Haemoglobin is the key

I forgot to mention I fell off a yoga wheel and broke my ass. I was so damn close to making it 48 hours of accident free yoga wheel ownership too. If you, like me, had never heard of a yoga wheel until you saw one on clearance on the bottom shelf at TJ Maxx and decided you had to have it because you’re holding out hope wellness can be achieved through technology, even though in your soul you know what you really need is a prison workout and to stop eating sweet and salty Chex mix with the caramel popcorn seasoning sprinkled on top at 3AM, well then the yoga wheel is a plastic circle about 10 inches in diameter that you do yoga things with. Beyond that, I’m not clear. The model was elegantly balancing it on her shin bones, but if I were to emulate this display it would result in a private Cirque de Soleil show for the sole benefit of my Build a Bear. So I went with the yoga wheel’s other stated use of deepening stretches to justify its purchase.

What I failed to realize was how much balance it required to stay on top of a light, 4″ wide plastic wheel a foot off the ground. What I did realize, but failed to heed, was that I had a bunch of shit on my floor and that probably wasn’t enough space to operate the yoga wheel. Thus, just like this summer, when I fell on my DVD player, I found myself hurtling (as much as one can hurtle 10 inches worth) towards my floor, with time freezing just long enough for me to process (but naturally not long enough to react to) the recognition ‘oh shit, I have no space to put my arms out and catch myself,’ before  tipping over, slamming the same fucking hip into my closet door.

However, unlike the DVD player incident of 2016, where I immediately knew I fucked up and crawled into bed to go to sleep and avoid what would be a totally unflattering reassessment of my life, this time, I was fine. I took a ten inch bump onto a shoddy, builder-grade hollow-core door and some carpet. I didn’t so much fall as I rolled, aggressively and unconsensually.

Yet somehow, I woke up to a fucking potato sized bruise on my hip, and my poor butt cheek was bruised and that didn’t even hit anything.

Thus, the only logical conclusion is I have hemophilia. I did a presentation in Russian History on hemophilia in the Romanov dynasty, and how the transmission could be used to prove Leopold was illegitimate so I’ve always felt kind of a kinship… with hemophilia. Totally normal. Also there was a b-horror movie I watched in 9th grade where the killer was driven to kill because of the isolation they felt as a hemophiliac child, and I thought it was a pretty good twist ending and was surprised no one had exploited hemophilia before for that purpose. I’m sure the hemophilia lobby (?) is relieved, because neither of those examples is a real great reflection on hemophilia, you don’t go to a public relations office and go, yes, we would like more of that, but we don’t always get to choose what associations people have.

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I Googled why people bruise easily because I don’t know if you knew, but I am a fucking doctor, and my alma mater is the Mayo Clinic website. I turned up a whole lot of nothing, besides “are you old?” “did you take ibuprofen?” and “you have hemophilia.” Hemophilia confirmed.

I don’t have hemophilia. I cut my thumb open with a pocket knife my Dad got at a trade show in 4th grade, and I survived dual attacks by a framed autographed poster of Matthew Good and a DVD player. Despite my usual reservations that anyone can confirm they are in fact, alive, it seems I probably haven’t bled to death.

BUT there is hemophilia-lite, which is not a medically accurate description. I’m sure the institute for clotting disorders is like, “go fuck yourself you Russian-sympathizing, Saw knockoff watching bitch, do you know how much we are going to have to pay a PR firm to undo your ignorance” but I maintain it is in fact hemophilia-lite if you just think of hemophilia as bleeding a lot. Which I’m sure they don’t.

Apparently your blood can be slightly wonked, various parts of it refuse to clot to varying degrees, from full on Leopold-grade hemophilia, to your blood is malfunctioning but so mildly so you don’t require treatment. That still wouldn’t explain how I managed to get a billion teeth pulled and came out unscathed, unless I have hemophilia-lite-lite, like if hemophilia was a full suite of Adobe PhotoShop and I had MS Paint. But, when I had my deviated septum fixed, and this is legitimately, one of my biggest regrets, the first time I was allowed to rinse my nose, a fucking softball sized blot clot flopped out and wiggled its way down my sink like a turtle returning to the sea. I had debated filming this event, but talked myself out of it, thinking, you idiot, it’s day surgery, nothing is going to happen. Then I got goth Flubber the blood turtle and have never forgiven myself. Having been relatively healthy and having no other symptoms I didn’t think much of it, but maybe I should have asked the ENT about a giant clump of coagulated blood that turned into a friend, like the plot of a 90s kids movie.

So I’ve got to add this to my list of medical things to get checked out. I’m already getting tested for some pre-diabetes marker, because when my doctor was going over my routine blood test results, she said everything is great but your blood sugar is high, and I said, what do I do, and she said, well sometimes it just happens with medications, and I’m just sitting their like… okay… you’re the doctor… what do I do. Then she looked at my chart, and apparently my blood sugar has been high every time. Stretching back years. I was just never informed.

Despite what falling off a yoga wheel, befriending my own blood clots and eating fake caramel powder covered Chex Mix suggests, quality healthcare tends to be a sticking point with me. But I wasn’t given the opportunity to become enraged because I was too busy fielding questions about the Trump presidency. She threw me off by quizzing me point blank asking who I voted for a second time, the only silver lining being that she probably didn’t write it on my chart the last time. Why isn’t that a violation HIPAA? Can’t you just amend something about the sanctity of the secret ballot to the end? Twice now, I’ve got to run this mental gauntlet, of like, who do I think she voted for? I didn’t have my prescriptions yet. I’m weighing race and age and economic status. Does gender beat being a businessperson? Race beats likely middle to upper middle class? Like stereotype rock paper scissors? Ironically, I’m reduced to dividing my doctor up by competing… voter attributes because I’m afraid of losing health care?

We’re headed towards some sort of, more attention-deficit Orwell or more faux-Puritan Vonnegut future, man.

February week 2? week 3? I don’t even know anymore

Watched The Accountant which seemed like a superhero movie without superpowers in the generally accepted sense. I genuinely wonder what the Autistic community’s opinion of this film is, and I’d they had any input (or financial stake in it.) Liked it though, bang bang shoot em up type movie (or as my Mom described “A BUM BUM BUM,”) with a bit of brooding Ben Affleck Oscar bait-y drama, and a hard left veering happy ending that also favorably compares autistic children to proteges of Dr. Xavier. Like I said, we all thoroughly enjoyed it, but I do wonder how people with Autism feel about it, because I could see it going either way.

Continue reading “February week 2? week 3? I don’t even know anymore”

February, week 1

I’m really proud of myself, because they left the security sensor on a $20 tote bag I bought at TJ Maxx, and instead of driving back to the store and having them remove it, I just cut that fucker off.

I wrapped the potentially dye filled part in a Ziploc then cut the chain with a pair of 3M plastic packaging cutting scissors I got at Michael’s in preparation for Christmas a couple years ago.

Best investment ever. Those shears will cut anything.

But I’m all high on myself because I’m not much for rule breaking, but in my deteriorated mental state I was all, not today TJ Maxx, and I got shit done and nothing blew up on me.

And I got to take my tote bag into D.C. because my Uncle is here for some trade show.

My Mom’s friend’s own stress response has become ordering things from Williams & Sonoma off her iPad while hiding in her bed, and in a near-literal turning-life’s-lemons-into-lemonade scenario, she bought this amazing Yuzu-Meyer Lemon Cocktail Mix that is one half of the classiest whiskey sour I’ve ever had.

I still can’t get my files off my memory card. At this point, it has nothing to do with the files themselves and everything to do with me needing to dominate my phone.

Old people, the Royal Rumble, SD cards that can S my D

I swear I’m not technologically incompetent. If anything, I’d rank myself slightly above average, maybe a nice 7.5/10. Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast, or Murphy’s Law, or that other variety of Murphy’s Law from that show I never remember the name of, ‘everything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment,’ but somehow my cell phone, my sister’s camera, and my computer all failed at the same time, and I lost my camera.

I have since found the camera, in a backpack that got put in the hall closet. Never again with the compact cameras. I shouldn’t be able to lose a means of recording in a backpack pocket. I need my cameras to inconvenience me.

Anyway I decided I wanted to make a Royal Rumble reaction video because I made one last year and I’ve played it over a couple times since then and it amuses me. My thought process is basically, well, do you find this funny? Then do it, at this point. The urgency of the Royal Rumble reaction video is entirely my family’s fault. My Mom broke her foot what feels like several years ago, but was really about a month ago, and I don’t think I’ve taken a deep breath, like in a literal sense, since then. My Mom has the physical grace of a donkey, which is all the more amazing given she is maybe 100lbs. Her lack of control of her being is so acute it somehow manipulates the laws of space and gravity and physics and I’m sure there’s a blanket concept for those three things I would know if I learned science in high school but I didn’t. Usually it’s just annoying but with the lack of foot and added crutches and even if I keep making fun of her, very real injury, it’s scary. She fell literally seconds after we got back from the hospital, flat on her back in the middle of a dark road, no less, and took a header ironically, going to the physical therapist’s office. I learned it’s really hard to pick another human being up, even if they are light. If they have a satin-y puffer jacket on, it’s worse. If you haven’t cut your bangs in a while and you can’t see and also it’s pitch black out, that also ups the difficulty.

It’s gross to see your Mom in pain or incapacitated like that. I have no other way to describe the wrongness that goes beyond just empathy. Both my grandparents died recently, and the terror of their mobility has been high on everyone’s minds. I don’t know so much that my Mom is flying to close to the sun, so much as she has some innate drive to hurl herself into it and then refuse help. Like my grandma, my grandma who in the last months of her life, with 100% mental clarity, and nearly 0% vision, decided to deep fry potatoes, blind, because it was a waste of money to order takeout french fries when they had perfectly good ones in the freezer.

I’m so fucked. My grandparents deteriorating health destroyed their half-dozen kids, and billion grandkids or however many there are. I have my sister, who makes my Mom Uber to appointments when she is home, and once cancelled on my birthday lunch with our Dad because she forgot to call off work, only she didn’t go to work, she was at home. I know this because we live in the same house. I mean what?

So that has been heavy. The thinking about caretaking. Which great news, I am fucking horrible at. Then that’s setting off good old-fashioned sibling rage. Rage.

So I haven’t been doing much besides trying to stay calm. My Mom was feeling good enough we went to return some stuff from Christmas that never got done. Thank God for 90 day return policies. A nice girl held the door for us. I got a new pair of sunglasses. We went to get groceries and I got a bunch of movie theater snacks and a motherfuckin’ sub. I ingeniously taped a selfie stick to my bookshelf and got my little reaction capturing set up going and did a little test video and things are looking up.

I recorded about 25 minutes (light on, counter going up, everything) and decided you know what, I’ll be smart and hit stop, and start a new video, so I don’t have one 2 hour video to contend with, and if something fucks up it will be contained. So I hit stop, I watch the video ‘save,’ go to play it back, and THAT FUCKER DISAPPEARED. NOTHING IN THE GALLERY. NO FILE. NOT ON THE MEMORY CARD. NOT ON THE PHONE. WTF!?!?!

I pulled the memory card, because motherfuck you SD card, this ain’t my first rodeo, so it wouldn’t get overwritten, but so far so shitty. I borrowed my sister’s camera (I realize my borrowing something from her/my talking shit about her in the same couple paragraph span is sort of wrong, though I do think her, trust me, abandoning me with our theoretical elderly parents is a different realm,) and recorded the last bit of the Rumble, but at that point my heart wasn’t in it as I was distraught about what new means my phone had discovered of torturing me.

To be clear, I realize this all sounds silly as fuck, and is in the grand scheme of things, incredibly minor, it’s just been a genuinely hard month, and I was so looking forward to that little spot of dumb indulgence. I managed to get so gutted I had to make a trip to my old cryin’ spot, sitting on the (lidded) toilet in our basement bathroom while praying there were no centipedes in there. I think I’ve classical conditioned myself to cry in there, because if I’m going to cry, it is virtually always in the worst room in the house.

I’m so glamorous.

Sometimes my tenacity is a bad thing and now is one of those times, because I’ve devoted far too much of this week to trying to recover a file of me eating a sub while hating Baron Corbin. I just don’t want that memory card to win, and right now I feel like it is. I hate forgetting things, losing things, and being one upped by machines.

Also my music lesson sucked this week. Where is sanctuary. Ugh.

Pearl

When I was in third grade my parents took me to a sketchy, subterranean pet store off the food court in Hillcrest mall with no windows and a single, incongruous neon sign bearing some nondescript name like BJ’s Pet Emporium where I would be allowed to procure my first pet, a hamster.

Continue reading “Pearl”