Beowabbit

Many thanks to plumtreeblossom for keeping folks back here in civilization in the loop. And many thanks to those of you who commented with well-wishes.

After a tweak to my Flexeril dosage I’m getting the relief without the scary side effect (although it still makes me a little slow and groggy — or maybe that’s not being able to use my CPAP masks, all of which still hurt too much), and I’m feeling much better. Slow steady improvement. I went in to work today, and was reasonably productive, and I have noticeably more range of motion in my neck this evening than I did this morning.

With any luck, I’ll be all better by Friday afternoon — just in time to have three wisdom teeth out!

And on that cheery note, it’s off to try to do a little bit of catching up on what’s happened here on LJ in the months since I last checked in.

After the fabulous closing night of Lysistrata and a wonderful birthday party for surrealestate and DD's darling Tadpole, plumtreeblossom and I were crossing the street this evening when we were hit by a car. It was making a left turn into the street we were crossing; the driver had probably slowed for the turn but didn't seem to slow at all to avoid hitting us; he did pull over a ways down the block and come back. There were lots of witnesses, among them anomie666 who happened to be on a bus that was passing and who stayed with us through the whole evening. He is a wonderful person and he deserves a medal and some really good Scotch.

All the emergency vehicles (at least two police cars, a fire truck, an ambulance, and eventually the tow truck to take away the driver's car since he left in other accommodation) had enough flashing colored lights for a Somerville Christmas. We declined the ambulance since we were just a few blocks from the hospital and the paramedics wanted to put us in back and neck braces and that seemed over the top (neither of us had hit our heads or had spine pain). anomie666 walked with us to the hospital.

The ER experience was quite good; everybody was very nice and we were treated very well. We both got lots of X-rays. I got the brunt of the impact, but I'm just banged up a lot and swollen and bruised. plumtreeblossom has a small fracture in her elbow (a radial head fracture), probably from when she landed. (I was thrown over the hood of the car, into plumtreeblossom who was also clipped by the car.) They gave her a splint and a sling, which is going to be a hassle for a while. We're both on industrial-strength ibuprofen and I'll be icing for a while. (Fortunately, plumtreeblossom had some bags of edamame in the freezer. :-)

Well, it wasn't the evening we were expecting, but at least we spent it together. plumtreeblossom, I love you through thick and thin.

I had a mild cold for some of the show two-and-three weekends ago, but I thought I was solidly over it by the end of the run. Unfortunately, it came back, with new symptoms, early last week. (Or perhaps I picked up something new to replace it in the green room — a bunch of the cast were sick, some of them pretty badly.)

Anyway, that got worse over the course of the week, and I ended up going home early on Thursday, and staying home on Friday.

Friday night plumtreeblossom came over to take care of me. (We’d already had a date planned, but we decided that with my hacking cough a nice dinner at a restaurant with lots of other diners was maybe not the best idea, so we picked up some take-out.)

After eating, we looked for something to watch on Netflix. plumtreeblossom said she was interested in something historical, and I asked if Shakespeare counted as historical. She said it did, and we ended up watching Great Performances’ 2010 production of Macbeth, with Patrick Stewart as Macbeth. The text was all Shakespeare, but the setting evoked a mid-20th-century fascist state with Macbeth as mad dictator. It was just spectacular. Although clearly done on a pretty low budget, it was visually stunning. The cinematography was wonderful. The acting was amazing — Stewart’s, of course, but also that of the other actors, none of whom we recognized. I felt like you could subtract the Shakespeare play and still be left with a great work of art. plumtreeblossom posted her own review of it here. See it if you can. It’s available on Netflix streaming and Amazon Instant Video.

This morning, we had a social event planned that we were supposed to be hosting, but I was clearly too sick, and unfortunately it was clear that plumtreeblossom was coming down with this too. :-/ So we scrambled in the morning to get in touch with some of the other attendees, and we hope it went off all right without us. plumtreeblossom went home, and I’ve had a quiet day at home watching more Netflix with my kitty and puttering around on the internet. I’m generally feeling better, but the coughing fits have gotten more violent (although less frequent). I really want to just wash my lungs out with warm water. (The vaporizer seems to be helping quite a bit.)

(1) My neck is all better. My chest is almost all better. I felt fine yesterday morning and went in to work. Unfortunately a cough on the train on the way in made me feel not fine, but I was basically OK most of the day. This morning I feel fine and coughing has not made the pain come back! (Although I’m trying to do it as little as possible so whatever it is can continue to heal.)

(2) I had an interesting couple of dreams last night. In the first dream, “we” (where “we” was some ill-defined mish-mash of my coworkers and my social circle, but mostly my co-workers) were having some sort of event where people would get taken up in a plane and jump out. Evidently somehow they were supposed not to die, although in my mind this was not the same thing as parachute jumping. I dunno, maybe you were supposed to aim for the pile of mattresses or something. The dream took place during the preparation phase. The police were not happy about us doing this (because they thought it was too dangerous). In the dream, First Amendment jurisprudence prevented them from actually stopping us (apparently, in the dream universe, sending planes up so people can fall out of them is purely a First Amendment issue and the FAA justly recognizes it’s not their problem), but they could set up alongside us and warn people how dangerous this was and try to get them not to sign up. But they were also coöperating with us about security and venue set-up and permits and stuff.

Then I had another dream in which I was telling somebody else about that first dream I had had (which was a dream in the second dream). That dream was odd, because I was living in the house I had grown up in in Illinois (permanently, but sleeping on an air mattress in the dining room), but I still had my Boston work and social life.

The rest of our trip to the Cape was great. On our way back, we spent a few hours at the Edward Gorey House, which was great. It’s a fascinating place celebrating a fascinatingly weird person. (He let raccoons live in one of his rooms for quite a while, for instance. Whether that was because he didn’t want to inconvenience them or because he just couldn’t be bothered to do anything about them, I didn’t quite gather. Either one seems entirely plausible.)

I finished Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries, by Molly Caldwell Crosby. As I wrote earlier, it was fascinating, and I think the novelistic style that rubbed me a bit the wrong way towards the beginning ended up working for me (especially when I read the notes at the end and realized that a lot of the suspiciously detailed descriptions were in fact properly sourced). Very highly recommended for anybody who likes historical nonfiction, medical nonfiction, or both. Looking forward to reading (and perhaps watching) Awakenings at some point. (Crosby says she was inspired to write Asleep in part because after reading Awakenings she wanted to learn more about the epidemic, and couldn’t find anything else written since the 30s or so.)

Got an unexpected impromptu dinner date with plumtreeblossom this evening. I was kept late at work, and she had her class schedule change unexpectedly, which meant we were both in Cambridge and free at around 7:30. So we met in Central Square for dinner. We first tried Mary Chung’s, but they’re closed on Tuesdays, so we ended up having a delicious Indian meal at Shalimar. Yay!

Oh, and it was very cloudy here all day, so no chance of seeing the transit of Venus around sunset EDT. (The new userpic is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite.) But as I was walking home from the T station the clouds had cleared a bit, and I got to see the International Space Station pass overhead.

PS — Huge thanks to surrealestate and DD for inviting us to join them and Julian on the Cape!

Well, the hip was much improved by the time I went to bed last night. It was much worse this morning. And it was a lot worse after I got into my car. [EDIT: Drove it to the T station and took the T to work, which was at least three mistakes.]

Had to take a taxi to tonight’s Poly Boston dinner (which was lovely; I treated the haze of pain I was in with a haze of wine) and from there to plumtreeblossom’s place, but I’m done having to move very far for a while. And with some luck, I’ll be able to walk tomorrow, and without some luck, at least I have a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Thursday.

‘Codeine... bourbon.’ —reported last words of Tallulah Bankhead

Hunh. I thought I’d been on-and-off sick for the past two months, but checking email and previous LJ posts it looks like it hasn’t been that long. But it sure feels like a long time.

Was in for a very partial day of work yesterday; stayed home sick today (and slept till 1pm, which I needed, and then dozed on and off the rest of the day). I think this is my third respiratory infection in five weeks. (And no, it’s not just allergies, although I’m sure the pollen is not helping things.)

Blah. Anyway, time for a long bath and then back to bed. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Friends list, already in progress.

So after lots and lots of sleep and getting sicker and sicker and groggier and groggier, I called plumtreeblossom and asked her to come over, because I didn’t feel entirely safe being alone. I was more or less OK at the time, but I was sufficiently out of it that I was afraid if I got a lot worse I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself or get myself to the hospital. (Thanks by the way to vanguardcdk for helping me get in touch with her.)

Over the couple hours it took her to get down to Quincy, I got worse and worse. I was drenched and broiling and dizzy and uncoordinated and could sort of stagger to the bathroom but not without holding onto walls on the way. And the most worrisome thing was that I was so groggy; I couldn’t think clearly, and was just going over this vague notion that maybe plumtreeblossom would want to take me to the hospital when she got there. Which I thought every few seconds, and it was new every time.

Then, about 20min before she got here, it all went away, within five minutes or so. I was still soaked, of course, but was no longer broiling and the breeze from the window felt cool. I could think clearly (which is a really wild sensation when it comes back so quickly). And when I sat up, I was completely coordinated. So by the time plumtreeblossom got here, I was able to sit on the porch with her and have a perfectly normal conversation.

I’m definitely not well — I’m still achey and exhausted and a bit nauseous and very stuffy — but I am so, so much better than I was yesterday evening. That was the sickest I’ve been in about ten years.

Behind the cut, why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker.

( Why you should always wear safety goggles when using a weed whacker. )

That’s something analogous to a bruise or a blood blister on my eyeball, from a piece of grit getting thrown into my eye at high speed. Whee! It hurt right when it happened, but almost immediately felt completely fine (and still feels fine now several hours later). If it had been a couple millimeters over, though, that might have been a very different story.

Don’t try this at home, kids! Wear eye protection!

PS — And of course after this happened (and I’d taken a look and satisfied myself that the damage wasn’t too serious), I went and found the safety goggles I’d been too lazy to look for before starting.

I'm guessing this is probably norovirus, gathering from what y'all seem to be up to. Got very suddenly sick at about 1:00pm at work (after PT appt I should post about), went home w/ a box and a roll of paper towels on the seat next to me just in case but managed not to lose lunch until after I got home; have been sleeping since then. Not on deathbed, but not very happy. But even this ill, I can still use "lose" and "loose" properly, so I'm ahead of 90% of the English-speaking Internet.

I hope cats can't get norovirus, because Chickenfinger is being her usual cuddly demanding self.