Down and Almost Out

Oof.

Bout to be a rough one, kiddos. Buckle up.

My abdomen is swollen and tender. My lower back/kidneys hurt. Four some reason, despite not being able to work out the last couple weeks, the slightly bulging disc in my back is sore. My neck is swollen up again, not as bad as it was late summer when I was going through all my ultrasounds, but it definitely feels like a flare up the endo doc warned me about. And on Friday I had my skin check that I bumped to an earlier date on a hunch, and the derm cut four spots out of my torso. Three on my stomach, one on my lower back. I actually bled through the band-aids and my sheets Friday night. So now I'm attempting to dress those wounds while physically uncomfortable in order to try and keep any from getting infected. All of which started up just two weeks after Vally passed.

I need a hug.

I know full well that life isn't fair, so it feels absurd to even say this, but I just keep thinking that this all feels so fucking unfair. I have sacrificed for years to try and excel in health in fitness. I've been far from perfect, but still better than and more committed than 99% of the people I know. For years I've often turned down drinks, birthday cakes, and comfort foods to try and stick to a nutrition plan. I've missed happy hours and bar nights and parties to stick to a gym schedule. And somehow, my health feels like it's falling out from under me. The thing that makes me feel worthwhile, my greatest goal in life, keeps slipping further and further away, even as I do more and more to try and reach for it.

I need a hug.

Friday was rough. The actual removal of all these chunks of my torso went fine, as fine as it can anyway, but having to lay around in the evening, unable to even sit on the couch in the basement comfortably to play a game, was so depressing. And worrying, wondering how many of these spots are going to come back needing further surgery. Or worse. Ok, odds are it won't be worse - it’s not like anything was bleeding or scabbing or looking like those warning signs on the derm's walls - but with everything else happening it’s hard to write off the possibility. I guess that's just the mindset I'm in right now. It feels like the walls are closing in and if it could be going wrong, it's probably going wrong.

I may feel silly for this later. Maybe it'll all be fine and I'm overreacting. But after 15 months of this trend, it's tough to be comfortable making any assumptions.

Meanwhile, I had made an appointment with my PCP on Wednesday. Drove the 30 minutes there, waited in the room for almost an hour before the doctor showed up, and then he proceeded to explain away each of my concerns one by one before I even got a chance to finish expressing them, let alone before I got through multiple for him to consider as a whole. If I say that my abdomen hurts, my kidneys/lower back hurts, and I've got a weird popping in and out that happens between my upper ribs and is sore, don't those things need to be considered together? Isn't the outlook on what that might mean simultaneously a little different than if each were in a vacuum? Because this dummy would just start explaining why is’s nothing to worry about halfway through the first item, and it'd be a couple minutes before I could interrupt to continue on to the next thing. Didn't even examine me. Then again, this is the guy that told me early summer that we have “two flus” now, referring to the pandemic, and didn't even seem to hear me when I asked how he could compare 60000 flu deaths a year to 60000 COVID deaths in 4 months starting from just one or two imported cases. What a fucking quack. All I wanted was a blood test to rule out more serious things happening, and I didn't even get that. Guess it's urgent care until I can get my PCP changed.

I did force a break yesterday. Casey, Aloy and I went for a hike up through the snow. It hurt and I was uncomfortable but once I started moving the discomfort faded somewhat. Getting that time face to face with a friend was good, getting up into the trees was good, but Aloy might have been my salvation. She did the same thing as she did a month or two ago when I saw her last - tail way between her legs and defensive when she first saw me, circling from a distance. Then I squat down and wait. After 60 seconds or so she circles in close enough to give a passing sniff. Then pauses. Then gives another little sniff, at which point her tail comes out and starts wagging and she THROWS herself at me. Licks and big floppy pawed hugs and playful jumps and rolls and… it feels like one of those videos you see online of dogs reunited with owners, and it makes me so happy. So so happy. A pure happiness, no reservations or hesitations, I'm just smiling and laughing and on the ground wrestling back before I have time to think. I've been too uncomfortable to want to sit on the couch in the basement, but a smiling happy pup and I'm rolling in the grass without pause.

Dogs, man. Dogs. For all the bullshit she put me through, that's the one thing I'll always be thankful to Ice Queen for - introducing me to just how much I love dogs. I mean, and her butt. She had a really nice butt.

It was a slow hike through the snow, with more effort spent trying to remain upright than moving forward, but we made it a solid fourish miles around the loop. Uphill and downhill. Aloy zooming back and forth the whole time. I don't know if any of today's extra discomfort is due to all that, but if so it was worth it. Having a living thing be that excited to see me again was necessary.

Been getting lots more attention on that dating site and I can't even be bothered to care. Who has time to try and win hearts when it feels like I'm falling apart?

Did I just accidentally write a chorus?

That theater couch upgrade is getting to be a higher and higher priority with my back feeling this way. Actually starting to feel like less of a stupid purchase idea and more like self preservation. I also think I'm gonna work on my home office desk situation. In the office office I had a stand/sit desk, and here it’s been all sit all year. I had let Jimmy know that, with his permission, I was gonna use some of my discretionary budget to buy one of those lifts that you put on your desk to raise and lower your monitor and keyboard. He wanted to check with the owners first. He came back to me later that day and said “Ok, they approved your desk purchase.”

… d… desk purch… OH YES MY DESK PURCHASE GREAT THANK YOU ALL VERY MUCH FOR APPROVING MY DESK PURCHASE.

So I'm gonna go ahead and order a $1600 motorized stand/sit desk. The sooner the better. Hopefully it helps with all this nonsense. It's nice to be appreciated as an employee these days.

I've gotten three more likes on my dating profile in the time I've been writing this and every one is an “eesh, nope”. What should probably be flattering is just kinda sad at this point. Maybe I'll just buy a wig and be an old cat lady.

I spent some time on the laptop this weekend and got everything ready for tomorrow's project wrap up meeting. It'll feel good to get that months-long project off my plate. Officially finish the thing that an operations manager and operations director couldn't do together in 14 years. I'll feel like I earned the big raise and expensive desk. Looking forward to moving on to the next thing.

Got a private Minecraft VR server setup and running for future multiplayer VR shenanigans. That should be some fun to look forward to. The HVAC guys finally got the part I need in and are scheduled to come fix it tomorrow. Gonna go out and watch so I can be sure they don't install the $400 motor part ordered if it isn't needed, and hopefully that'll warm my place up again. Football season just ended with a whimper, so I can cancel my tv subscriptions again until fall. Financially, things are sound. Oh, and since I had switched over to a keto diet again to try and help with my issues, and that clearly has not helped, I'm switching back to a balanced healthy plan. Being free to enjoy fruits and breads again will be nice.

This is me attempting to come up with positive items to go out with as I'm actively shifting around in bed trying to get my back to stop hurting. I guess the best thing I can do right now is think as positively as possible and take this one day at a time. With any luck, the abdominal pain is just some digestive thing and that's putting pressure on my lower back. I assume that at least one of these chunks taken out of my abdomen will need margins removed, but hopefully it'll just be one or two and I'll recover from that and be in the clear again there. I've had this bulging disc for awhile and it hasn't been a problem, once I get past the rest of these issues I should be able to continue strengthening muscles around it carefully, maybe just avoiding deadlifts for a time, and I can be back on track there.

I've been through so much in these last 15 months, so fucking much, that it's easy to feel discouraged when the progress I've been making clawing back out of it starts to erode. Two steps forward, two steps back, or so it feels like. But, so far at least, I've Neo bullet-time dodged every disaster that's come at me. Been nicked several times, but nothing has put me down yet. That of course could change at a moment's notice here - I may get some awful news from the derm any day now, or the endo, or from an upcoming blood test if it comes to that - but until that happens I'm not out of the game yet. I guess I need to focus on that angle.

A strange mentality change I've noticed in myself over the last couple months is that, where I used to think of each day as getting one step closer to an eventual end, now I tend to think of each day as one more day I've made it. And I think that's positive? It feels much more positive, if unsettled. Like I've acknowledged much more clearly that one of these bullets I've been dodging could hit me any day, and that every day I'm around is another day I've successfully dodged them. Whereas before life felt like a given for another 35-45 years. Whether that's a healthy respect for and sense of urgency regarding my own mortality, or a severely stressed out man feeling like impending doom is closing in on him, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm very ready to get back on my feet and step out of my comfort zone when the world gets back on its feet. Much easier to take those risks when you feel like there's potentially so little time to dwell in a loss.

… did it just take the most difficult 15 months of my life and several pages of venting for me to effectively learn “YOLO”? Fuck. That's… that's pretty stupid, actually.

Gonna go try to roll out my back one more time before bed so I'll sleep a little more comfortably. In summation, things are fucking miserable right now, but I guess I don't really get a choice in the matter. Work through it. Rest when needed. If I can come out ok on the other side, I will. If not, well… I'll go down knowing I had given it my best shot anyway.

Hoping the next entry is from a better headspace and circumstances.

Holding paws would help a lot right now. I really miss you, Vally.

-M