eddyfate

The check-up with the surgeon's office was very short -- mostly it was a cleaning of the extraction sites and a quick lesson in how to do it myself (twice a day). The nurse told me that actually I'm doing really well -- many patients can't really even open their mouths at this point, and nearly all of them are still on constant pain meds (I'm on one pain pill in the morning and the rest of the day on ibuprofin for the past couple of days). The pain, numbness and nausea are all common, especially with the number of extractions I had (apparently I had twelve novocaine injections for this surgery). I asked if I would be able to eat and talk around this time next week, and the nurse said that shouldn't be a problem, and if it is a problem, I should probably come in for another (free) post-op check-up.

I asked because next week is ICC. I also found out that I'm going to be working in the office for parts of ICC weekend -- probably all of Wednesday, and likely at least part of Thursday and Friday. That may also mean coming home Wednesday and Thursday night to make sure our pets are handled and fed, and so I can get up and go to work without bothering Michelle and David by waking up insanely early (by convention standards). So, I'm not going to be around as much as I've been at previous ICCs -- in fact, I think this ICC I'll be positively scarce until Friday evening. This does mean I don't have to rush Whitechapel, though, and I might even fudge my NaNoWriMo wordcount to start late next week instead of trying to cram it in on the Sunday of ICC.

Which reminds me -- I need to post about my NaNoWriMo plans. But first, I need to do the Whitechapel Post-Mortem.

Tuesday night, while I was playing Brutal Legend, I was struck with sudden and massive nausea. I went to lie down for a bit. I ate a little, and that seemed to help, but I went to bed very early. I woke up nearly 12 hours later, still nauseous and still exhausted, so I took another sick day from work and stayed home.

Today I'm feeling about where I was Tuesday morning (maybe a bit better, since I'm managing my pain with only ibuprofin). I have some nausea medication with me at work, just in case, and I have a follow-up with my surgeon this afternoon. I'm hoping to catch up on my Whitechapel post-mortem tonight, as well as catching up on some work today.

For some reason I thought this recovery would be a slam-dunk because I've been through so many surgeries, but I'm just moving back to an old coping mechanism -- taking it one day at a time.

I realized that while I mentioned this obliquely, I haven't actually talked about my recent surgery, or why I needed to have it. Let me correct that oversight now.

About a month ago, I went to a new dentist for a (long overdue) checkup. She took some X-rays, and said that all four of my wisdom teeth are sideways in my gums, and the lower two were pushing against my roots. She suggested that I get those two removed, and referred to me an oral surgeon. After I worked out the best time at work to take a few days off, I talked to said surgeon, and we decided to just go ahead and get all four removed so I don't have to do this again in a year or so.

The surgery was Friday. As far as I know, it went well -- I went to sleep and woke up with a sore throat and gauze in my mouth (which sounds much more interesting than it really was). Michelle drove me home, and I stayed in bed all day watching videos on my laptop and trying to find ways to swallow pills without opening my mouth too much. The next three days were an exercise in relearning how to chew, talk, and play video games while under the influence of pain meds. (Note: I have no idea how good it is while sober, but Brutal Legend is hella fun while on pain pills.)

Today I'm back at work. I'm mentally and physically exhausted, and I'm still not too far beyond eating soft foods, but I'm able to do more than sit on the couch and try not to accidentally bite my tongue. It might be another day or two before I do much more than get up, go to work, go home and lie on the couch for several hours, but I'm slowly ramping up to something approximating "normal." I'm going to have a post-op follow-up Thursday afternoon.

... bronchitis. Doc gave me scrips for an inhaler, some pills and a nasal spray. After the all-hands meeting this afternoon, I'm going to go home, get gloriously doped up on prescription meds, and play GTAIV before I start work again tomorrow.

Although the way this day has been going, I was starting to wonder if it wasn't an allergy to stupidity on the internet.

My cunning plan to work from home and quasi-recover was thwarted. An urgent project hit my desk that needs to be handled by the 18th, so I had to come in for a few hours and run around doing the initial ramp-up work before I could go back home. Ended up working until 8:30pm, and it's the first in what I expect will be a long list of late nights for the next dozen days. So I'm trying that whole "stay and work from home" thing again while doped up on DayQuil to see how that works for me today. Doctor appointment is on Friday.

(And it's kind of indicative that it took an illness to slow me down. I'll have to look into that once I'm well again.)

So a few weeks back I went to New York Comic Con. Air travel always tears me up a bit, as do conventions, so I wasn't surprised when I came back with the sniffles afterward.

Then a few days later I turned around and flew to Marrakech. I was fighting the sniffles the entire time there, constantly blowing my nose and loading up on Sudafed that Kelley graciously shared with me. The flight back was particularly hard on me, so again I wasn't surprised when I spent a few days severely jet-lagged and miserable.

Around Friday or Saturday I started developing a cough. Nothing big -- usually when I get a cold one of the last phases is the phlegm draining into my throat, causing a cough. I figured it would be miserable, but I would be fine by Monday or so.

It's Wednesday, and my cough isn't getting any better.

So, I'm going to call the doctor and make an appointment for sometime soon. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it did make me miserable enough to work from home today (which I've only done a couple of times since I've started, since I actually like the energy I get from working in the office itself, although once in a while I need to catch up on things with less distractions).

I'm still feeling pretty miserable. I managed to haul my coughing, achy ass into work, and the combination of meds seems to finally be having some minor effect, but after work I might just go back to sleep.

On the other hand, Kelley had a good interview with Cerise magazine. So that's good.

There's been a crud going around the office, and I think I got it. Or it could be that the crud I had a week ago decided to hide out and get me back a week later. Either way, I feel like ass. I have a gauntlet of meetings this morning, but I might take the afternoon to nap before coming back this evening to help with decorations for the office Christmas party.

Edit: The amount of stuff I had to do outweighed the risk of falling asleep and not being able to wake up (as well as throwing off my sleep schedule), so I just stuck it out.

Yesterday I was feeling kind of unwell. It was enough that staying in bed was tempting, but not so bad that I couldn't go to work. Certainly not when I have a 20-step commute to work right now.

Today, though, I'm actually sick. The headache I've been dodging for days finally caught me, I'm sore, my throat's getting scratchy and my brain feels like it's full of used motor oil. I think it's allergies to something in St. Louis, but it doesn't make me feel any less miserable. So, through the miracle of teh intarwebs, I'm still going to work today, but at a slower pace.

Blech.

I had two doctor's appointments and one colonoscopy in the past three days. Long story short, it turns out I don't have any sort of GI problem, and the regular dizziness is probably just persistent allergies. I just have to keep track of my diet for a while and take a slightly stronger version of my allergy medication, and everything should clear up.

Nice to have some good news for once.

So this email subject line showed up in my work email (for white-wolf.com):

"It would have been hell for the players to even begin to consider such sophisticated metaphysical issues."

Intrigued, I clicked on it, assuming it was something for my MET Mage work.

AND IT WAS FUCKING SPAM.

Seems the infinite monkey with infinite email accounts finally hit on something that got my attention. Fucking monkeys.

In other news, I have been hit with a weird bout of insomnia. I have been utterly exhausted yesterday and today, and yet still slept only ten hours between both days. I haven't even been productive both days -- just a sort of mental fog shrouded over me (although I did get a chance to do some redlines for draft two of Digital Dirge). I'm not stressed or anxious, and I've been working out around 6pm most nights to try to wear me out. I'm just... not sleeping.

On the other hand, I did get to hang out with bloody_ace and delwin in two surprise visits last night, along with mrogre and banzaigrrl. There was much, much geeking about Requiem and Mage, and con stories are always entertaining, even if you weren't there. I tried to go to bed early, failed to sleep, ended up watching Raw on our TiVo, and genuinely enjoyed the show.

Now I go back to work, and try not to think of zombie whales.

For the past few days, I've had a case of mild death. I managed to struggle through a couple of days of work, but on Wednesday the crud I had contracted moved to lodge in my ear, and the exhaustion, dizziness and nausea prompted me to stay home. I spent the entire day doing nothing more productive than watching the first season of Torchwood. I drug my carcass into work today because I had to help finish up a grant, and tomorrow I have some support work for the Associate Dean I have to do, but after that I can spend the entire three-day weekend being miserable. However, I did get my second monitor for my work station, so now I'm getting to play a bit with dual-monitor support and seeing how I like it. Somewhere in there I have to catch up on Digital Dirge (which is quite firmly behind schedule) and the Origins LARP (which isn't quite behind schedule, but I certainly need to get moving on it).

(As a side note, I'm going to start labeling and separating my entries by topic a bit more. I'm getting more and more readers who come here for different things, and rather than try to create a bazillion filters, I'm just going to try to divide my posts into more distinct topic areas instead.)

Right around December, after my first surgery, I promised myself that I would get a nice haircut for myself after everything was all said and done. Between having the hair behind my ear shaved a couple of times and the general ick that hair gets whenever you've had surgery and it's hard to take a shower, getting all that hair cut off was not only a lot of heavy, nasty hair removed as spring approaches, but a symbolic demonstration of moving beyond my medical problems and moving forward. While "all said and done" isn't going to happen for a good long while yet (see below), I'm sufficiently healthy enough that I asked greebotrill to schedule an appointment for me with her hair stylist. It's now a touch shorter than shoulder-length when it's dry, which makes it much curlier. The stylist (whose name is, coincidentally, Michelle) was familiar with the problems of curly hair, and spent a lot of time explaining ways to maintain my hair that didn't involve a ton of time or products, even offering to purchase some products at her discount that we can both use. And I learned that someone taking a long time to wash your hair can feel very, very good.

However, I'm not out of the woods -- just moving into a different section of trees. The right ear is 99% healed, but the left ear is continuing to worry my doctor. He's been concerned about it since this whole thing started back in 2005 (or was it 2004?). He always thought it was just ready to tip over and start problems, and he's concerned that it might be reaching that point. I'm back on another course of steroids, along with two decongestants, and he wants me to pop my ears every now and then to try to give it some more flex. If that doesn't work, I might have to get a tube in my ear (which means, yes, yet another damned surgery), but we're doing everything we can to avoid that possibility. Unfortunately, my left ear is actually my good ear in terms of hearing, which makes mucking around with that ear even more of a concern.

One thing that's interesting to me is not only the number of people who are aware and comment on my ongoing medical trials (as I get the occasional "hey, how's your ear doing?" questions), but also those who find my reactions to such inspirational. I am naturally a modest guy, so take this for what you will, but I don't find my own reactions all that brave or noteworthy. I've lived with ear problems all my life, and while some of this is probably the worst it's ever been, it's also given me the most hope for improving my living conditions than I've ever had. Further, there are plenty of people in the world, some I'm even friends with, who struggle with far more debilitating afflictions (some of whom have helped me immensely in getting through some of the rougher spots of my recovery). All that said, there are times when I do get down about my ear, and I look to my own inspiration: Stephen Colbert.

For those that don't know, Stephen Colbert is deaf in his right ear. From his Wikipedia entry:

When he was younger, he had hoped to study marine biology, but surgery intended to repair a severely perforated eardrum caused him inner ear damage sufficient to rule out a career that would involve scuba diving, as well as leaving him deaf in his right ear.

If you look at him, you'll see his right ear sticks out quite a bit. It's a very similar reason as why mine does (scar tissue from a mastoidectomy), although mine has actually gone down quite a bit with this last surgery. He also references his "freaky ear" and his deafness on the Colbert Report on a regular basis. He's gotten comfortable with it, and for the most part I have as well. It's just a part of me, and I accept it as such.

* Started working out again (now that my body is finally letting me). I counted all the lifting, walking and stair-climbing on Monday as a cardio workout, and I did 15 minutes on Tuesday. I skipped Wednesday to break it up, and got up to 15 minutes yesterday before my ear started to hurt, so I stopped. My hope is to get up to at least 30 minutes by the end of the month, if not back to my original time of 40-45 minutes.

* Saw the dentist. Nothing's going wrong there. The hygienist gave me some suggestions to help with my tender gums, which I'll start implementing.

* Finished draft two of MET: Awakening last night. It clocked in at just under 202,000 words, which is 17,000 over. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to sit down with my personal editor to deal with problems and improvements I'm just not seeing, and maybe tweak a few things to get a couple thousand more words lopped off. Or just delete all uses of the word "the."

* Somewhere in the next week or so, I have to start two new projects: hammering out details for the Origins one-shot LARP, and 20,000 words on another project I'm currently calling Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I also really need to finish reading a manuscript that's been sitting on my desk for weeks now.

* monkeegoth called to let me know that his second son, Grayson, was born and that they were home and okay. It was good to hear that everything was fine, and I'm looking forward to another opportunity to spend time at Casa del Connelly.

* Played Awakening on IRC last night, and we discovered that three WW freelancers in the same game gives you egg rolls, or possibly spare ribs. I'm still not finding my stride with Chance, but I think that's because I've played him entirely online, which is a medium I'm not totally familiar with (I usually use online gaming to supplement other games). Had to bail out halfway through to pick up dinner, and then got distracted by an OOC conversation about mechanics before I went to bed. There were some disagreements, but I got to flesh out some of my ideas on core resolution and the interaction between rules and story in MET. I may toss it into my notes for a theoretical MET 2.0 (i.e., "shit I considered shoehorning into MET: Awakening").

* I've also been starting to do email scenes with my Requiem PC, since I haven't seriously been playing him since December, and I don't think I've played him in LARP since November. The Gangrel Drama flows, and it is good.

* I haven't played World of Warcraft for a couple of weeks now. I logged in a couple nights ago, started a quest, died, and logged off. My attention will come back around to it, I'm sure, but right now I'm just not into it.

* We got plans for Wrestlemania 23 sorted out, making it as cheap as possible while still getting greebotrill back for classes on Monday. I, however, am taking that Monday off. We've decided that it'll be an early anniversary gift to each other, because we're huge dorks. greebotrill is also debating going to a dig Mexico for a couple of weeks for school (needed for her human anthropology degree). I'm very proud at how far she's come in her schooling!

I forgot something else at the end of this month/beginning of next month that I made plans for. It was discussed several months prior, but the process got started yesterday.

I now have a ticket to Wrestlemania in my possession. Absolutely free.

Long story short, someone from Cincinnati got the tickets, someone couldn't make it, and the ticket was gifted to me. All I have to provide is gas to Detroit, and a portion of the hotel room. I'm not sure I'll be able to do that financially, but we'll see how it goes. I mean, it's Wrestlemania.

In other news, the cold I've been dancing with kicked my ass over the weekend, and got me today. I'm home, lying in bed with the laptop, very slowly catching up on email and the like. This is the first actual sick day I've had in about a month, so it's still improvement, and all signs point to it just being a very nasty cold/virus, not a complication of my other medical condition.

I finally got sick. Stumbled through the Awakening game yesterday afternoon by a balancing act of various medications, and ended up falling behind on just about everything else (not a lot, but it is a lack of progress). Continued said balancing act to get into work today. Have called doctor, as he told me to notify him if I develop any cold or flu symptoms. Have started to mentally reconsider my available time, moving things from "wait until I get better and see" to considering "rearrange things under the understanding that I might not get better anytime soon."

Further, due to an inheritence lawyer making a mistake, we now owe over $7,000 in taxes this year. We have some plans in place to take care of the majority of it, but the tax consultant also discussed what I can do this year as a freelance writer to claim deductions next year (as this will be the first year I make enough money to worry about such things). Any tips from the audience are also appreciated -- I'd rather get the same advice fifteen times than learn something I could have done next year when I file.

My head has been stuck in the work/writing/sleep cycle for so long that I realized I haven't actually updated. Here are the high points:

* Car engine (the new car) died last Thursday. We managed to limp it to the Mazda dealership, which has an Enterprise rental kiosk right there. Mazda covered the rental car while they looked at it.

* Saw Ghost Rider and The Prestige over the weekend. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed GR -- I expected it to suck, and while it wasn't great cinema (or even as good as, say, Spider-Man, and had a few plot holes you could drive a truck through), I did enjoy it. The Prestige was really entertaining as well.

* Monday sucked. I had a doctor's appointment in the morning and my boss was off that day, so I just slept in. This resulted in me not being able to find the rental car key, failing to disarm the alarm on the other car, having to dig for the keys and alarm fob for said other car, losing and finding my parking pass, and ultimately having to reschedule my appointment. So....

* ... I went on Tuesday instead, after dealing with an obnoxious doctor (at the med school, not my doctor). My left ear (i.e., not the one operated on) has been hurting for the past couple of weeks. I am on medication to help that, but it flared back up on Tuesday. Turns out the eardrum is so plastered down over my inner ear bones that it's formed a seal over my inner ear canal. He's put me on a short dose of steroids, in the hopes that it will clear up and avoid yet another surgery. He also admitted that my ear is probably the most challenging ear he's had to operate on in his twenty years of practice, which is why he tries to reserve such operations as a last resort. I jokingly offered to be the subject of a paper. He might take me up on it.

* Found out yesterday that the problem was that the oil-change place put the wrong weight of oil in, even though it's clearly listed on the oil cap. Ergo, we need a new engine. Since we're covered and it isn't our fault, we aren't paying for it. I suspect, however, that Jiffy Lube will be paying for our new engine.

* Got the steroid scrip yesterday. These are mean -- I have to take 6 pills today, 5 tomorrow, 4 the next day, etc. until they're gone. If I miss one, it could have serious side effects. Also, I'm more susceptable to illness during this time. So, yes, I'm still not well. At this rate, I suspect I'll be actually healthy about the time MET Awakening is released. Speaking of...

* Got the final rules comments in, and made the last revisions. Now I'm in the edit phase, which is simultaneously easier and harder than I expected. It's easier because I realized in order to keep to my deadlines I have to ignore some of the small-scale polishing I would like to do and focus on larger issues like continuity and flow, proper capitalization of words, consistancy of terminology, as well as cutting unimportant or redundant words. Plus, something I thought I would have to do I might not have to do after all. It's harder because even those things take up a lot more of my time than I anticipated. I could half-ass it and save myself some time, but I don't want to. (Of course, once my final deadline approaches, what I want isn't so important anymore, so that's something else I have to balance -- what edits matter as opposed to what edits only drive me crazy.)

* I will be so happy when my assistant Storytellers can take over some of my paperwork. Seriously.

* I have my weekly WoW game tonight. That's positive.

This past week I actually had a full week of work, as well as increased attempts to help with chores and cleaning around the house. It was followed by a mostly-full weekend, as we hung out with krisnitori and romany_celt on Saturday (and mrogre and banzaigrrl on Friday and Saturday). There was a lot of story swapping, a business meeting, and generally the kind of conversations that you never have time for at conventions. I also played WoW and D&D on Sunday, but my body decided that that was enough and shut down around 5pm, forcing me to cancel out on my plans to go to a wedding. I went home and slept until this morning, called in sick, realizes I hated the prospect of staying home yet again and being sick yet again and drug myself into work. (Since my wordcount is easily met for the day, I can go home from work and be sick again if I want.)

I'm getting better, but I'm not well.

226,989 / 185,000 (122.7%)

Long story short, I was feeling ill last night and this morning, but then I felt good enough to go into work, so while I was waiting to go into work, I banged out the rest of the spirit section. I've gotten some good commentary that I will go back and look at once I finish this draft.

Now I'm going into work, and then I'll probably fall over dead.

Was doing pretty well all week (mentally and physically), but then Friday it all caught up with me. I left work a few hours early, and crashed on a couch near the cafeteria, listening to my iPod and trying not to fall asleep while waiting for greebotrill to pick me up (as she had prior appointments to keep). Went home, and ended up napping a couple of times before falling asleep for twelve hours.

Feeling better today, but I plan to stay fairly low-key this weekend.