rebound headache from the meds. I haven't been to the hospital for migraine in like six months, which is what passes for luxury around here.

DISTRACTIONS I HAVE ENJOYED THIS YEAR:

- Dropout, the streaming service. It's mostly nerdy improv comedy, but they do it VERY VERY well and also they are fantastic about respect for trans people - not a given for comedy - and they have the best content warnings I have ever seen. Like if there are flashing lights, they list the exact time-stamps in the video you need to avoid, so you don't have to just skip entire series because of a vague "This broadcast may contain flashing lights, viewer discretion is advised" like literally everyone else uses. Game-changing. (Both because it makes watching videos less risky for me and because my favourite Dropout show is called Gamechanger.) But also great content warnings for a broad set of other triggers - spiders, mentions of abuse, etc etc etc. And the comedy is so kind. They don't punch down, and the actors all seem to genuinely like each other and like their boss. Even if I've had a shitty head month and haven't watched much, I never regret the subscription fee, I'm happy to support their continued existence.

- Martha Wells' Murderbot series. I devoured it myself earlier this year, and now it's Greg's bedtime story (we finally caught up on the October Daye series, all... 17? 18? books of it, so we needed something new.) Murderbot is very sarcastic, can't stand eye contact, and is a total badass who wins most of his fights by being clever instead of just using his impressive arsenal of weapons - so pretty much 100% written to pander to Gregory specifically.

- Star Trek: Lower Decks. I'm so sad it's been cancelled after season five, but also it's clear the writers took that as license to just go NUTS in season five instead of trying to behave to be renewed, and it's glorious. There's like, the Capitalism Is Terrible episode, the Anti-Maskers Are Dumbasses episode, the That "Just Friends" Queer-baiting Couple on DS9 Are Canon Fucking Now episode, it's just fuckin' great. And it was already great.

- RELATED: Ryan North has written a lower decks graphic novel choose-your-own-adventure and IT IS SPECTACULAR. He has done a bunch of bad-ass CYOA shakespeare in the past and he has mastered the format and does some ridiculous stuff with it here. Also his writing is just amazing, I would buy absolutely anything he wrote sight unseen. The writing is very true to the show but also very true to his style and it's just so delightful. And he's a sweet nice guy and Canadian! Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way, highest recommendations.

- My DIY yarn advent calendar! I was whining about how tempting yarn advent calendars are. I still haven't finished making my blanket with last year's calendar (partly because the colours were kind of boring. Very pretty, but not even a little neon.) so I banned myself from buying a new one, and anyway, whining sure pays off sometimes, because a dear friend who was in the process of winnowing out her yarn stash made me a personalized yarn calendar with stuff she was getting rid of. We have very similar tastes in colours, which is to say, YESSSS BURN THE EYEBALLS and/or RAINBOW! and/or THIS COLOUR IS DEFINITELY A LIMITED EDITION FRUIT-ROLL-UP FLAVOUR. I feel very, very seen, both emotionally and because of all the HI I AM A COLOUR ALSO MAYBE I HAVE SPARKLES yarn is hard to miss.

- Aurora! That was just one day but it was a very good distraction. Greg was very, very impressed with it and ranks the aurora-watching night as one of his best days ever.

- It's been a year of mostly replaying comfort video games - Witcher 3, Okami, Loom, Stardew Valley with a mojillion mods, but I have also enjoyed a few new ones:
-- Loddlenauts, which is kind of "what if pressure washer simulator, but underwater and you are constantly acquiring adorable axolotl blobs as pets"
-- Donut County, which is short but you team up with raccoons to reverse-katamari the world, A+++
-- Merchant of the Skies, also very short, a commodity trading game but you have a flying turtle ship and also have rap battles with giant octopuses and do favours for an enormous sky carrot??
-- A Highland Song, a combination walking simulator + rhythm game + selkie visual novel? Great gameplay, huge world that takes multiple playthroughs to see all of, and fantastic writing paired with fantastic voice acting.
-- Miss Mulligatawney's School for Promising Girls, which is not actually out yet, but I've been a beta tester. It's hilarious and also I sent them a painfully nerdy bug report about anachronistic drug choices for the historical setting, and now they are listing me as "Pharmaceutical Consultant" in the credits.
-- Wilmot Works It Out, a jigsaw puzzle game, sort of. You are a square whose day job is organizing boxes in a warehouse, and you have joined a puzzle club and use your warehouse skills to assemble them. But a bunch of the puzzles have visually similar elements and a big part of the game is figuring out which pieces go with which puzzle. The interface is very awkward but somehow that makes it better because you are a man who is a square and also are the same size as the puzzle pieces? It's a weird game that I found very soothing.
-- Monster Prom, a dating sim about uhhh monsters going to prom.

Okay that's a lot I will stop typing. See you next year! Or next week! Who knows!

I AM SO SORE which is actually really great. I have left the house three days running and even though I'm sitting down, I'm able to move around more than I would at home, and because I'm sitting down, I never push it enough at any one moment to trigger the OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD MY HEAD that would normally come long before I had a chance to make anything sore.

Today I finally hit some kind of limit and managed to bring on a brutal neuropathy spell by shoulder-checking a little too fast. (Nerves that got snipped in my mastectomy are slowly growing back, and as they do it hurts at random times, but it's more likely to happen if I wrench the muscles nearby. It's like an ice cream headache in your entire arm + torso, but it passes in 10-15 minutes so it's not worth medicating.) So. Tomorrow I am going to stay home and rest, really, truly, probably, even though outside is VERY EXCITING and I feel like a cat in front of a screen door. *scratch scratch*

I went on a bus! Using the ramp the first time was terrifying! I parked very, very crookedly, and discovered that my brakes are /excellent/ because yikes were they tested by my diagonal af parking job as the bus went up New West's second steepest hill. (The steepest is right next to my house. I am NOT going up it in my chair unless a bear is chasing me.) (Well or then, I would just go downhill instead to the nearest dumpster and assume the bear would be way more interested in that than me.) On the return trip I somehow did *magical sparkle perfect parallel parking* when I boarded the bus, although I think this was probably a stopped clock is right twice a day type of accident, and I will continue to approach this task with humility.

THINGS WHICH LOWKEY WANT TO KILL ME:

- Cambered sidewalks
- Broken pavement
- Steep curb cuts
- Hills
- Steep, cambered curb cuts with broken pavement on hills.
- My front casters
- Castors?
- Apparently both are used in Canadian English, welp.

THINGS WHICH ARE SURPRISINGLY NOT MY ENEMY:

- Grass! I swerved off a broken-ass segment of sidewalk onto a grassy verge and instantly everything was okay, wheelchair was happy as a clam, I was able to reorient and get back on the sidewalk. I suspect because the grass puts my casters cast damnit they both look wrong. Ahem. I suspect because the grass puts my cast*rs in friction jail so they can't flip around as whimsically. There are mildly fancy driving maneuvers you can do to be the boss of when your cast*rs flip, but I am not there yet.
- Brick and cobblestone! They're a bumpy ride but don't send me off on surprise direction changes like cambered curb cuts do.
- Puddles! At least, reasonably sized puddles.
- Bus drivers! I was so nervous about using the ramp. The transit website has vague instructions and says forbiddingly "You must be able to manoeuvre your device safely onto the bus!" OR ELSE DETENTION! They do have a thing where you can go to transit HQ and practice on an empty bus, but I would need to take a bus to get there, which... yeah. ANYWAY. Bus drivers today were nothing but patient with my erratic driving, politely not commenting while my rear wheels squealed against their wheel well, etc etc. Much appreciated! (Although wow, very different experience from taking a kid in a stroller on the bus, but it's more socially acceptable to judge moms in public than guys in wheelchairs. Even though a stroller literally is a wheelchair for someone who cannot walk.)

THINGS WHICH ARE JUST HARD TO GET USED TO:

- The need to look where I'm going vs. the Canadian urge not to make eye contact with other pedestrians lest we have to acknowledge each other like in a *shudder* elevator.
- Also, elevators. Wow do people want to use me like a jungle gym to fit in the elevator. Sorry gang, my electric badonkadonk is just going to take up two thirds of the car, there is no jenga move that will make it shrink, you must suck it up and wait 3 whole minutes for the next one or risk my running over your toes and I will not apologize.

JUST KIDDING I WOULD TOTALLY APOLOGIZE:

- But passive-aggressively, see also, Canadian.

====

Me: I am not going to name the wheelchair, it is a tool, an inanimate object.
Me, five minutes later, after Seanan happened to me: I have named the boy Caleb, in accordance with your wishes. His name is Tyvar.

Tyvar is a character from Magic cards, which I do not play and know basically nothing about except he is gung-ho and loves punching.

PRO: When I feel nervous about my driving skill, I ask "Would Tyvar hesitate to give it a try?" and go for it.
CON: The answer to "Would Tyvar punch the shit out of this [curb, door jamb, wall, pole, drywall]" is always "YES. YES HE WOULD," which is, alas, fairly descriptive of my driving style at present. I'm getting better! I did not drive into the front door of the building today even once!

Actually I only bonked it lightly once the day before, the turning radius on this bad boy is sick, the brakes are fantastic, and I crank the speed way down before entering a building. But I have Forklift Driver Klaus playing on repeat in my brain the whole time and I'm convinced I'm about to decapitate someone / topple a warehouse at any moment, which is not a bad attitude of caution to take as a driver I suppose.

WELL THAT HAPPENED

My fundraiser has been funded. In 6 hours. I am getting a wheelchair!!! I JUST ORDERED IT!

I'm just wandering around with a :O look on my face right now. Also flipping forward in my calendar looking at appointments and gleefully going "I can VROOM to that one! Hah!" Definitely I have never been this excited about getting bloodwork. XD Bweeeeee!!!

Folks donated over my target before I showed up to mash the "oh gosh stop it, stop it you sweethearts!" button, with the result that this is also paying for almost all of Sammy's vet bill from last month. I am getting a wheelchair and I am out of cat debt. I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING.

Okay it's me, I'm crying, although actually I think that's 50% an autonomic quirk from my current migraine, because I'm sobbing from one eye only and pouring out snot from the nostril on that side. Bodies, amirite? I... am so sorry you just had to read about my nose faucet. I am a little jumbled right now I AM GETTING A WHEELCHAIR PROBABLY NEXT WEEK oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh.

Hola! I am not sure why, but I consistently feel the need to open journal entries with hola. I do not speak spanish pretty much at all, like, I can't even keep the different options on a Canadian Mexican restaurant's menu straight. I should go for Привет! or Salut! instead, languages I can actually order food in. But there you go, brains, amirite?

My brain is much the same as ever on the pain / fatigue / fun times front. I still haven't gotten to try the new drug I posted about uhhhh... oh wow, it's November. 7 months ago. I qualify for it, the paperwork has been submitted, the paperwork has not been acted on, my doctor has resubmitted it and called them to ask what the heck, still no approval, I don't even know. That stuff was my day-job so I know my doc has Done The Things, the system just... didn't spit out an answer and I have no idea why, bubblegum in the gears. If I ever get the spoons for it I'll head up the chain to, I guess, involving my MLA? But I don't feel that urgent about trying my 40th migraine drug anyway, I've already tried one drug in this class so this is kind of a "might as well" thing rather than real hope. Maybe when the the gepants and ditans hit the market. Or well, maybe well after they hit the market, and Pharmacare gets around to putting one on formulary. ANYHOO.

Currently waiting on the Ministry of Blah Blah Blah Writes Welfare Cheques (that is, amazingly, shorter than their actual name) to decide whether or not to fund a mobility scooter for me. I can walk fine (well, "with a cane" fine, old knee injury) I just get blazing head pain if I try to go more than a block or two, which is hard to cram into an approval/denial rubric based on more direct limitations to mobility. So... not very sure what to expect. Gosh I hope it gets approved, though. I did a trial go with a scooter and went to the skytrain station and back and then WASN'T TIRED OR CLUTCHING MY HEAD IN AGONY. Or well I was tired, but like, I checked the mailbox tired, not I walked farther than the migraine police thought wise tired. IT WAS GREAT. 4-12 weeks to find out! Hopefully this will go better than the drug approval thing. Different ministry, at least, so presumably haunted by /different/ capricious paperwork spirits. The occupational therapist and the equipment vendor were both so supportive, even if this gets rejected it was nice to have an encounter where my limitations to mobility were just accepted as valid and we went right to trying to find solutions to help. You kind of don't realize how adversarial the medical system is in disability until you hit an experience where you /don't/ have to primarily focus on proving how disabled you are to get basic care. Although this one does still boil down to waiting for someone to decide if I have adequately proved I'm disabled enough for a scooter. Lol/sigh. Also now that I think of it, it took me 12 weeks and like six phone calls to get the OT visit arranged. BUT LISTEN THERE WAS THAT BRIEF MOMENT OF VALIDATION AND IT WAS NICE.

My world feels pretty small right now. I leave the house mostly for blood tests once a month, and to visit my parents once or twice a month. We try to visit every week and I cancel most weeks. (Hoping a scooter will reduce that a little.) Travelling to see friends who aren't local: hahahahahahahaha no. Not that I could afford to; Sammy almost died last month and that cost over a thousand bucks and that will take my oozing slow drip of disposable income quite a while to recover from. (Actually a fair bit more than a thousand, but a friend very, very kindly offered to pay for a second hospital day for him, and I am so grateful, because I think that day made the difference between him coming home alive or not.) He is okay now! Mostly! Still sneezing for mystery reasons, which concerns me, but for a while there he stopped eating and was throwing up every hour and hiding under the couch. When the cat who would like to sit inside my nostril if there's nothing closer available hides from me, something is deeply, deeply wrong. He is back to sitting on my hands while I type, thank god.

Well that all sounds grim. Things are kind of grim! I am a depression goblin lately. More than usual.

LET US PRETEND LIKE I'M NOT: THINGS THAT ARE GREAT:

- Video games! There's a Rakuen sequel, Mr. Saitou, and it is charming as heck. You're a cross between a garden eel and a llama and a suicidal salaryman, and you help a flower bud achieve his dream vacation by carrying around animals you are terrified of. Hand to god that is an accurate and straightforward description. Also recently enjoyed Venba, which is a cooking simulator that is also a visual novel about intergenerational friction in IndoCanadian immigrant families. Speaking of games that are hard to describe. The boss battle is making your mother's layered biryani from a recipe you can't read, and then having an awkward discussion with your son who is off to college and doesn't want to take your embarassing smelly ethnic food with him to his dorm. WHY IS COOKING MAMA MAKING ME CRY, I said to myself, incorrectly making a dosa. I mean it also made me very hungry, this is a recommended title from me, to be clear. Also have been playing A Little to the Left, which is mostly satisfying but sometimes impossible, and Suika Game, which you SHOULD NOT DOWNLOAD it's not even fun but you can't stop playing it and goddamnit why can't I get a watermelon whyyyyyy.

- Crafting! Taking a small break from cross-stitch to do a mystery-knit-along shawl. I picked very eye-hurting candy corn colours, and then ran out of some of them halfway, oops, and swerved into the rest of the eye-hurting rainbow and let me tell you, this shawl is gonna be V I S I B L E

- Nikoli puzzles! Nikoli is a japanese publisher of paper and pencil logic puzzles. I got one of their sampler books and loved it, and was especially surprised to find I really loved the kakuro puzzles, which up until then I felt meh about. Emboldened, I bought a bunch of north american kakuro books and they... were awful, as usual. What the heck? But I have found out why, and it's because Nikoli's whole thing is that all of their puzzles are hand-made by humans, not computer generated. This sounds like I'm being very precious about it like audiophiles who buy gold-plated cables, but really! It makes a big difference with some puzzles, especially hard ones. With easy puzzles it doesn't matter much, other than that humans are most likely to make puzzles with cute patterns in them. But when you get to difficult puzzles, hand-crafted ones are more satisfying, because they rely on solving strategies that may be tricky, but have steps that are fun to think about instead of tedious and requiring extensive notes. It is possible to make computer-generated puzzles that do this too - if you have Apple Arcade, the Good Sudoku app is a great example of this, it segregates puzzle difficulty based on what solving strategies you need to use, and teaches you how to use each of them. (Although tangent to my tangent, some of their strategies involve "since I know this has a single solution, I can rule out options that would lead to multiple solutions" which I feel like is cheating. I prefer to solve without meta-solving. Now I am being precious about it, but whatevs, sudoku is a pretty harmless thing to be a snob about.) But it's much easier to just have a computer check "can this be solved at all? yep? print it!" and this results in a mix of puzzles where some are fun to solve and some are painful to solve, with no way to tell the difference unless the publication is high-end enough that the editorial team has test-solved the puzzles. But Nikoli puzzles are almost all the fun-to-solve kind. Not easier to solve, the expert level ones include puzzles where it takes me 4 days to finish, but fun to solve, involving steps where you just have be clever in a way you can hold in your head, not "consider this option's implications through 17 layers of next steps and see if you hit a contradiction" which is the case in a lot of computer-made logic problems. It's hard to see this with graphical puzzles other than by doing a lot of them and noticing it feels different, but you can absolutely see this with classic word logic puzzles - you know, the ones that come with the grids to fill with Xs and dots. In a modern collection of those, you can read the solutions and fully half of the hardest ones will involve stupid chains of "assume this, then that then that then that then that" and a paragraph later get around to "But that would contradict the first assumption! Therefore--" which maybe someone enjoys but I sure don't. It's definitely a computer thing rather than a style choice; you can look at solutions to logic problem collections from the 80s and earlier and there's basically none of that, or maybe like a three-layer-deep chain in particularly tough puzzles. ANYWAY ANYWAY, after learning this I ordered just a crap-ton of Nikoli books - all of their (limited) English-language ones, and then a bunch of single-puzzle collections of games I already know the rules for so I can limp through without being able to read Japanese. Happily their annual mixed-puzzle compilation always includes English directions, so I've learned a bunch of new-to-me puzzle types through those. Masyu 4ever, yo. But most of all: I have like 18 kakuro books to attack. In my tenure in Migraine Land, hobbies which can be done in complete silence are treasures and well worth the postage from Japan.

- I got a new reading light! A glocusent neck light. The task light I was using for cross stitch was starting to flicker in a way I couldn't repair, and anyway I was just leaving it off and squinting in the dark half the time because using it didn't make my head happy. The neck light is so good! I can bend it to point just at the small part of the knitting / stitching I am working on without it shedding enough ambient light to bug my head, I can pick the colour temperature to suit the craft I'm doing and/or whether yellow light or white light hurts more that day (BRAINS. THE WORST.) ...and I have to fix fewer mistakes now that I'm not literally making a stab in the dark, which it turns out is a saying for a reason.

- Greg, of course. Not that parenting isn't exhausting and challenging too, but it comes with comedy gold and hugs, so. We've been reading the October Daye books as bedtime reading and he spends so much time during the daytime wheedling extra chapters out of me and I love it, I love that me reading to him is a special treat he wants to sneak more of.

Hola dreamwidth! I am basically just saying HI I AM STILL ALIVE, I have no spoons to write often but with twitter self-destructing my usual outlet of posting cat pictures as proof of life is defunct.

Things are not ideal over here. I just quit my job, I'm retiring from pharmacy, letting my license lapse in a couple months. I've been waffling about this for years as disability has made working harder and harder, and it just got to the point where it was time. I can't make it through a CPR course, I miss almost half my shifts because of migraine, I'm worried migraine cognitive effects will lead me to make a dangerous error, I'm barely even working enough to break even on my license/insurance fees. And it's been meaning that hauling myself to work anyway knocks me out for days afterwards and I keep missing seeing my family or friends or spending time with Greg because I'm so trashed from work. So just... no. I can't anymore.

I HATE THIS. I love my job so much and that should be enough, but it's not, and I hate it. I don't want to not be a pharmacist. I mean, I guess I still am, just... a retired pharmacist.

(This is where kind, well-meaning people will pipe up to suggest that maybe I could write, or do remote work, or something; alas mostly I cannot; meaningful jobs of that nature need you to be licensed and so I would lose money doing it because I can't work enough to pay for that.) (So uh. People who talk to me regularly: I am so sorry for how HELLO CAN I OFFER YOU UNSOLICITED DRUG ADVICE I'm going to be in the next while, this is gon' be an ADJUSTMENT.)

I feel like maybe my headaches are worse the last six months, but it's hard to tell; they aren't better anyway. If they are worse I don't know what to do about it anyway. And I've had a continuous headache since late 2015, so. I feel like I've done enough wait and see to decide that waiting and seeing isn't going to result in a magical remission.

Sigh. If I do magically get better, I can change my mind. I have six years in which returning to practice would just mean catching up on continuing education and doing a lot of paperwork, and after that I still could, I would just have to retake my licensing exams. (Which sounds stressful, and it is for a new grad, but would be trivially easy for me as a pharmacist with my experience, just expensive and a bit of a hassle.)

I just... don't see that happening. There are new migraine drugs coming to the market, but I've failed on 40 drugs already, this is just... what it is.

Moneywise it's not a big change; I was working 2 hours a week, and missing a lot of those weeks, and now I won't have to pony up two grand for annual fees. It feels kind of stressful because work was ostensibly the one part of my income I had any control over - my disability pension, child support, tax credits etc are all just whatever they are. But let's be real, I'm quitting because I didn't really have control over this either, so.

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I will get through this and find the sunshine in the cracks between the blackout curtains. I have my family, my cats, I've been finding a lot of solace in fiber crafts, I'll be okay. Just. Grieving at the moment over this loss.

Surgery happened! It went great and recovery is going well, the big unwrapping is in two days. And then the big re-wrapping, I'll be in elastic compression jail for several more weeks whether or not I see my shadow, but this'll be the first chance to see my cool new scars/chest.

Great moment: last thing I remember before waking up in recovery is the anaesthesiologist saying "What is this, this is amazing!" about my banjola tattoo, and then the whole surgical team stopping what they were doing to demand a tour of all my tattoos (the pharmacy one was the crowd favourite, unsurprisingly) before getting on with the anaesthesia. If a roomful of strangers is going to see you naked, that's got to be the best possible response, gotta say.

I was prepared for a minor ordeal at least in recovery, but uh. Honestly I haven't even noticed the pain, it's so minor compared to what I have every day with chronic migraine. So it's just like a regular ol' Tuesday, except I can't reach the top shelf, but have already taken the day off work and bought extra popsicles, so it's kind of vacation-like, really. But with mummy bandages. Usually not wearing mummy bandages on vacation. Although I did once ride a mummy-themed rollercoaster on vacation.

My toilet has decided to take this moment to die, thankfully with a slow-dripping whimper instead of something more dramatic. Luckily my parents are nearby and were able to come rescue me when I put down towels and then realized I couldn't pick them back up again without violating the terms of my surgery parole. Sigh! I will now call a plumber to remand this bad boy to toilet justice or toilet retirement or whatever and buy a shiny new one, and perhaps upgrade my bidet from "$25 on amazon" to "something made by an actual plumbing manufacturer" while I'm at it. I'm a mostly-homebound disabled person and god only knows when travel will be a real thing again, so might as well put such discretionary income as I possess towards hermit luxuries, right? Anchorite chic? Is that a thing? I'm making it a thing. (I'm not making it a thing. Although my mom coming over to rescue me by washing my towels does have major Henry David Thoreau vibes, natch.)

Surgery cancelled at the last minute! AGHRJGEHRGjhgfhjgHJREGJH

I will get to do it eventually, probably in just a couple months, but I am SO FRUSTRATED. At least this means I can pick up more covid immunization shifts and get my frustration out by stabbing people. (Gently, in the public interest. Will do my actual rage stabbing in video games.)

The worst part is I told all my bras "HAH! WON'T WEAR YOU AGAIN!" as I tossed them in the laundry, and now they're all "Nanner nanner, look who's come crawling back!" and there's just no point in telling compression garments not to rub it in, those smug bastards. Oh mastectomy hubris thy name is Brooke. *cry*

Because the regular kind are too depressing! Although NGL, making the list this year was also pretty depressing. There were a lot of things I did this year that I didn't want to do but they weren't optional. Probably you too, huh?

RESOLUTIONS I DEFINITELY MADE JANUARY 1, 2021 AND NOT JUST NOW:

1. Don't start smoking
2. Successfully buy a couch and get it delivered despite hypothetical disruptions to trade that could plausibly happen
3. See your SOs in person
4. Come up with a weight-training routine short enough that you'll stick with it and stick with it
5. Budget smack-down! Start using a budget tracker so you can stop having vague money anxiety every time you buy something.
6. Stab lots of people
7. Get Greg a better school situation
8. Pay people to help you do things you can't do instead of just feeling guilty about how you aren't doing them
9. Go to the Smithsonian! Or at least /a/ Smithsonian. I know it's a terrible time for travel, but hey I feel lucky.
10. Keep up your duolingo streak

I KEPT ALL TEN BECAUSE I AM EXTREMELY RESOLUTE

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Footnotes:

2. YES THE COUCH ARRIVED. December 14th, only uh... eight months after I ordered it. This would have felt infuriating to know in advance when I bought it, but at this point I feel damn lucky to actually have it show up despite all the supply chain nonsense in the world, and to have ordered it a few months before the government imposed big tariffs on imported furniture.

3. Usually this is not something I need to resolve to do, but I didn't see them for all of 2020 and that SUCKED. Travelling to see them also sucked, for the usual migraine reasons but also COVID anxiety, but was worth it.

4. I have been sporadically but steadily doing push-ups and pull-ups! Modified and assisted respectively, but I'm growing me some visible arm muscles. Testosterone is kind of great; these results would have taken like 15 times as much effort for pre-T me.

5. I have been using You Need A Budget thanks to Tim's recommendation and I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I was skeptical at first that it could be worth it to pay a hundred bucks a year to upgrade my excel spreadsheet, but IT REALLY IS, like, I bought a subscription three days in to the 34-day free trial. I'm good at saving but I have saved so much more with this, I can look at it and see that I'm on track to pay upcoming big periodic expenses, and I can buy things and know that minute if I can afford it or not, instead of just feeling vaguely guilty about every purchase and hoping it pans out. I know my bank and credit card balances to the penny and also I know whether those balances are _enough_. It makes it super easy to switch up your plans to reflect reality - you spent fifty bucks more than you budgeted on groceries? Welp that money is gone, select which category to take it from, there you go, carry on. My only complaint is that making USD purchases is hard to track because I have to go back and adjust them from my credit card bill to find out the actual exchange rate, but that's a problem with credit card transparency, not YNAB so much. ANYHOO. Love it, top marks, recommend. It is a bit intimidating to set up but so worth it.

9. IT WAS COOL. I bought a t-shirt and also got to tick off a new subway system on my life list of transit tourism.

10. 1119 days in a row of Russian. I use Russian exclusively for translating things the Winter Soldier says in fanfic. But that makes me feel VERY SMUG. And blah blah blah brain plasticity blah blah dementia blah blah pop science.

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Well That Happened shit from 2021:

1. Tom died. I got to say goodbye, I got to hold his hand while he passed, but he's gone and I'm sad.

2. Lost an SO to transition. They're straight and my gender, nebulous though it is, isn't on their menu. We're still friends, or will be when I'm done grieving that, but. We were dating for 8 years and this sucks and I am sad.

Something like 50ish percent of relationships don't survive a transition, or at least that's a number tossed around with no citation in a lot of books, and I have kept 2 out of 3 of my long-term relationships, so I'm actually ahead of the curve I guess, but uggggh I don't feel lucky about that. I'm pan and demi and so this is a difficult thing to even wrap my head around, it's like "I can't date you because your favourite colour changed" from my point of view. I know that's not what it feels like inside a straight person's head. I'll get to feeling philosophical presently. Just... not yet.

3. Ain't no party like a pandemic party 'cause a pandemic party won't stop FFS COULD YOU STOP

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But 2022's Comin' And I'm Ready To Frankenstein Some Shit Up:

Got a consult with a new top surgery surgeon this coming Tuesday! 2021 was the year of gastroparesis for whatever reason, screw you too migraine, boo, and I have lost a lot of weight. I don't really want to lose weight, but I didn't get to choose. But the upside is I now fit the arbitrary weight cut-off of a surgeon with a much, MUCH shorter waiting list. I'm told 1-3 months after consult for surgery with this guy. For comparison I'd been waiting 14 months and counting with my first surgeon, one of the few willing to work with me at my starting weight/BMI. Grrrr. So I'm excited and pleased and furious all at once. Elective surgeries are being cancelled all over the place right now so I'm not sure if the estimate I was given will be accurate, but it will happen sooner than it otherwise would regardless.

Don't have a consult yet but should be hitting the top of the list soon for a specialist to address The Uterus That Thinks It's Hilarious To Increase Menstrual Cramps In Response To Testosterone. At this point we've given up on trying to find a T dose that mitigates this, so I am very likely going to ask for a hysterectomy, and the wait list for those is usually pretty short too, because cis women get them all the time.

You would think this would be the case for top surgery too, since it's basically the same surgery technique as mastectomies and breast reductions, but nope, most plastic surgeons don't do them even while they do dozens and dozens of the cis-woman flavour a year. The number of surgeons is slowly increasing as people retire and new graduates are from a generation that doesn't view trans people as an oddity, but it's still a big gap.

ANYHOO. So good odds I will lose a bit more weight this year, through the somewhat extreme technique of just literally cutting it out of my body! Well, talking someone else in to cutting it out of my body. You know, for propriety's sake.

Depressed as heck to say goodbye to my father-in-law, Tom Lunderville, today. Father, husband, grumpa, filker, electrician, luthier, unitarian, giant robot builder, survivor of taking a giant plasma ball to the face, youth group leader, soccer coach, and all-around shit-disturber.

He passed peacefully in his sleep after a short, annoying arm-wrestle with cancer. (Lung-wrestle?) He is survived by his sisters Martha & Susan, his wife Peggy, his sons Ben & Joe, his wiggly grandchildren Greg, Josie, Otto & Gus, and an ungodly number of speakers in various states of disrepair. Big thanks to the staff at Royal Columbian Hospital for their compassionate & kind care in his last days.

I was holding his hand when he went, but I was only the most recent of his dozens of visitors and callers over his weeks in hospital. "I didn't know I had touched so many lives," he said a few days ago. Well duh, Tom.

The world is just a little bit smaller and more boring now. Please do something weird and kind to help make up the difference.

( Slightly ginormous pictures beneath the cut )